Less Is More When Migrating Content to a New Intranet
By James Koppenal,
Senior Managing Director
March 30, 2018
I recently bought a new car, so we had to clean out my trusty old Prius. It had a good run. It even made a cameo in the Sopranos back in the day. Before I traded it in, I asked my boys, ages 10 and 7, to clear out their stuff—small toys, trading cards and knickknacks that kids collect.
I asked the kids to go to the car, get their stuff out, and throw away what they didn’t need – a mini content audit in a sense. Moving that stuff to my new car wouldn’t have made sense and would have quickly overshadowed the exciting bells and whistles of a new ride.
The same rule applies to intranet upgrades. Before you move to a new platform, get rid of the old stuff.
I’ve managed a fair share of intranet makeovers in my 19 years at SPI Group. The best ones start with an audit. IT or communications consult with content owners who review their information and prune dated material. What’s left migrates to the new platform. Makes perfect sense. But in the hustle and bustle of the business world, sometimes those steps are skipped.
Always Keep Your Users in Mind
In the interest of time, some teams migrate all content to the new platform with the intention of cleaning it up later. By doing this, you’re trading one mess for another mess with better performance metrics. IT and communications teams should always follow the Golden Rule of intranet upgrades: always keep the end-user in mind.
Your audience wants to find the latest, most relevant information quickly. That’s where good design comes in. But before you bring in the designers, think lean. Work with content owners to weed out irrelevant PDFs, HTML pages, Word documents and spreadsheets.
Forgetting this rule usually leads to a celebration on launch day, focused on new site features and slick design. On day two, users grumble about outdated content and bad search results.
Audit Before You Migrate
At SPI Group we love well-done intranets—portals providing effective communications within an organization, allowing colleagues to find what they need in a timely fashion and bringing together colleagues to share knowledge, experience and best practices. An audit will get you there.
Audits are the best way to avoid future headaches for communicators and IT professionals. So, should content owners just review their own content? Absolutely, but you also need an overarching audit to get a bird’s eye view of your intranet. Often content owners are siloed. They don’t know the same content could exist in many parts of the intranet.
SPI Group’s approach to an audit is global. We see all the content and can recommend the best location for it. Our developers created a tool that helps us manage the project and gives you a great decision-making resource. As we audit, we use the tool to capture basic meta data and other information. Then we give you an accounting that recommends what content you should migrate and where it should go. You have the final say of course, but the tool helps you make a more informed decision.
“Less is more” is a great approach to managing an intranet upgrade. It’s also a good way to keep a new car clean.
