QW2002 Paper 2A1 Mr. Michael Weider (Watchfire Corporation) Testing and Managing Risky Content in the Online World

Key Points

• Risk problems associated with privacy
• Risk problems associated with accessibility
• Risk problems associated with third party content

Presentation Abstract

Many organizations still lack insight into what users are experiencing on their website and have no means of finding the risk issues that drive users away. In addition to quality issues that have the potential to damage a company’s brand, new problems have arisen. These issues include privacy glitches, accessibility issues and managing third-party links. Since these issues are often buried within tens of thousands of pages, they are cumbersome and difficult to find and resolve. Until now, this has not been an area well addressed by vendors or internal quality assurance teams.

Understanding the extent of the problems, where they’re located, and where the responsibility lies for creating and addressing the problems is critical. Current manual testing methods are expensive and ineffective. This lack of a centralized, automated solution often means customers will find the problems first.

The consequences of these problems can be severe. They can affect your ROI with impacts such as lost customers, brand erosion, and reduced conversion and customer retention rates. They can also affect the bottom line through decreased productivity, increased litigation risk from lack of compliance to corporate or government standards, and a lack of e-metrics to manage the website effectively.

Manually auditing and monitoring corporate websites is not a one-time event and can be costly, inefficient and virtually impossible. Mr. Weider will share his insight on how to better understand potential risk management issues and how businesses can use the latest technologies to help proactively manage these issues.

When you leave this session, you will learn:
• How to better understand potential online risk management issues
• How to identify common online risk problems
• What can be done to prevent them
• How to bridge the communications gaps between your legal and technical teams
• How new technologies can automate the testing and analysis of sites for risk issues
• How to integrate risk management into the Web publishing process
• What are the best practices that the world’s leading sites are using to test and manage their sites for risk

About the Author

Michael Weider is the Founder and CTO of Watchfire Corporation. Founding Watchfire in 1996, Mr. Weider has spearheaded the company into a leadership position in the Website Management software market. As CTO, Michael is responsible for product strategy, engineering, technical support and customer service. Prior to Watchfire, Mr. Weider was a co-founder of a software startup, Quadrillion Corporation. He holds a B.S. in engineering from Queens University.

Mr. Weider has spoken at numerous high profile industry and business events, including Internet World UK and the annual Privacy by Design conference. He has been frequently quoted in the business and trade press including the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, Investor’s Business Daily and USA Today. Mr. Weider has also been a guest on CNNfn on several occasions to discuss various website management issues including the topics of privacy and risky content. Mr. Weider was voted the 1999 Young Entrepreneur of the Year by Profit Magazine and was nominated for the young entrepreneur of year by Ernst and Young.