Defining the Enterprise Web Ecosystem Approach

Many colleges and universities find themselves managing an expanding network of websites and digital tools—each built to meet specific needs, each serving a different audience. While this independence can foster innovation, it can also lead to a fragmented experience for users and internal teams alike.

What if we could take a step back and see the full picture—not as a tangle of challenges, but as an ecosystem with untapped potential?

By adopting an enterprise web ecosystem approach, institutions have an opportunity to align their digital assets in a way that amplifies their impact. This is not about centralization for its own sake. It's about enabling collaboration, increasing efficiency, and ensuring a cohesive, high-quality digital presence that supports the full mission of the institution.

The goal is not control, but coordination. By thinking strategically about how web platforms, governance, content, and teams interact, higher ed leaders can create more sustainable systems that serve everyone better—from prospective students to internal stakeholders.

What is an Enterprise Web Ecosystem?

In nature, an ecosystem is a balanced network of organisms that coexist through the exchange of resources. A web ecosystem functions similarly: it’s a network of platforms, channels, and teams that either collaborate—or clash.

Like natural ecosystems, digital ecosystems require balance. While institutional teams often operate independently, they share goals and constraints. Applying an enterprise web ecosystem framework helps align resources through a collaborative, strategic approach—resulting in a more sustainable, effective, and cost-efficient system.

Importantly, an enterprise web ecosystem is not a single monolithic experience. It’s an interdependent system of websites, infrastructure, and governance that demands coordinated decision-making across technology (platforms, architecture, hosting), communications strategy (marketing, content, publishing), and web governance.

Why Now is the Time for Universities to Invest 

The combination of risks and opportunities means investing in a healthier web ecosystem now is a smart, strategic move.

CMS technology stabilization
The most common higher ed CMS platforms – Drupal and Wordpress – have reached a certain maturity level where if you build a system now, you won’t have to do a major rebuild of that system soon. They are well-suited for iterative improvements. These platforms can be treated as products that evolve incrementally rather than major projects that require heavy lifting once every five years.

Evolving user expectations 
Users have high expectations for our websites. Ensuring ease of use is necessary to keep them engaged and ensure positive interactions with our digital spaces. With an enterprise web ecosystem approach, we can not only ensure more consistent user experience across our websites, we can also more easily evolve and adapt to new online patterns through iterative design management. 

Risks of inaccessibility
Inaccessible web content and technologies are a serious liability for institutions. Without strong governance and support for accessibility remediation, you face high risk of being sued for ADA violations. An enterprise web ecosystem approach enables you to find and address accessibility issues to reduce your institution’s risk.

Restricted budgets
Funding cuts, freezes, and the looming threat of closings and consolidations put enormous pressures on higher education institutions to be good stewards of their resources. By managing your systems collaboratively, as part of an ecosystem, you can discover efficiencies to reduce costly overlap.

Preparing for search and AI-content readiness 
Many higher education institutions are exploring how to use generative AI to create, manage, and deliver content. Solutions such as chatbots may help address audience needs. Google is leaning in to AI for search as well, with its Search Generative Experience.

However, generative AI tools aren’t useful if the source material they are drawing from is incorrect, out of date, or disorganized. Generative AI makes publishing organized, accurate, and useful content even more necessary. It requires high-quality, authoritative content that answers user questions while using natural language and a conversational tone. An enterprise web ecosystem approach that addresses content quality, structure, sharing, and taxonomy sets you up for success in this arena.

Web Ecosystem Models for Universities

While specific arrangements may vary, there are several factors that are common among healthy enterprise web ecosystems. 

A tiered service approach

Not all websites require the same features or level of customization. In a healthy web ecosystem, there are solutions for a range of sites. Different tiers of sites serve different purposes—and their infrastructure should reflect that. 

How do we distinguish these tiers? 

Tier one: primary marketing sites 
These are high-visibility sites, including the institutional homepage and top-level academic or admissions sites. They should leverage a common CMS with a robust, flexible toolkit and uphold the highest standards for usability, accessibility, and brand expression.

Tier two: key outward-facing sites 
These are secondary marketing sites, such as individual colleges, schools, or large departments. They should also be on the primary CMS, sharing design systems and components that allow for flexibility within a unified brand framework for efficient maintenance and a seamless user experience across the ecosystem.

Tier three: non-strategic or internal sites
These have limited marketing value, and include administrative offices, internal tools, and niche program pages. They should use streamlined templates tailored to basic publishing needs with minimal support. This may mean offering a simplified, self-service version of the main CMS, or an alternate platform better suited for minimal upkeep. 

Centralize Core Content for Efficiency and Impact

Core content—like academic programs, degree offerings, faculty profiles, and institutional stories—should be structured and centrally managed to support reuse across the web ecosystem. This approach delivers clear benefits:

• Consistency: Ensures users see the same accurate information no matter where they enter the ecosystem.
• Efficiency: Reduces the need to update content in multiple places, saving time and minimizing errors.
• SEO Strength: Consolidates traffic to a single, authoritative page for each topic, improving search visibility.
• Streamlined UX: Allows for a smoother user journey across different sites with coherent and aligned content.

Where possible, integrate data sources (e.g., faculty directories, contact databases) to automatically pull in accurate titles, locations, and contact info—further reducing redundancy and manual updates.

Investment in shared assets
Tools and systems that can be widely beneficial across the institution should be managed centrally as shared resources. This not only ensures their optimal use but also can be more cost-effective than having multiple subscriptions or tools in play.

These may include tools for reporting, analytics, personalization, and user tracking, as well as search, CRM integration, and a DAM for shared media access.

Centrally managed hosting
Managed hosting providers such as Acquia and Pantheon enable you to manage a large amount of sites. Enterprise-level contracts with hosting providers, instead of multiple individual hosting contracts, ensure consistent, reliable, and stable hosting across the institution.

Benefits of an Enterprise Web Ecosystem Approach

Risk mitigation
The reputational and legal risks of rogue sites are hard to overstate. Left to their own devices, site owners may put the institution at risk of accessibility violations. (accessibility and legal compliance).

Any website published under your institution’s name could be the front door and first impression for any given user. Your brand is in the hands of every person who publishes content under your banner. Allowing each of these publishers to define for themselves what and how topublish without guidance is a risk.

Improved user experience for internal and external users
Sites with different design systems, navigation, and information architecture create a fractured experience for page visitors. 

Each site owner may think of its audience as unique, but in reality there is substantial overlap. A single prospective student may look at academic departments, athletics, and student life sites, in addition to the admissions site. An employee who needs to complete administrative tasks in the course of a day's work may visit sites on finance, facilities, parking, special events, and human resources. Ensuring a consistent experience across sites saves everyone time and reduces frustration.

Reduction in the total count of unique sites
It's not unusual for a university web presence to comprise hundreds or even thousands of sites over time. Sometimes this is because a lack of governance means any part of the university can spin up their own site at will. In other cases, it's easier to create a new site than to figure out where the information belongs on existing sites. 

When sites are allowed to proliferate independently, content redundancy becomes common. Excess, ungoverned content makes it harder for users to find what they need and allows incorrect or inconsistent information to persist. 

With an enterprise web ecosystem approach, you may reduce the number of overall sites and eliminate redundant or outdated content. This improves findability for users and allows for more efficient use of resources.

Platform simplification
Without an ecosystem approach, groups within an institution will find their own solutions to problems. This may mean different CMSes but also different CRMs, email marketing systems, DAMs, or any of the various tools needed for digital communications. We've even seen multiple units within a single university have separate contracts for the same tool, when a single enterprise contract could be more cost-efficient for everyone. 

With an enterprise web ecosystem approach, you can decrease the costs of multiple, redundant subscriptions. But you can also find efficiency by more effectively managing how tools integrate and how groups coordinate offline to make the most of available resources. Your opportunities for impact will be greater when the parts are all working as part of a cohesive whole. 

More efficient maintenance and support
An ecosystem approach leads to fewer, more strategically selected platforms, flexible enough to suit a wide range of needs. This means less complexity for your training and support efforts, allowing you to shift resources to proactive training from reactive troubleshooting. Empowering site editors with CMS governance tools, training, and clear documentation can reduce the support requests that previously took a lot of time with little benefit. 

Site editors may be tasked with updating multiple sites in the course of their work. Using multiple systems means time lost not only in duplicate training but also in task switching. More systems in play also means more resources devoted to maintaining, updating, supporting, and training for those systems. Shared resources are more efficient.

Platform roadmaps built on foundational strategy 
A clear vision for your enterprise web ecosystem shapes your platform development priorities. With a roadmap built on strategy and supported by leadership, your development process can be more efficient. Clarity of purpose helps you deflect inappropriate development requests. Clear guidelines and processes for submitting and reviewing feature requests help stakeholders understand the bigger picture and empower you to say no.

Increased velocity in deploying university-wide changes and new features
With so much flux impacting institutions these days, the ability to iterate nimbly is business-critical. With shared foundations, changes on a large scale are easier to implement. Whether you need to flex to accommodate new priorities or programs, roll out an evolution to your brand, or introduce new features to meet audience or site owner needs, you can get it done more quickly and efficiently if you iterate upon a strong foundation versus building anew.

Key Points: Why a Web Ecosystem Approach Matters for Universities

Higher education institutions are navigating increasingly complex digital landscapes—managing hundreds of websites, platforms, and tools across distributed teams. The enterprise web ecosystem approach offers a strategic framework to bring clarity, efficiency, and coordination to this complexity.

Key benefits of this approach include:

• Improved user experience through consistent design, navigation, and content.
• Reduced risk by addressing accessibility, governance, and compliance across all digital properties.
• Operational efficiency through shared platforms, centralized content, and smarter resource allocation.
• Platform simplification and cost savings by reducing redundant tools and streamlining support.
• Stronger impact through coordinated strategies, scalable content, and faster rollout of new features.

This isn’t about rigid control—it’s about building flexible, scalable systems that enable your teams to do their best work while delivering a better experience for your audiences.

This is just the beginning. In upcoming articles, we’ll dive deeper into how to:

• Structure governance models that empower stakeholders
• Build tiered service models for site support
• Create shared content libraries that drive SEO and storytelling
• Develop roadmaps that align your digital platforms with institutional goals

Stay tuned as we continue to explore how an enterprise web ecosystem approach can help your institution evolve with greater confidence, clarity, and cohesion.