Scope statement

This document is a proposal to the Web oversight committee to charge a discovery project that will investigate success criteria, system requirements, and potential solutions. The output of a discovery project is to provide an actionable recommendation to senior staff for stafff and budget approval.

Rationale

In less than 15 years, the World Wide Web has become a powerful force in public discourse, professional development, and community building. For the on-campus community at Bates, the Web is becoming a critical interface for learning, collaboration, and business processing.

Above all, for our constituents who are at a distance — especially prospective students, students abroad, and alumni — the Web is becoming a primary point of contact and engagement with the College.

At the core of this constituent engagment is the content that is delivered through Bates core Web site at www.bates.edu. Although there are strengths in the current publishing process — regularly-produced Bates stories crafted in words and images, a single system for Web publishing, and a large number of contributors — there are a number of important challenges that can’t be currently resolved without hundreds of hours of administrative updates and custom programming.

Therefore, a discovery project is being proposed to gather and prioritize requested features, identify existing campus resources, and propose solutions that meet Bates’ needs, whether through a system upgrade or migration to a new system.

Purpose

Evaluate and prioritize the resources required (both existing and proposed) to deploy or upgrade to a system for publishing core Web content according to best practices for Web user experiences.

Objectives

• Identify and consider needs of core Web site users.
• Identify and consider needs of Web content staff: authors, editors, designers, developers, administrators.
• Develop broad criteria for evaluation of Web CMS options, including prioritized features list.
• Investigate and evaluate current options and costs for commercially-available, open-source, and campus-developed/integrated CMS applications.
• Select top hosted solutions for demonstration.

Deliverables

Publish initial findings on the Web Roundtable wiki to benefit the professional Web development team and other campus Web developers and designers. Options may include: External service agreement, in-house development, or manual production.

Project Constraints

• Integrated communications strategy and planning is at an early stage.
• With the current level of staffing, maintaining the status quo is a challenge. Additional staff and budget would be required for an implementation phase.
• Expectation for rapid delivery of findings to coincide with Web oversight group presentation to the president.

Success Criteria

High-quality information provided by this discovery project will help the Web oversight group determine which Web content management options to investigate further.