Rethinking Global Web Operations and Technology?

For most of the past decade, global enterprises have been rationalizing and professionalizing their web publishing operations, setting global standards, upgrading local talent across various regions, investing in better technology.  All good.

But I'm perceiving a new twist on this activity, and I'd be interested to hear your take.

Traditional Efforts to Standardize

As part of our service to enterprise subscribers, we offer advisory time, where we counsel on best practices and help sort out complicated decisions.  Naturally, global web publishing technologies and operations represent areas of consistent interest and inquiries from among our subscriber base. 

For a long time, large enterprises were trying to get a grip on the chaos of supporting multi-country publishing.  So the conversations often revolved around improved globalization: achieving more consistency across regions, taking a methodical approach to the diffusion of global content, establishing core standards and practices, balancing local needs against structural consistency. 

And of course, we discussed the supporting technologies for these strategies.  Many vendors, especially at the upper tiers of the marketplace, have responded to customer needs by making their platforms more object-oriented, to support varying degrees of website "inheritance" for country and regional properties.  This has been an area of close attention in our WCM product evaluations as well. 

More Localized Control?

Now I get the sense that the pendulum may be swinging back to more localized control, especially among more advanced enterprises who have already gone through a global "rationalization" phase.  Specifically, we're starting to get inquiries about how to better de-centralize web operations and web publishing technologies. 

There are several phenomena driving this:

  • Vastly different levels of staff maturity and resource investment across regions, making a single platform too brittle for the global firm
  • Increasingly diverse content agendas, reducing the applicability and proportion of truly "global" content
  • Persistent and thorny local regulations and norms for things like privacy, reducing the scope for global application-sharing
  • Diverse and often quite localized e-marketing toolsets driving highly variable integration needs at the country level
  • Availabillity of lower-cost application development resources at local levels for country-specific customizations and extensions

Technology Implications

If this trend is accurate, I think we'll see a transition away from object-oriented, central "blueprinting" approaches towards more multi-tenant infrastructures, with looser forms of sharing across countries.  At Real Story Group we've evolved some reference models around this. Suffice it to say there are various levels at which the enterprise can share: infrastructure, core CMS, specific modules, or just expertise on a platform where local countries are otherwise freer to experiment. 

We can cite pros and cons to consolidation at each tier.  But in general, I think the future is going to be more loosely coupled, and I'm not sure the current crop of WCM vendors are truly prepared for this.

Operational Implications 

In a more loosely coupled environment, central controls give way to more supportive monitoring and facilitation, with an emphasis on common standards over common applications.  To be sure, just how much "freedom within a framework" will vary across industry sectors.  Financial firms will evolve different models than consumer packaged goods and global consulting firms, for example.

Naturally, there are downsides to greater decentralization in website management.  Less sharing means fewer global economies of scale. Varied templating systems and repositories could increase the likelihood of brand dissonance.  If the pendulum swings too much towards decentralization, you could expect it to swing back.

You Have Choices

In the meantime, you have many choices.  If you'd like some help thinking through your alternatives, please contact us.

And if you are a global web manager, I'd welcome your perspectives in the comments below.


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Gil, Partner, Cancentric Solutions Inc.
iStudio Canada Inc.

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