You Are not Alone

Sometimes it feels like I am the only one who has the problems I have.  I know many of you have the same feeling – you are the only one with this or that problem.  It could be that your husband drops his socks right IN FRONT of the hamper instead of INSIDE the hamper.  (I mean really – he’s standing right there – how difficult is it to put his socks IN the hamper?)  Or it could be that your current intranet or portal is out of control.  Over the years team sites have over-bred and been abandoned, other sites exist but aren’t used, communities could be put to better use, and there’s a lot of stale content that takes clutter to the nth degree and makes it difficult for your end-users to find anything.

I know, after having talked with girlfriends, that I am not alone in having a drop-the-socks-just-in-front-of-the-hamper husband (who rocks in every other way, btw).  I also know, after talking with customers, that I am not alone in wanting a better organized, searchable, easy for end-users intranet.  At NewsGator we are mid-migration in taking our intranet from SharePoint 2007 with Social Sites v3.2 to SharePoint 2010 with Social Sites 2010.  I’ve talked with many customers who are planning for their migrations and they all feel like they should do some clean up in advance of migration but are not looking forward to the work.  In many cases they feel like they are alone in having a messy intranet that grew out of control because they didn’t have governance in place, their governance was loose, or their intranet was in use for so long that things just happened.  This is when I tell them “You are not alone”.  I also talk with them about what a wonderful opportunity they have on their hands.

Think about it.  Ask anyone who is in charge of the content on the intranet (often times this is Corporate Communications or is farmed out to the individual lines of business) and they can immediately list out 5 things they would like to do differently.  In my case I’m talking about SharePoint and Social Sites migrations but the same theory applies to any intranet / portal migration.  I’m excited about the opportunity to make our intranet sing.  For our migration I have a 5 step plan: 

• Work with the lines of business to understand their needs.  Were they being met before or are there things we could do better?  If they keep existing sites we will set expectations and deadlines on content clean up.
• Evaluate the current communities, review statistics, and combine, close, create where it make sense.  Set expectations with community managers on content clean up.
• Write or update your governance plan.  We were a start up and our intranet kept growing without any planned structure, roles, or responsibilities except for some internal volunteer work on the technical side.  If we put a better structure in place it should take us much longer to make a mess of things.  (We have an added challenge in that we do testing of alpha and beta code on our intranet.)
• Work closely with our technical resources.  They have done great work on supporting our intranet but a key to a successful E2.0 deployment is having IT and business work together.  One without the other is like peanut butter without jelly.
• Educate and communicate.  Have you heard the one about the cobbler’s children having no shoes?  NewsGator employees often run around barefoot when it comes to what we are doing on our own intranet.  We will run a number of lunch ‘n learns to cover the new 2010 capabilities and any restructuring we’ve done of the site.  In addition we’ll keep everyone updated as we release new features.

  So for those of you who have been feeling alone in the messy intranet syndrome - know that you are not.  Carpe diem.  Don’t just move over what you’ve got; use this time to think through your information architecture, work with IT, and take full advantage of your do-over. 

Anyone who’s migrated recently please comment and share your experiences and lessons learned.

Comments

[Michael Brown]

your thoughts are always wonderfully insightful and timely!! we're going through those very issues as we speak.

[Social Networking]

hey the post was so informative to me. looking for your next post.

[Masha]

Very useful post. tnx

[Marghoob Sibtain]

Informative and useful

[mary]

I liked this. It gave me plenty to think about.

[Mary]

Excellent way to look at organization. Great tip!