A performance measurement framework created specifically for your website shifts the focus from simply reporting last month’s site traffic, to obtaining actionable insights that can help you make informed decisions. Not convinced? Consider 10 reasons that make the case for adding a framework to your web strategy.

1. Define what success for your organization looks like – You may know why you need a website, but do you understand if it’s delivering results? You can only manage what you can measure.

2. Align your site with organizational objectives – Your Program Activity Architecture spells out the strategic objectives and associated activities for your department or agency. Determine how your current Web presence can support those objectives, and then frame any future content, information architecture or technological changes in terms of how they support your organization’s goals.

3. Identify the ROT and get rid of it – Measurement of site performance includes casting a bright light on underperforming content, or “Redundant, Outdated and Trivial” pages. This content is best archived in accordance with your IM policies, or backed up to portable media.

4. Monitor campaign effectiveness – For high-profile, public outreach programs, having an established method for monitoring traffic to special landing pages via site, e-mail or printed links will tell you if the chosen messages are working, or not.

5. Validate previous site design choices – Web metrics highlight which links on the home page or key landing pages received the most traffic. If traffic is flowing to your most important content and users aren’t abandoning your site, then the existing design is helping to meet both your goals and, hopefully, theirs!

6. Inform future redesigns – If you are contemplating a significant change to the site architecture, your measurement tools will help focus the design direction on research-based patterns of behaviour and further define user tasks and goals.

7. Identify performance benchmarks – If the core site functionality involves a particular online service, then comparing performance against successful organizations with similar mandates offers further insight into how your site measures up against industry leaders.

8. Define key performance indicators (KPIs) –. Ideally, KPIs are directly relevant to a business outcome (e.g., increasing the number of people who complete transactions on the web), or user outcome (e.g., successfully finding a specific piece of information).

9. Maintain evidence of key decisions – A framework document captures the decisions the management team has adopted, providing sustainability of the measurement program.

10. Adopt a research-driven approach to the web – Basing decisions on a continual analysis of evolving business outcomes, web statistical trends and regular user feedback affords management the ability to stay strategic and avoid tactical approaches to the Web.

E-health has always been one of the feel-good stories about e-government. Even mainstream media outlets love to report on how technology helps these days with everything from organizing information to conducting brain surgery. Their accounts are usually warm and fuzzy in the extreme.

So it’s useful to be reminded every once in a while of the downside of e-health – which, unsurprisingly, is a security yarn.

The government site NextGov reported the other day on an unnerving incident in which hackers broke into a Virginia state site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. The nogoodniks deleted records on more than 8 million patients and then “replaced the site’s homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.”

Wikileaks also favored us with the ransom note:

“I have your [expletive]. In my possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password).”

Virginia shut down the site soon after the attack was discovered on April 30 and began restoring the system, but there’s no further word on the outcome, legally or otherwise.

So: A small story, in a way. But useful to the extent that it reminds all of us to be careful out there, people, to reach back well before health care hooked up with data management. (Hill Street Blues, since you asked).

Security. It’s an old problem, but it’s just been restated with a new urgency. And it has all kinds of implications for the practice of e-government as it’s evolved over the past few years.

The Cassandras were both CEOs, availing themselves of a platform at the RSA conference last month. And they were singing from the same gloomy songbook.

Enrique Salem, the new CEO at the security heavyweight Symantec, was particularly blunt. The current model of cybersecurity, he said, just isn’t working.

“It’s time to change the game,” Salem said as he called for “a bridge between day-to-day operations and security departments” to create shared plans and goals.

In Salem’s reckoning, the problem with security now is that it’s done piecemeal. His argument was nicely captured by Internetnews.com:

“(A)dministrators still perform manual analysis of threats against their systems within carefully partitioned silos. One team configures laptops, another looks after the datacenters, an operations team keeps an eye on routine tasks and an entirely separate security team does vulnerability testing. . . . Stand-alone products at various points within the system hamper policy coordination, making automation of many processes nearly impossible. Lower-level administrators end up creating de facto policy day-by-day based on how they configure e-mail, backup and server security.”

Salem’s musings ran along the same lines as the keynote address at the same conference by John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco. Chambers argued that security has to become fundamental in IT infrastructure – which means integrating it into business processes.

“Security isn’t a stand-alone area,” he warned. “Security is something that has to be embedded in our strategy, it has to be embedded in our technology, it has to be automated,”

Salem and Chambers are hardly the first to worry about security, and cynics will argue that Salem in particular has a vested interest in making his case. On the other hand, CEOs don’t often go this route in public – which suggests that their fretting about the bad guys is entirely appropriate.

And if that’s true, reflect for a moment on the consequences for the good old Internet, vehicle of choice for citizen cyberconnection with government.

It’s simple, really: If the bad guys make the Internet in its various incarnations too risky, people will simply abandon it where possible. Snail mail used to work as a way to pay your taxes; it still does, by all accounts.

Which of course would leave all those nifty vehicles of electronic service delivery – the pride and joy of e-government over the past 10 to 15 years – in a difficult spot.

Pity, that.

The folks at Gartner aren’t happy with the state of play on the e-government file around the world – specifically on web 2.0.

The tech research heavyweight talked to 80 government clients on five continents and checked in with what it described as “a gloomy picture of current adoption and plans for Web 2.0 in government.”

“Attention is still primarily focused on technologies and applications that aim at improving engagement and collaboration,” Gartner reported. “There is little evidence that government IT professionals appreciate (and indeed plan to pursue or at least pilot) the most disruptive, but also potentially rewarding aspects of Web 2.0, such as its impact on lighter, middle-out architectures that promote reusability and composability, and the shift from constituent-centric to constituent-driven initiatives.”

Rather scoldingly, Gartner added:

“Governments have always been — and will always be — conservative adopters of technology, as they are concerned with inclusion and accountability more than with the bottom line and market share. However, they should have learned a few lessons from their e-government ventures, where their attempts at modernizing their face and processes have had mixed results — even in the best cases, citizen engagement and uptake remain lower than expected.”

“There is a concrete risk of widening the disconnect between citizens who embrace technology and change their personal and professional behavior as a consequence, and governments that keep defending their turf, playing with technology at the edges.”

And, for the high-minded, Garter concluded with a reminder of the potential of web 2.0:

“Web 2.0 is not just a bunch of promising technologies. It is an opportunity for government agencies to step back, reflect on what their core mission is, and determine on how they should structure information and services that closely relate to that mission. This will allow the ecosystem of other agencies, intermediaries and communities to access those services and information in the most convenient, effective and efficient way.”

Nothing if not plain. . . .

One of the sticking points for Web 2.0 in a public sector context has always been privacy and security. It’s a notion crucial to both the mission and mandate of all orders of government and the general confidence of cybercitizens in online government.

There are signs, however, that such concerns may be needlessly overstated.

A recent U.S. survey by Mintel Comperemedia, for example, found that two-thirds of Americans were more concerned about security than they were five years ago. But in nearly same breath, Mintel analysts noted that identity theft is actually declining.

“The actual risk of having your identity stolen online is not as high as many people think,” eMarketer quoted Susan Menke, senior analyst at Mintel. “Financial services companies are trying to reassure consumers, but their marketing messages aren’t sticking. Companies need to find innovative new ways to convince Americans that their identities are secure online and when using e-mail.”

The most recent data from the U.S. Department of Justice indicated that less than 9 per cent of identity theft is a result of online scams. Rather, most identity theft is perpetrated through stolen mail and other low-tech methods.

In one sense, such findings support the laissez-faire approach to privacy and security which characterizes Web 2.0 tools like Facebook. In the longer term, however, what e-government managers could be looking at here is the very thin edge of a wedge that leads to new views of privacy and security issues in a public sector context. Not exactly plus ça change, maybe. But worth noting.

So far, what happens when Web 2.0 meets e-government is mostly turning out to be a lot of wikis. That’s one of Martha’s Good Things, to be sure; who knew intranets could be so easy, not to mention useful. But there are other circles to be squared out there.

Like, f’rinstance, politics. Or: Politics, with a capital P.

The public sector has made great strides in the wired world over the past 15 years or so, moving from simple information pages to ever more complex adventures in transaction. But it’s happened without much in the way of input from those elected folk – MPs, MLAs, city councillors – who are supposed to be at the top of the food chain.

Not that the relative absence of politicians hasn’t been useful. It’s given CIOs and such a fairly free hand for the heavy lifting that goes with pilot projects and leading edge architecture. Indeed, more than one senior bureaucrat has argued that politicians would only gum up the works.

That argument was good for a long time, as e-government found its feet. Now, though, it’s matured, to a point where it arguably could use a little something from the legislators who are supposed to represent the will of the people. It wouldn’t take much; a meeting of ministers responsible for e-government, maybe. Or a high-level public airing of the possibilities of digital democracy.

Meanwhile, there’s a lingering irony in the absence of politicians at the shrine of e-government: Most of them have their own web pages these days, and of course they’re as Blackberry-crazed as anybody else. All that’s needed is a formal touch to get a little something going at the big tables. What the hey; they do it for everything from fiscal management to tourism; why not e-government?