Two types of people are involved in Web sites today: those who see content as an asset, and those who see it as a commodity.

The latter better start looking for a new career!

Last week, I talked to someone whose organization had just installed a portal. The home page took 30 seconds to download, and that was just the beginning of the problem. Staff demanded that the portal be removed so that they could go back to the simpler, more efficient Web site.

The previous week, I talked to someone whose team was being forced to use portal software. They absolutely hated it, and everyone they knew within the organization hated it too. It seems that someone high up in IT had decided that portals were the way to go.

Also a couple of weeks ago, I had an email from someone who has a battle within his organization over whether to have a portal or a Web site. Those who support the portal think Web pages are not necessary and will be expensive to maintain.

They think it's just fine to put the stuff up as PDF or Word files in folders, with only the most basic navigation.

The people who think of content as a commodity want to store it in a data warehouse that gets filled up as quickly and cheaply as possible. The same people think that there has to be a way to automate the creation of metadata. "We've spent the last 50 years focusing on the 'T' in IT," Peter Drucker famously stated. "We'll spend the next 50 focusing on the 'I'."

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Gerry McGovern
Gerry McGovern (gerry@gerrymcgovern.com) is a content management consultant and author. His latest book is The Stranger's Long Neck: How to Deliver What Your Customers Really Want Online, which teaches unique techniques for identifying and measuring the performance of customers' top tasks.