When NASA Moves Its Websites to the Cloud, Everyone Watches, Nextgov
“The space agency has more than 1,500 public-facing websites and 2,000 intranets, extranets and applications, and the agency’s data offerings and holdings are huge. “These guys have probably the most expansive list of Web assets,” Ananthanpillai said. “That’s one of the reasons why everyone’s looking at them for lessons learned.””
NASA is Unable (and Unwilling) To Coordinate Its Websites, earlier post
“So, NASA is paying to maintain two MSL websites and the web addresses they give out are different than the actual web addresses – but they won’t bother to put the actual addresses in press releases. Meanwhile, NASA is paying for 2 (or 3) MER websites – and again the links put in the press release are not the actual website address.”
Part of the difficulty is that operational branches don’t actually maintain the public websites anymore. When the Internet was installed, most websites were maintained internally. Because of concerns about snazzy and appearance, configuration control, signoffs by multiple managers, and security, all websites were placed under the control of IT contractors, so to make any change in a website, even correction of a spelling error, requires a support request. There are some branches that put in the extra work needed to actually maintain the content on a website by indirection through the IT contractor, but many rightly give up and make changes only when they get a complain, and then it takes months.
Obviously from a technical standpoint there are simple solutions. Most branches have people who are perfectly capable of maintaining their websites and could do it much better than the current hands-off approach. A reasonably flexible CMS would keep the pages looking alike while giving the operational branch or activity control of the content. Hey, NASA IT, if you’re listening come up on the net and tell us why this can’t be done.