Tuesday 6 January 2009

Welcome to 2009

A Happy New Year.
So the first day back was busy with visitors from the US who are touring the UK consortium member sites this week (oracle EAI consortium). We found out that there are now 260 campuses in the consortium and 120 of them have a working portal - but they have learned that a custom implementation for each of these is not the smartest way to support and implement in the medium/longer term. As some will know we don't have a single portal and we have currently suspended the portal project until March 2009. One of the phrases that I wrote down was "clicks as currency". The consortium has negotiated a deal with a well known job advertising board to get a few dollars for each click through from the portal to the site. The revenue potential across a large consortium is significant but for one insititution it is not. Then scale this up to some other service providers (e.g. Google) - the advice was think carefully about letting go of your virtual real estate when each click has potential value. Should we so easily give up potential revenue streams either now or into the future?

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