Overall, the management severe than the technology and policy barriers. Participants indicated that these barriers resulted from a lack of understanding on the part of management that the Web is a powerful but extremely complex new approach to providing services to customers.

 

The number one barrier to developing Internet-based services was the lack of appreciation for the extraordinary complexity of the task. This complexity is comprised of several factors: new forms of information presentation and management, new technical tools, and the fact that offering Web-based services to those outside the agency means adopting a new way of working together inside the agency. The project agencies reported that the managerial complexity of this project was greater than in any of their previous experiences.

Developing Web-based services required the involvement of a cross-section of people from the public information office, the network services staff, the MIS staff, the program staff, and others. Success required identifying stakeholders who can benefit from the availability of Web-based services, defining the appropriate services, marshalling the appropriate organizational resources, and developing the guiding policies—all while mastering a suite of new technologies. Most participants were frustrated by the simplistic picture most people had of a “home page” in contrast to the complicated reality they were trying to harness in order to create Web-based services.

Most of the agency teams were initially made up of technical staff. However, these teams quickly discovered that representation from other areas of the agency was critical to project success. The complex nature of Web-based services required a cross-agency development team and a management team which included technical staff with a variety of skills, program staff with an understanding of the agency’s customers and service objectives, public information staff including graphic designers and editors, as well as top management. Early in the project a number of the teams returned to their agencies and recruited additional staff from these areas to ensure the required mix of skills. Once these players were identified however, the lack of clear organizational roles and responsibilities presented a new barrier to both development and ongoing management of the Web service. Agencies had difficulty determining who had responsibility for identifying information to be placed on or collected by the Web service. They encountered problems in determining who set the priority for material to be created or converted to Web-based formats. When the Web service was intended to cross program boundaries, it was difficult to establish who played a contributing role, who played a coordinating role, and who arbitrated disputed territory. All these are symptomatic of more far-reaching organizational change and service integration that the Web makes possible, but does not necessarily make easy.

In several of the agencies, the project was set in motion by the MIS staff who wanted to explore the networking opportunities afforded by Internet technologies. These agencies faced the challenge of getting management support for their efforts. In other agencies, the process was set in motion by a directive from management to the MIS staff to “get us on the Internet.” In these cases, the technical staff were unprepared to identify service goals to guide their efforts and needed to convince program managers to become involved. The best practices reviews that agencies conducted early in the project taught them that sites that serve no real service objective quickly become stale and are a disservice to themselves and their customers. These teams were faced with both the need to respond to management’s desire for a “home page” and their growing realization that they needed much more than a home page to be effective.

The selection of a target audience, service goals, appropriate content, level of interactivity, and the new ways staff would interact with customers over the Web are all management-level decisions and all of the project teams had some difficulty getting the appropriate managers on the team. At the project demonstration in June, a visitor pointed out that agency managers would never authorize a database application without being clear about what program area it would specifically support. However, many MIS groups say they are being asked to implement Web sites without similar guidance. As a result, the sites are unfocused or focus and content are being chosen by the technical developers.

Whether initiated by a management directive or a technology visionary, a Web site must be established within an organizational context. Since a Web-based service required involvement from across the agency, staff who had not traditionally worked together on projects had to learn to collaborate with and trust one another. One participant noted the reversal of his agency’s usual decentralized approach to a more centralized one due to the need to coordinate among the many staff involved in the effort. Another said that a success factor was getting a team who can “ignore the typical barriers between technical and policy types...get folks (on the team) who work well together, who are willing to share knowledge and experiences... and really work together to get something out there.” In order to do this, team members must begin to communicate about and coordinate their work. One participant told us “We are used to operating up and down in our smokestacks. We know a lot about our own tunnels. But Internet technologies are in between - they cut across all of that - we have to communicate in between and up and down, and outside the agency as well.”

A further challenge was the sheer amount of time that this level of coordination activity requires. In many cases, the project participants noted the challenges they faced in trying to carve out time in their already overloaded schedules to ensure that the necessary communications were taking place.