One of the keys to success for retailers such as Dell and Wal-Mart is inventory control. Knowing what inventory or products they have, how much of it, and how it relates to customer demand (e.g. what are they buys, when will it run out, how much do we need to order).
Your intranet or website offers a product: content (either static, dynamic or in the form of a tool or application). And content remains king. It is the most valuable thing you offer your employees or readers. But do you know the state of your content? Is it up to date? Who owns it? How much do you have?
Dell and Wal-Mart offer a practical lesson for the world of intranet: success is partly predicated on knowing what you have.
The challenge is volume. If your intranet is like most, then your intranet portal and/or sites have a lot of content. It
I've started asking the Web people on our team to tag each page they work on with an HTML comment containing the name of the page's owner, the term “NEXT_REVIEW”, and the date set by the owner for the next review of the page's content. Then we'll scan the files from time to time, selecting those that are overdue for a content check.
I am not sure why this hasn't built in to the whole Web process long before now.
It's really a must. A content management system (CMS) would also definitely help in ensuring that this is done by embedding those elements as mandatory fields that must be completed within the publishing template. With a CMS comes not only a lot of speed and easy-of-publishing but also a lot of control and inherent standards and policies.