An Enlightened Federal CIO Meets Web Analytics

Last week I had a great conversation about web analytics with the CIO of a federal agency.

Why was it a great conversation?

 

He understood the importance of web analytics to his organization, and made the commitment to support web analytics with his resources and authority.

 

He stated that web analytics is a discipline that all content managers need to use to plan new content and remove old content. He views web analytics as a “value add” service that his office can offer to internal stakeholders. He committed to having his development team learn how to tag web sites, and wants to encourage site owners to initiate web analytics on their sites. He understood the business benefits of his IT staff moving out of the log file processing business and into a SAAS solution that enabled better access to analytics data by potential analytics consumers throughout the enterprise.

 

Yes, I found this conversation to be somewhat of a revelation because the Federal government is by and large at a very early stage in using web analytics. This is an environment where older log file solutions are commonplace and entrenched, where IT departments still “own” analytics, where reams of page views and visit reports define web metrics. I speak with Federal web analysts who have literally spent years trying to institutionalize web analytics at their agencies and have met extreme resistance and/or apathy.  The common denominator…no senior management support.  True, lack of senior management commitment hampers many web analytics programs in the private sector, but the impact within the Federal sector seems to be more extreme. Historically, there has been no revenue-based goals driving an interest in web analytics, so a lack of senior management focus tends to leave web site managers in a place where they need to determine priorities for themselves. Fortunately, this seems to be changing due to tighter budgets, and zero based budgets (ZBB). According to Forbes Investopedia:

 

ZBB allows top-level strategic goals to be implemented into the budgeting process by tying them to specific functional areas of the organization, where costs can be first grouped, then measured against previous results and current expectations.  

 

If Federal CIOs needed a business case for institutionalizing web analytics as a program office, the ability to tie all web initiatives to a ZBB model and initiate accountability through meaningful web metrics seems to make a lot of sense.

 

Will Federal CIOs take a leadership role in developing web analytics programs at their agencies? I hope so. While there has been a lot of attention about cookies and privacy, I think that in the scheme of things, this is a somewhat overstated issue when it comes to making web analytics useful within the Federal government. The issue of importance as I see it is in establishing viable and relevant web analytics programs within Federal agencies. After all, if you resolve the cookie or no cookie issue, and there’s no senior management commitment to support a web analytics organization, no one to implement the web analytics solution, develop meaningful metrics, create reports and provide analysis, then what’s the point whether persistent cookies are used or not?

 

Comments

[Phil Kemelor]

Here's a comment a Federal Web Manager shared with me. Does this resonate with you.
Phil
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I am working very hard to build awareness about Web analytics at my agency. So far, I have only been able to garner support among people at my level -- not the attention or commitments from the highest levels of the organization. While some middle managers and Web teams understand and value the information that Web analytics can provide, lacking the support from senior managers means most do not have access to the Web analytics tools or expertise that can truly guide our agency's Web site improvements. From my perspective, we are far from having such buy-in or commitment of resources here. While the stakeholders have a growing understanding of the Web's power to communicate our messages, we seem to lose their attention before they embrace the importance of Web analytics.

Government Web Manager