* Web governance helps to ensure standardization, control and compliance with privacy and accessibility regulations
Over the years, your company’s Web site has gotten larger and more complex. Depending on the size of your organization, the site might have hundreds if not thousands of individual pages comprising the whole web site. At the same time, public-facing Web sites are coming under an increasing amount of scrutiny, including online legislation and regulations as well as brand guidelines. New “Web governance” services monitor your Web site for site quality, accessibility, privacy assurance and other important attributes.
While you can’t really put a dollar value on it, your company Web site is a very important asset. At the very least, the Web site provides a means to disseminate information about your business to people all over the world. You might also use the Web site to sell goods and services, or to encourage a sense of community through forums and portals for partners, customers and employees. As we delve deeper into the era of Web 2.0, corporate Web sites are used to provide a multitude of services.
But what would you do if customers began to complain that your Web site is not accessible to people with disabilities who use assistive technology? What if the Web site is peppered with broken links that leave visitors frustrated because they can’t get to the information they want? And what if your Web site failed to protect visitors’ privacy rights and accidently revealed information that shouldn’t be made public? How would you know if pages on your Web site have been hijacked by hackers?
No company wants to be the next Target Corporation, which is being sued for having an inaccessible Web site, or the next Facebook, which inadvertently revealed private data on 80 million members.
There’s a new discipline called Web governance that involves crawling through the multitude of pages of a Web site, looking for signs of trouble. Web governance defines the rules for content editors, business owners, developers, administrators and designers to operate maintain and evolve Web sites and/or intranets from a content, design, quality, and technology perspective. Web governance also focuses on how decisions and policies get made and implemented with respect to content, data and applications published on an organization’s Web site(s).
There’s more than just quality content at stake here. There are numerous regulations that have civil or legal ramifications if violated. For example, many government agencies in the United States are mandated by law to ensure that their Web sites are accessible to people with disabilities. In the United Kingdom and other countries, privacy laws govern how personal information can be collected via Web sites and used for various purposes. Violating these and other regulations can have costly consequences in terms of fines and restitution to victims. Web governance helps to ensure standardization, control and compliance (Compare Network Auditing and Compliance products) with privacy and accessibility regulations.
Looking at Web governance in a broader sense, it is an integral part of the overall IT and organizational governance program that large organizations should have in place. Organizations need to ensure their Web sites are compliant with a range of guidelines and regulations as part of their online risk management strategy. Among the many worldwide guidelines and regulations that have an impact on Web sites are:
• Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities ActWeb Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)The Disability Discrimination Act 2005 in the U.K.The Data Protection Act 1998 in the U.K.The Swedish National Guidelines for Public Sector Web sites
• The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
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• Japanese National Standards on ICT (information and Communication Technology) Accessibility
With so many complex guidelines and regulations, it’s just not feasible to manually enforce Web governance over a dynamic and expanding Web site. To help automate these assurance activities, there is an emerging market for Web content quality tools. Such tools are used to crawl through the pages of a Web site in a way that’s similar to how a search engine spider works. But instead of indexing a page’s contents, the crawler looks for problems that violate regulations and internal policies. The tools provide summary and drill-down reports that demonstrate the Web site’s overall quality and as well as details of the problems found, including accessibility, privacy, consistency and risk management.
Web developers aren’t the only ones who are anxious for such valuable feedback. With so much information at hand, internal auditors are starting to use Web site quality reports to manage corporate image risk.
HiSoftware is one company that provides a hosted Web governance service. HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff allows any organization to validate its Web site and applications content against standards-based and custom organizational policies for accessibility and privacy compliance. Compliance Sheriff remotely scans, monitors and audits a designated Web site’s content in each of the following six areas:
• Privacy – Scans online properties with multiple checks and validation points across the Web site for online privacy compliance.
• Accessibility – Looks at adherence to numerous worldwide accessibility guidelines, including the W3C WCAG standards; the Section 508 accessibility guidelines in the United States; and the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 in the United Kingdom.
• Site Quality – Checks for broken links, broken bookmarks, and Web site inventory.
• Content Integrity – Identifies customer-defined classified content, sensitive information or offensive content.
• Conformance – Helps reduce the risks from non-compliance with customer-defined marketing and legal standards.
• Search ability – Validates content based on practical and accepted search engine indexing guidelines.
Compliance Sheriff is a fully hosted SaaS offering that puts Web governance within financial reach of all types of organizations.
HP Services also has a Web governance service based on the HiSoftware technology. HP hosts the service, so the customer doesn’t need to invest in any hardware or software to conduct the Web monitoring. More information about this service is available here.
