Target is doing fine!

Let’s all applaud them for an outstandingly good job in handling this whole accessiblity fiasco (tongue firmly planted in cheek, of course).

I know that you probably don’t want to hear any more on the issue, but I do want to raise a point about something that I don’t think has been covered very well yet (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong).  A point that has to do with something most people tend to overlook:  the state of the large corporation - for that’s just what Target is; a very large, lumbering giant of a corporation.  And I do have a “teeny-bit” of experience in dealing with the “Deus ex Machina” of large corporations.  And naturally, I’ll do my best to over-generalize and presume that they are all alike.  Because they are.

Let me tell you why this is going to get much worse before it gets better.  Large organizations function on silos of walled communication from within the bubble of the company.
In english, this is only an assumption of what happened:
Some poor Web geek built the site (or a team of geeks) in the only way that he/she/they knew how.  Legal gets wind of a lawsuit that relates to how the website was built, sending it back through management for resolution, who not knowing what else to do, sends it back to the web geek(s).  Said geek(s) might be scrambling to fix things in the best way that they know how, all while trying to fend off an internal scramble of people who all think they know what’s going on (although it all still happens within the contained walls - yet rarely face-to-face ) and all may have an opinion on what needs done to fix it.  This, we all probably can guess, is what’s happening over there.

Next up however, we hit a very tiny, but important little detail that most people aren’t going to catch:
Outside of the corporate walls, something else is happening.  An entire community of web standards developers has read about the problem, and are all rushing over to Target’s website to see for themselves.

Think about every link you’ve ever seen that takes you to the site.  Got a few in mind?  Now what happens when you get an internal department, that might not be completely up to speed with the web community at large, and not realize that the massive amounts of new pageviews happens to be directly related to what the legal team is trying to get fixed.  Because it’s doubtful that the upper-management level has kept up with the internal linking.  And, it’s doubtful that a production-level employee may not have had the opportunity (because of previously-mentioned silos) to get that connection made to the upper-management branch.

Two things are happening simultaneously:

1. Some internal team is claiming that they are working on resolving said issues.
2. A different team has sent the latest statistical trends upward, showing how many pageviews there have been.

See where I’m going with this?

“Hey Bob, look at this… we’ve got a 400%+ increase in traffic on the site - we must be doing something right!  Send a bonus over to our marketing team.  In the meantime, tell those slacker code-junkies downstairs to get the site fixed a.s.a.p. for all of our new visitors, before we get sued again!”