Go to page: 1 2   Printer Friendly Version

You really have no idea how much junk's lying around your house until you actually have to move. I became intimately aware of this fact when I recently helped my mother pack and move 20 years worth of accumulated possessions -- things she put in the closet to be sorted out "later," things that she thought would be handy when she bought them but are still in their original packaging two decades later, things that were given to her as gifts and never used. And of course, there's the basement -- the graveyard for a household's unwanted garbage.

Intranet owners can experience this same rude awakening when they go through a system migration or content audit. If they aren't diligent enough in their content management, they'll eventually discover that a lot of it needs to be dumped on the curb for the garbage collectors. The old platitude about content being king is not entirely accurate; relevant content is king. And sometimes you just need to boot the king on the backside and start hitting the key.

I admit that I used to be a content pack rat. As a writer and journalist, I squirreled away every piece of interesting information I got my hands on -- from feature articles in newspapers and trade magazines to simple blog entries. You never know when an obscure little tidbit of information will form the basis of a future article. At least that was how I rationalized my pack rat behavior.

More From Intranet Journal

Intranet Spring-Cleaning for 2007 Taking Stock: Intranet Content Audits Dealing with Information Overload If you want to comment on these or any other articles you see on Intranet Journal, we'd like to hear from you in our IT Management Forum. Thanks for reading. - Tom Dunlap, Managing Editor. FREE IT Management Newsletters bITa Planet CIO Update Intranet Journal Update Datamation IT Management Careers Datamation IT Management Update Grid Computing Planet HTML E-Security Planet Text E-Security Planet HTML DRM Watch HTML

I categorized and filed all this information away in a simple searchable database for easy reference. But in all honesty, I think I referenced my database only twice within the two years I maintained it. It dawned on me, after a time, that I was simply going through the motions. I was storing content for the sake of storing content, and hardly made use of it. When I came to my senses, I went on a massive deleting spree.

So why did I save all this content to begin with? I did it for the same reasons intranet content owners do it:

Fear of missing out on information. You might not need it now, but who knows what will happen in the future. It's that "who knows" possibility that traps people into saving every scrap of content they find or receive - even if it has only the slightest hint of relevance.

The content selection process becomes automatic. If you do something long enough, reflex can take over good judgment. The vetting process eventually degrades from reading through the entire document to simply reading the title.

Lack of time for content review. You save content temporarily because you're too busy to read it when you get it, and you convince yourself that you'll deal with it later. That "later", however, can turn into weeks, months, and years.

Any intranet professional should know that one piece of high quality content is worth more than five pieces of mediocre content. It's a mistake to think that storing extraneous content on an intranet is harmless. Intranets are used as content management systems, not content storage systems. All that content white noise can have a negative impact on your intranet:

Pollutes and draws attention away from newer, more relevant information.

Affects users' overall perception of an intranet. Since users have a tendency to see things as a whole, the poor content will mar the good content, or worse, the entire system.

The longer you keep old content on an intranet, the more difficult and time consuming it will be to clean up later.

Affects the quality of an intranet's search engine results page (SERP).

Affects the performance of the search engine's indexing routine.

Gobbles up storage space on your intranet server(s) and your backup media. Although storage is cheap, why use up more than you have to?

Go to page: 1 2   Printer Friendly Version