The dominant way in which the Government of Canada manages its web presence is along organizational lines. Each dept or agency has its own website and manages its own content and services. But does this make sense? Should the overall federal government web presence use organizational boundaries as its main organizing principle?
I think maybe not. it is a truism in government communications that our citizens and stakeholders don’t understand or care how government is organized, or which dept or agency is talking to them. All they want is to receive the services that they are after. They tend to see the GoC as a monolithic, singular entity.
But when it comes to web I don’t think one monolithic uber-site is the answer. Online, segmentation is the order of the day — it is niche that plays well. Digital communities tend to coalesce around issues or topics rather than organizations. So targeted sites divvied up thematically — regardless of which orgs have a stake in the topic.
An example: Today, GoC consumer information and services are spread across a range of sites belonging to a number of different orgs — e.g. Industry Canada (in several spots), the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy, the Competition Bureau, the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, Health Canada, NRCan, etc. Why not collect all that into a single consumers.gc.ca site. This would be a more truly citizen-centric approach to delivering web.
I’m fully aware that there are some examples of GoC web presences developed along these lines — for instance science.gc.ca, canadabusiness.gc.ca. And if memory serves, this was one of the principles driving the old Government Online (GOL) initiative. But the job was never really finished, and the topic sites that are active today coexist uneasily with organizational ones.
I also realize that what I’m suggesting would be a massive undertaking. Reorganizing the entire .gc.ca web from a collection of mostly org sites to a set of theme ones would take years of effort, not to mention impressively strong willed leadership. After all, trying to keep even a single agency site from its tendency to become organized by org chart is difficult.
Gerry McGovern says that the “essential challenge of the Web is to become customer-centric.” In government terms, our central web management challenge is to become citizen-centric. If we are going to rise to this challenge, if we truly want to become citizen-centric online, then dropping organizational sites in favour to subject sites is probably the way to go.
What's a spaghetti test?
You’re right on all counts, it would make a lot more sense and it would be nearly impossible to do without strong leadership for the effort.
The idea of portals is an interesting one; essentially another layer of interface that ultimately directs you to content or applications that reside on one of the traditional org-based websites.
Another interesting approach would be to invest in a robust GoC-wide federated search application. Create “start.gc.ca” or “search.gc.ca” and adopt a Google-like approach to navigating government websites.
There’s some pretty cool stuff going on with search technologies like FAST (owned by Microsoft and, yes, full disclosure, my employer is a MS-certified partner though we work with other search technologies too) that create a pretty awesome search experience (visual best bets, faceted search, entity extraction).
It would require a lot of work to set up and an ongoing investment in tuning the results but it could be a workaround for the all-too-real political problem of convincing departments and agencies to surrender control of their digital turf.
Peter,
All too true – from the organizational structure to the post-GOL lag in vision and management.
The nature of government online communications is going to experience, and struggle through serious shifts over the next few years. The social nature of the web will provide challenges for silo communications and service delivery.
The future of our departmental sites and their relationships to others will be less clear unless each undertakes a committed and robust content audit – time to lighten the load and improve information.
Massive undertaking yes, but now a critical one.
@mjmclean
Peter,
Spot on.
The GoC hasn’t addressed it’s web presence from an information architecture (IA) point of view. As you note, it is based on internal departmental divisions.
The Nielsen Norman Group done a lot of study of intranets (it’s applicable here too) comparing the effectiveness of org-based vs. task-based. Task-based wins every time.
Massive undertaking or not, it’s the only logic approach and would go a long way to improve the user experience.
I like Joe’s idea of unified search. It’s a good start and could be done quickly enough. Get search fixed and continue to work on the change to a task-based IA.
Mark
@marknca
Excellent post, Peter.
Often crutial content is buried under multiple layers of pages structured along organizational lines, and it takes a content “champion” and levels of approvals to prioritize placement. What results isn’t necessarily in line with how the public prioritizes information.
Users should be able to get in and out of a website having achieved what they were looking to do or find what they were seeking simply, quickly and consistently each time.
I agree with the above comments on search – it’s a great place to start. We need to ask, “If I need to find GoC information but don’t know where to find it, what do I do first/how do I start to look for it?” and “How can this experience be improved?”
Indeed, we have a lot of work to do to.
Where can I sign up?
Wendy
@w_grimes
hey thanks for all the comments folks!
love the idea of GoC-wide approach on the search front. Who owns search.gc.ca?
Nice post Peter.
I think there should be *both* portals aimed at specific target audiences or services AND departmental sites. But I don’t think they should be merged together. I would see a holistic IA across the GOC as a desirable vision to work towards. We can start that by promoting commonalities across any departmental site, like the same navigational labels and similar functionality (clickable org chart).
Here’s what I would like to see on a departmental/agency site:
-a clickable org chart that allows me to understand the structure of the organization and the mandate, programs, target audience and results for each one.
-A Ministers’ media room with his/her photo ops, press releases etc. all in one place (preferably using social media and networking sites that already exist like flickr)
-location(s), contact info, any public services that are available (like library, walk-in centres).
-departmental reporting and proactive disclosure on spending and results and impact of that spending in machine-readable format.
Although goc-wide search would be a-ma-zing(!) it would be even better to have content re-used across multiple views of a site. This can be done with web services (like bizpal.ca does) or interoperable coding and systems. I also think it would be great to have sites that can be personalized based on location or preferences.
Like the others, I realize this is a long term vision (not a pipe dream like some might say!) but we might as well get started. Ever the practical one, I’m particularly interested in working on a controlled vocabulary for audience types. The one that was created for the Government of Canada Service Reference Model (GSRM) is too broad. Need to drill down more in a way that speaks to audience segmentation.
I would also be interested in hearing more from people who lived through the GOL days about why they think it didn’t work, or what things did work, and what can be re-used from those efforts.
Wow.
I wasn’t even three paragraphs in, and I was thinking “Gerry McGovern would love this.”
Well done.