May 21 2009
When Policies Become a Maintenance Nightmare
For those of us that work at large universities (with a lot of different sub-domains – or Web sites – handled by a lot of different entities within the university), there seems to be a problem with duplicate policy information on different sub-domains (or areas within the larger university Web site).
This issue is always brought up at semester-or-fiscal-year-end because it’s the time that a lot of policies change.
Case in point – we recently changed a policy university-wide. A communication went out from the university to change the policy on individual college or unit Web sites.
Just for kicks, I ran a quick check for the policy on our university internal site search to see how many places the policy showed up. 1,119 internal pages (most at different internal Web sites or sub-domains) contain the name of the policy. Granted, some of those probably link directly to the main university page that contains the policy. What I found, though, is that a *lot* don’t.
I checked out the first 3 results pages of that search. The first 2 results didn’t even belong to the *main* policy page , but that’s another post for another time. Almost all pages that included the text also included the policy itself (of those on the first 3 results pages). So, there are literally 10, 20, 30, 100? iterations of the same policy within the different university Web sites.
This doesn’t just happen at Penn State, obviously. I looked on 6 different Big Ten school Web sites for the same policy. The same thing is happening on *all* of those Web sites I checked.
Yes, the policy makers (or messengers) sent out communications for Web sites to update the policy. Do you really think every site will do that in a timely manner?
Are there university standards saying that you have to *link* to policies, not duplicate the policy on your Web site? Maybe. Maybe not.
Where there seems to be a lot of this happening is on different college Web sites. For instance, the College of Engineering or the College of Mathematics Web sites will re-iterate an admissions policy instead of linking to the policy on the admissions Web site.
Those same college Web sites say the same policy on an admission requirements *page* within the Web site and also an *FAQ* page as well. So the duplication may be happening twice within the same college or unit Web site.
Then, when the policy changes and they aren’t all updated, there is inconsistent content and confused users.
Obviously everything isn’t cut and dry. For instance, a policy may be slightly different depending on the user (audience).
There are *many* policies that are the same for everyone (or the same for *big buckets of users* – for instance, all undergraduate or all graduate), however.
For our sanity and for our users sake, shouldn’t we house policies in one appropriate place and link to those policies instead of duplicating them on each sub-site within the University?
Oh absolutely agree with your point. It becomes a treasure hunt looking for policies at times. Because you start looking in one place and then remembered you saw it on another site of the universities site and before you know it you’ve start noticing that some of the policies are updated and others are not. Now when that happens you wonder which one to refer to and that is a whole other problem to worry about.
I like to think of our website as a CVS for policies. Need an older version? No problem, just look long enough and you’ll find it. And not only with policies but with admissions/enrollment procedures, academic content, you name it. I have been focused on this lately and am evaluating catalog and policy management systems. My goal is to create a managed system to house ALL policies that allows very specific linking to a sub section etc. Once that part is complete, then comes the removing and banning of posting ANY policy to the web except through linking….. Yeah, wish me luck on that one.
Not only is it important for students to have the information centrally located and accurate, but there are some Title 34 issues that are worth considering.
@Carlos and @ed – Thanks so much for your comments. I guess the next step is to ask ourselves, “what do we do about it?” Ed, I love the fact that your creating a system to house all policies that allows linking to sub-sections.
Something I forgot to mention in the post too – what if the policy you want to link to is within a page that is not user-friendly or otherwise not readable, scannable, etc? Then you have to make a decision to link to a non-user-friendly page or duplicate the policy on your own page. Obviously there are advantages and disadvantages to both. I’ve found myself in this situation many times.
At our own institutions, especially at larger ones where this is a more obvious problem, we need to somehow get everyone on the same page and working together on this – with real standards and consequences. Unfortunately I am as pessimistic as you, Ed. Wish us luck on that one, right?
losing track of ‘multiple copies’ is a common problem, not just in the education sector. The best way to solve it is with a decent content management system. To be transparent, I work for a WCM vendor, SDL Tridion. The SDL Tridion approach is all about content reuse, so someone writes that policy once, its stored in a central repository (with version history) and all the other sites and sub-domains etc can use that exact same content. The reuse is across pages and channels, so, policy pages, print friendly, FAQ, RSS, Email, whatever. Now, when the University next changes that policy (they can even do it themselves), it’s done once, and all those other pages, rss, sites, channels etc automatically get updated. Problem solved.