Defining Web Governance?

For my purposes I did some trawling for a definition and found the following:

“Web Governance is the structure of people, positions, authorities, roles, reponsibilities, relationships, and rules involved in managing an agency's website(s). The governance structure defines who can make what decisions, who is accountable for which efforts, and how each of the players must work together to operate a website and web management process effectively.”
From What is Web Governance?

I thought this was reasonable. The concept that governance is made up of a range of control mechanisms is particularly useful for organisations undertaking more complex activities. However, with this definition the difference between the activities of “governance” and “management” is not immediately clear. The potential weakness of this it is possible to have a well managed web site while having poor governance. The broader of “Information technology governance” from Wikipedia (1 Dec 2008 ) does a better job of separating these.

“The primary goals for information technology governance are to (1) assure that the investments in IT generate business value, and (2) mitigate the risks that are associated with IT. This can be done by implementing an organizational structure with well-defined roles for the responsibility of information, business processes, applications, infrastructure, etc.”

This resource points out that IT governance is not just good management practices: “IT governance is about the stewardship of IT resources on behalf of the stakeholders who expect a return from their investment”. This will require a little massaging to bring into it line with my work place (a government agencies).

So for the web governance model that I’m developing I’m proposing the following:

1. Governance is the mechanisms (structures, roles, processes, business applications, etc) that an organisation uses to control the web
2. The purpose of this control is to ensure; the various web activities align with business objectives, resources are efficiently used, risks are mitigated
3. Management is the activities involved in; defining, opperationalising or undertaking the mechanisms of governance