That’s the question that kicked off the discussion at a session I attended on Integrated Fundraising at the recent Direct Marketing Association conference in D.C. As soon as it was asked five different attendees offered five different scenarios on “ownership.” Accompanying most of their remarks were slightly snide references to the web staff involved and frustrations surrounding getting that staff to address needs in a timely manner.

As one of those web staff people, it was hard for me not to take offense to both the tone and the terminology. Own? From my perspective, the organization owns the site – and in the best of all possible worlds each division is informing and supporting that presence. Ownership, in this context, is a collaborative process and one that often requires reconciling a number of inputs. The role of web staff is to guide those inputs alongside the strategic goals of the organization on a parallel track with [ever emerging] web technologies and trends.

But as nearly all business functions are now filtered through the web, web properties (and subsequently, web content) are highly charged topics. As someone who was around during the early days, when no one seemed to care what the webmaster did, the contrast is striking. Today, when it comes to web properties, it seems everyone wants to own them but no one wants to support them.

I have a confession to make: I'm not a techie.

I am, though, a tech believer. A tech advocate. A guy who knows enough to be dangerous. A guy who can make the ITS folks cringe with sentences that start with, "How about we try..."

I'm also a guy whose brain seems to have a finite amount of usable space, not unlike a hard drive, and new info that comes in sometimes requires old information to be erased.

That's OK if the erased data is funny lines from season one of "Scrubs" (there are a lot of those). But it's not great if learning new HTML code pushes out rules for proper comma usage when dealing with essential clauses.

It's a bit of a conundrum. I need to talk knowledgeably with ITS folks about improvements I want made to our content management system, but I also need to be able to coach a student intern who has just written a poorly organized story about a Pulitzer Prize winning author visiting Colgate's campus.

If you fail to disclose certain information on a corporate website, or from a corporate e-mail address, in the United Kingdom, you could be fined. Companies in the UK who do not contain regulatory information on their websites and in their e-mail footers (as of January 1, 2007) are in breach of that country’s Companies Act and risk a fine (see Companies to update websites and email footers before 2007, OUT-LAW News, 20/12/2006).

The revised Act states that every company should list its company registration number, place of registration and registered office address on its website. The same information must also appear on order forms and in e-mails that constitute a ‘business letters’ (a somewhat ambiguous term that is open to interpretation and therefore may apply to all corporate e-mails).

A comment (thanks for writing!) on my previous post says: "So they (IT) have created a behemoth CM solution ..."

Yikes.

Any content management system is supposed to make things easier for those with website responsibility, not harder.

At Colgate University, we are using an ASP.Net product that has been greatly modified in the past four years. When I first came aboard (in '03) I could not update stories on our homepage, I had to go through ITS. Not a good way to keep a site fresh and engaging.