Change-management policies key to Website sanity

Steve Etzell saw for himself how quickly a minor unauthorized change can foul up a Web site. Etzell, director of Web technology at Select Comfort Corp. in Minneapolis, was on vacation when he got a call telling him the bed maker and retailer's Web site performance had gone "into the tank." The reason: A developer had let a business group user "twist his arm" into dynamically generating user-specific price quotes on a Web page that showed an entire category of Select Comfort's products. The site had previously sent users to a cached page that showed the same prices to everyone.

That change "seemed fairly innocuous," Etzell recalls. But the page "is accessed potentially 100,000 times per day . . . and you'll bring the server to its knees" by forcing it to dynamically create the page for each visitor, he adds.

"About an hour later, they realized what they had done and turned the caching back on" for the category page, says Etzell. The long-term answer was to remove prices from the categories page and instead put them on Web pages that describe specific products. Since those are accessed far less often than the categories page, the site can deliver customized pricing without taking a huge performance hit.

Balancing Act

It's that kind of unplanned, untested change that Web site managers hate and users love. Managing change on the Web is a "balancing act" between the need to keep your very public Web site up and running and the need to update it often enough to keep it attractive to visitors, says Etzell.

The more important your site, the more reliable it needs to be. The more transactions you do, the more it needs the kind of rock-solid stability once associated only with mainframes in a data center. Keeping embarrassing and costly outages to a minimum requires IT managers to create standard change-management policies, automate them as much as possible and outsource them if they must. Repeatable, consistent procedures, performed either by skilled support staff or automated tools, are the best way to cope with the pressures of a public-facing Web site.

The Web environment is unique because users demand changes within hours, not weeks. Changes to content aren't done by database administrators who first check the validity of the data and its effect on site performance, but by marketing managers. There's no single mainframe vendor to release updates or patches on a regular schedule, but rather a half-dozen or more suppliers that find and fix flaws in their products on their own schedules.

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