Governance Process Examples

U Chicago: formed committee from many academic units. question is, after go-live, what should committee's role be? how are others governing, how do you decide what content goes in? IT decision alone, or business units involved?

U Illinois: both approaches. have steering team on each campus, than 1 coordinator that works with all. steering committee based on audiences targeted. started out student-focused, now faculty and staff also. coordinator can steer direction of portal, but balance has to be struck between needs of users and capabilities of product. ad hoc meetings. need to develop a good relationship, good communication with content contributors. if they're going to change something, they must show it in QA first.

U Chicago: process has a lot of structure now- meets monthly. uses BaseCamp for communication. pulls in Subject Matter Experts as needed. post-launch, thinking of going towards approach that UIllinois- student, faculty committee; but also stakeholder committee for overall direction/issues.

Virginia Tech: governance committee kind of fell apart after time-- too much going on. his area has full responsibility for portal, but his area works with stakeholders individually. The approach originally was that his group will put in whatever they need to put in w/o seeking sign-off. but recently, decided to pull out content that was not so necessary to enterprise.

UW-Madison: there was an advisory group with stakeholders, faculty, staff, students early on. but the advisory group quickly lost attendance. ... eventually "tab czars" emerged. approach mentioned this morning developed-- personal stuff for portal, public stuff not in portal. advisory group meetings became less useful-- right people were not in the room. recent portal visioning process discussed in lightning talk this morning was meant to address this-- after guidelines were developed in this process, now when a new portlet is proposed, it can be asked if the new portlet is aligned with guidelines commonly developed. Portal Service Team in IT division meets every other week, include app devs, DBAs, project manager, help desk reps-- this is the contact for groups wanting a new portlet. It's not really a gatekeeper committee, but they can veto ideas if they would not add value to portal. ... they try to encourage content contributors not to use much CSS (since it should inherit CSS from portal). Eric has put guidelines on the JA-SIG wiki on proper use of CSS in uPortal so that contributors will not break themes with new CSS. but locally, they haven't had much trouble-- just encourage content contributors to namespace their CSS class.

Yale: There can be problems if units contribute content/portlets, but perhaps those who contribute content do not consider a key part of their job. So if they leave the U, and the content is abandoned, this can hurt the portal. tried to force content contributors to only use uPortal CSS classes. governance process has changed over the years

Other Governance Ideas

• maybe come up with guidelines for what kind of portlets are permissible, what kind are prioritized?
• portal dev team should present their proposed approach to committee/stakeholder, then let them react to it
• style guidelines and interaction guidelines would help to make sure that content being submitted for the portal meets standards. U Illinois is developing a style guide like this.
• perhaps collect these different governance philosophies and publish them on wiki?

Support and Resource Levels

Overall question: what is norm of resource levels for keeping uPortal up and running?

UW-Madison: Resource needs vary based on what is in portal and user base. Application aggregation requires more significant development work, versus just aggregating content from websites. It also depends on how often content on portal will be changing. Complexity of environment has increased over time. ... One unit that contributes a lot of content has 4 FTEs devoted to developing portlets. Help Desk also provides a lot of support, in terms of ongoing maintenance. A lot of problems are attributed to the portal rather than to the source system. 30 days before content goes in portal, the portal contributor has to get in contact with the Help Desk, to give the Help Desk enough time to develop documentation. U Illinois: trying to empower the units to create content on their own, and ramp down their own resource needs. vision is 1 FTE for server maintenance, coordinating among campuses, sponsoring upgrades. then at each campus, 1/2 FTE to administer portal, and work with business units.

Help sites - separate or a portlet within portal?

• UW-Madison: There's a link on their portal that leads to entire Knowledge Base site. Help Desk also launched a live chat, available from link in portal-- very successful.
• U Chicago: putting together separate Help site.

Misc

• portlet development environments w/o a full uPortal install? there will be a lightning talk on Wednesday morning