Interview: Piet Niederhausen, Georgetown University’s Webmaster

University Webmaster at Georgetown, Piet Niederhausen studied architecture and went to law school before getting caught up in virtual constructions and online causes. He is part of the Office of Information Services directed by the Vice President for Information Services and Chief Information Officer and works closely with the Office of Public Affairs. Piet is responsible for the Georgetown University web presence composed of about 600 individual websites for a total of 600,000 pages according to Google. These web pages are individually maintained using a variety of technologies including the University’s in-house CMS, Dreamweaver, FrontPage, and ColdFusion. Piet has also recently launched a group blog for the members of University Web Developers’ Mailing List.

What’s your background? What did you do before becoming a higher ed web pro?

I studied architecture in undergraduate and then went to law school. While I was at Georgetown Law, the web became important to universities, and I had the opportunity to work on some of Georgetown’s early web sites. After graduating I stayed on at the university and eventually moved into my current position. Working as a web professional in higher education has been a great way to apply my interests in design, planning, and policy.

What’s your biggest achievement as a higher ed web pro?

I think my most important achievement is the opportunity I had as a manager to hire great people and start a web group that continues to evolve, produce good projects, and be a rewarding place to work. In higher education it’s often difficult to bring a team of highly qualified specialists to each project, and having a good team has made an enormous long term difference in what we can do with the web at Georgetown. Their work stands on its own, of course, but I’m glad to have contributed to it.

What’s the most difficult part of your job?

The hardest part of my job is at the same time the most rewarding. We’re finding our way in new media, discovering best practices as we go along, with little to guide us. Even as we try to wrap our heads around the potential of what we’re creating, we have to educate our communities about how it integrates with traditional communications media such as print. On top of that, doing anything at the scale of a whole university is a challenge. So we have to continually identify and develop the plans, guidelines, and tools that will move our institutions in a positive direction over the long term, without fully knowing how what we’re creating will need to be used in the future.
It’s not really about the technology, although a critical part of our jobs is to liase with the technology. It’s much more about content — facilitating the great content that we know our institutions are capable of producing, managing and syndicating it to provide useful access to it, using it to further institutional goals, and keeping it reusable and alive for future uses.

In your opinion, what’s the biggest challenge we face as web pros in our industry?

I think higher education has a fundamental human resources challenge when it comes to web development. It’s not that our institutions don’t apply resources to the web, it’s that they tend to apply them so diffusely. The web “happened” very gradually in higher education and so our web-related human resources tend to be stretched thin across our institutions. Internet development today is highly professionalized and specialized, but our institutions are only gradually recognizing that. So it’s difficult to focus the right resources to address the big questions in depth:

• How are we going to make our enormous amounts of content accessible and useful?
• How are we going to maintain a message across so many web properties?
• How can we make our efforts on the web harmonize with and amplify our institutional goals?

Any good advice to share with your fellow higher ed web pros?

My advice is to always take the time to look beyond the projects you are working on now and think about what you can do to further your institution’s long term goals. We don’t generally have the resources to create enterprise web infrastructure; we have to build our infrastructure project by project. That often means identifying priorities that your organization doesn’t see as important yet. It may mean quietly laying some groundwork that nobody has asked for, but that you will prove important. A good example is content syndication. You can bet that people in your institution will soon be asking for RSS feeds, if they haven’t yet. To syndicate content in a meaningful way, you have to have laid some groundwork with content management and metadata. But it probably wasn’t in your organization’s five-year plan in 2000.

What about a couple of good links?

I think some of the most interesting work that is being done right now is in the area of social networking and collaborative content categorization. Our institutions are microcosms of the larger web in that we host large amounts of content, much of it unrelated and poorly indexed. How are we going to provide useful access to this content? It’s not likely to happen just by us coming up with the perfect information architecture. Instead, we may end up relying in part on our users to classify content and make connections for other users with similar interests. Wikipedia has a good list of links to follow. But sites you may use every day, like Amazon, NetFlix, and Friendster, are working on these issues and we can learn from how they work.