Sociotechnical Analysis

University Publishing Corporation (UPC) is dedicated to helping organizations and higher educational institutions find and locate past alumni in order to create an updated directory or publish newsletters. The website of UPC has seen its primary goal change over the years. At its inception, UPC website served as a tool to distribute information to clients so they could learn more about the organization. Now UPC is hoping to make it easier for customers to keep their contact information up to date by offering online forms. The most basic goal of the organization is to maintain a complete and up to date listing of contact information. Thus, UPC's hope for the website is to make it so easy to submit contact info, that more people will find it worthwhile to update their information.

The major stakeholders of UPC are clients including development professionals, alumni relationss, high school and college students, sororities and fraternities. Young people are more in favor of using the web to update information than older people and there is a very large number of young and educated clients. Sorority & Fraternity chapters and High School and College alumni associations are the two major sections of the audience. UPC wants the clients' members to be able to use the site to provide their contact information for the directories, although this isn't being done now. Adding this third audience will have a huge effect on the architecture of the site. Employees within the company don’t use the website at all, the website is entirely for the clients and clients' members.

The UPC site was designed by Jeni Szymanski. Until recently, Jeni did all the maintenance and updating herself as designer and webmaster. She accomplished all those tasks by spending approximately two hours per week depending on the amount of work needed to be done. Most workflow in site maintenance involves adding more forms, developing forms, changing forms, fixing templates, etc. A lot of responsibilities in the IT respect have been outsourced to the web host company name Seg-Ment?, such as network, troubleshooting, and programming. The expense of the hosting and a few hours of maintenance work count for the cost of the website. Mainly this website is very static. There is no database behind the website, and forms are sent to UPS employees through email. UPS is unwilling to put directories online due to their relunctance of dealing security issues.

The site contains several forms. There is a sign up form for clients and form which chapter leaders can use to update information about their chapter. There doesn't seem to be a comparable form for alumni associations. There are two separate forms for alumni associations and chapters to request information. There is also a link to a survey about the company's services. The link to the survey is on the global navigation bar and is labeled 'feedback'. There are no forms for clients' members to update or provide their information. Jeni said that those forms have been created, but have not yet been posted on the site. She does not know whether or not there are plans to do so.

There is no backend database linked to the forms. All forms are emailed to an employee named Tara Holbrook. We do not know whether she submits these to other employees to handle or inputs the data into a database herself. Because the company has been reluctant to have contact with us, we don't feel like we can contact Tara to ask her about this.

Jeni has since left the company and Heidi Drockelman was hired to take her place. Heidi does have some experience though the extent of her knowledge is unknown to the company. Based on her experience, UPC may or may not decide to continue to use Jeni to update and maintain the website on a free-lance basis. We do not have contact information with Heidi, as the company was reluctant to give us this information and asked us to continue to contact Jeni with web site questions.

UPC is not interested in having their site redesigned. They feel that they have invested too much time and money into the site to redesign. They really want some usability testing done and some suggestions made for improvements. This illustrates a common problem with web development. Many organizations want to think about the usability of their site but they put the testing at the end of the project when it is really too late to deal with major problems.