Website Management Outsourcing Explained

Website Management Outsourcing (WMO) is the contracting of the management of a website and entire online environment to a third-party service provider. A variant of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), WMO is an outsourcing service typically offered to SMEs and in particular, Medium-Sized Enterprises, that don’t have a specific internal web team or web-marketing team.

The days where a single design agency or development company can create and manage a successful online offering for an organisation are gone.  In today’s business environment, the online presence of an organisation is increasingly layered and complex.

Online projects now require the skills of designers, developers, hosts, project managers, editors and marketing experts in addition to an internal project team in order to create an effective online environment. This has fueled the need for WMO services.

A WMO company work on behalf of a client organization to manage the designers, the hosting company, the development partners, the content editors, the online marketing company, SEO specialists and the internal marketing team of the client, to ensure that their online environment meets their commercial objectives.

Typically, a WMO company will manage the provider companies to Service Level Agreements, follow best practices, and assume full responsibility for the success of the deployment and ongoing management of a website.

Just as with BPO and other forms of Outsourcing, WMO companies work with SMEs and Medium-Sized Organizations on an ongoing basis rather than a simple per-project basis – implementing new techniques and technologies to make the website more effective throughout the lifecycle of the site.

The most common examples of WMO are website marketing, website development, website design, support and maintenance, and website project management.

History

WMO is a term that was first coined by industry thought-leader Gregory Kris, in January 2006, during a speech at the Internet Business Networking Conference in London, to describe the fulfilment of the expanding needs of clients within the online sector. Today, this term and the WMO industry are growing in common usage.

Industry

WMO is a nascent industry that has only recently been labelled, but is growing at a rate of 110% year on year. Although many companies do outsource part of their website development or design to 3^rd parties, very rarely do they engage a WMO provider to manage the entire process.

Current WMO providers estimate that WMO accounts for less than 2% of the total website development industry revenue (Q1 2007) – up from 0.5% in the first quarter of 2006. The WMO industry is expected to grow to a market share of 15% by Q4 2009

See also

BPO

Outsourcing

Offshoring

Nearshoring

Homeshoring

Links

What is Website Management Outsourcing (WMO)?  Fresh Enterprise

Sift.com Website Management Outsourcing

http://www.sift.com/services/siftgroups-services/index.html

The Web Team

http://www.the-web-team.com/