Content Migration Strategy

Mergers and Acquisitions are high profile events and the need to seamlessly combine two disparate content stores and deliver a consistent message to users is vital. To achieve success the project team needs to deal with issues such as brand compliance, application of a single information architecture, content model, and corporate taxonomy. These issues require careful thought and should be an integral part of planning for any merger.

So, why then do so many mergers, carefully thought out in terms of strategy, markets, and organization, stumble on the integration of technology and the valuable content of the user community? One reason is that IT assets and important website and intranet collateral are often absent from the due diligence process.

Research suggests that only around one in six of these projects bring in the data or content migration portion on time and within budget. The main reason for overruns is a failure to fully understand the content to be migrated. In other words, the data sources are neither fully known nor completely understood.

Failure to include content within the due diligence process can lead to high profile, post merger quality issues, such as a lack of brand governance and poor link cohesion.

So, what are the key points to think about when embarking on an M&A project involving digital content. Here are some pointers....

-    Undertake a thorough Content Discovery phase to ensure that you understand the size, structure and scope of the acquired property and the effort required to create a unified content store
-    Consider whether your existing hardware and infrastructure can cope with the additional content and increased numbers of authors and consumers
-    Talk to the content owners and make sure they are involved in any decisions that will affect future content usability
-    Produce a plan with key milestones and deliverables to track progress towards a smooth integration
-    Plan to implement a common IA, content and metadata model which can encompass all content
-    Think about the key customer-facing sections of your site

• branding must be consistent
• navigation and search must function reliably for all content
• duplicate, conflicting and non-compliant content should be identified and removed

-    An ongoing content governance model should be adopted to ensure all future content conforms to the organization’s digital content policies

Removing risk from these projects is a Vamosa speciality, but even without professional support, these pointers will help to keep you on the right track. There are many pitfalls for the unprepared, but taking an organized and structured approach actually enables a merger to benefit content quality, as it is the ideal time for content cleansing and removal of redundant and obsolete content.

Although high risk and highly visible, tackled in the right way, M&A projects provide a platform to a more streamlined and efficient digital content store.


 To learn more about the typical barriers to starting a content migration, download the 'Making Enterprise Content Governance a Reality' White Paper.

Corporate intranets are changing fast! No longer are intranets created and controlled by a few select authors and webmasters. New social networking features are being adopted across all industries in an attempt to increase user collaboration and provide a support framework through a modern, feature rich intranet site.

Fears of users running wild and spending their working day tweeting or poking have proved unfounded. In fact, providing social networking features within the organization actually reduces the time users spend on external sites. Evidence also suggests that because users are in a working environment, they retain a professional attitude and don’t abuse the system. Companies are learning that there is a huge wealth of information held within their user base. Blogs, wikis, support forums etc. can all be used to leverage that knowledge and benefit the wider user community. Commonwealth Bank recently introduced a new SharePoint based intranet with social networking functionality and - among other benefits - have had helpdesk calls reduce by 50-60%, massively reducing support costs.

So, all good news then? Well, yes and no. The benefits are obvious: more collaboration from motivated staff interested in contributing to the site, the ability to tap into the knowledge of all users and possibly even a reduction in external browsing leading to increased productivity. It’s also safe to say that a failure to embrace social networking will lead to an exodus from the intranet to the intranet for the most innovative and forward thinking users, who use these tools daily in their private lives and expect to do the same in the workplace.

The drawbacks? It may be new and cool social media, but it’s all still content and as such requires a governance strategy to ensure that user-authored content is relevant, accurate, standards-compliant and appropriate for internal publication. The Intranet 2.0 Global Survey reveals that only 57% of all organizations have published user content policies and standards. This means that almost half don’t have any user content governance. Especially worrying when the same survey indicates that 87% of organizations have at least one social networking tool on their intranet. That’s a lot of ungoverned user content!

As described by Elizabeth Marsh of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, social media governance is all about mitigating the risks and fostering user trust. You don’t need a separate social media policy. A well designed Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) model will cover all aspects of content, including social networking. The risk of not having a solid governance model is that your organization’s content, including that stored in blogs, wikis, podcasts, status updates, comments and instant messages, will expand in an uncontrolled way, increasing risk and liability.

So, to enjoy the benefits of a popular and productive intranet you should fully embrace collaboration and social networking. Just be sure that you have appropriate safeguards in place. Take expert advice and ensure that you have a content governance model in place that will allow you to reap the rewards in a controlled and risk-free way.

Any enterprise looking to manage content knows it has a challenge on its hands. Not only has the volume of content exploded exponentially in the last few years but so has the rate at which content is changing and users’ expectation of a satisfactory experience, whether on the Internet, or simply locating a file on the Intranet or Portal.

Vamosa announced its new consulting services on Tuesday. They offer a comprehensive approach to implementing best practice Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG), focusing on practical aspects, such as content modelling and keyword tagging.

A Vamosa customer – British Council – summarized the need for such expertise perfectly: “We knew there was a lot of out-of-date content, but with so many pages, it was an enormous challenge for us to undertake an analysis on our own. We chose Vamosa because of its Consultants’ expertise.”

The Consulting services are structured around ten different components to provide enterprises with a start-to-finish content strategy, and the added bonus of providing an independent evaluation to support decisions on CMS vendor selection.

A few examples of the different areas of the Practice include:
•    Content Discovery – a comprehensive analysis and assessment of content to optimize performance, reduce Total Cost of Ownership and resolve problem areas before content users complain
•    Migration Programme Management – capitalizes on the expertise of Vamosa experts to migrate content so employees can focus on day to day jobs and avoid the common pitfalls associated with CMS/DMS implementation
•    Keyword Tagging – Valuable keywords and phrases extracted from content and weighted based on relevance, then tagged as metadata making it easier to find

By engaging with Vamosa for consulting services, enterprises can not only be confident of receiving advice gained on hundreds of customer engagements, but also that these will be executed within a structured ECoG framework.

Do you understand your content lifecycle? Do you even have a content lifecycle? A content governance model, such as Vamosa’s Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) framework is built around control and governance of content from creation, through consumption and on to retirement/archival or deletion. Implementing a governance model will make a huge difference to overall content quality, with streamlined processes resulting in a high percentage of well tagged, standards-compliant and relevant content. There are other benefits too: including cost reductions from increased efficiency; and reduced maintenance and storage requirements. The big question for Records Managers, Web Content Managers, Librarians and other professionals is ‘How can I start to apply this framework and regain control of the information in my organization?’.

Content has always been difficult to control due to its diverse nature and it should be no surprise that it’s not going to get any easier. This article from the eDiscovery Journal raises some of the issues facing organizations in the Web 2.0 era. Not only is legislation being tightened around how information can be used and how it should be retained within organizations, but the number of ways that information can be created has increased dramatically. In addition to the content residing within Content Management Systems (CMS) and email servers, organizations now have to consider the new breed of collaboration and social networking tools that are growing rapidly within the workplace. User-generated content featured in instant Messaging, Blogs, Twitter, Google Wave, Buzz etc. all make it possible for information to exist in a wide variety of locations, yet still “owned” by the company. This type of information cannot be managed or controlled using traditional methods.

Failing to appreciate the need for governance introduces risk and is one of the reasons why enterprise organizations find themselves in a situation where they lose control of their content. There is often no real understanding of either the quantity or the value of information existing within the network. Misleading information can seriously damage a company’s brand and customer service, while duplication can result in increased storage and infrastructure costs. Ultimately, this lack of control leads to an increase in the so called “digital landfill” and the first thing to suffer is content quality and, in due course, the end user experience.

So, where do you start? The first stage of the ECoG governance model is “Initiate”. This really is the stage where you have to plan your strategy and think about the content you need – whose going to use it and when; what are they going to do with it – and also what you can live without. Retention of obsolete or irrelevant information is one of the biggest factors contributing to uncontrolled growth of content within organizations. The Initiate phase fits extremely well with the implementation of a CMS for the first time, or as a ‘take stock’ point ahead of migration into a replacement CMS, but it can also be undertaken on the back of a thorough analysis of existing content. This is the perfect opportunity to rationalize content and ensure quality and relevance are high before populating the CMS. A CMS will only manage content, it won’t deliver governance. For that you need a strategy and policies covering the end to end content lifecycle – ensuring that you not only obtain a high level of content quality, but maintain that level, in order to maximize the value of your information assets.

We like a challenge at Vamosa, so when a major pharmaceutical company contacted us recently to discuss migrating their entire Intranet portal we were immediately interested. This was an ‘all or nothing’ situation for the customer, as both an internal project team and the CMS vendors themselves had already tried and failed to migrate the sites.

These previous failures didn’t scare us off however and actually made us keener to prove to the customer that Vamosa software and Expert Services consultants could actually achieve what they were beginning to think was impossible.

Being confident in our abilities, we agreed to deliver a two week proof of concept to demonstrate that we could move content, digital assets, metadata, portal navigation, portal structure, portlet placement and security (i.e. everything!) from the existing source system to a new target. The content, currently stored within Interwoven TeamSite with a WebLogic Portal front end, was moving to a new Oracle Publisher CMS with WebCenter Interaction as the portal front end.

The PoC was difficult, as we were pushing the boundaries of what was previously considered part of a content migration and literally creating an entire portal – with content and structure – automatically from scratch. So, a difficult two weeks, but ultimately very successful, leading to some gasps of amazement from the internal technical team when we ran through the whole process over a WebEx meeting. Needless to say, we won the piece of work for the full Intranet migration.

And then the next challenge: because so much time had been spent trying to figure it out before Vamosa became involved, there was very little time left to actually migrate the Intranet portal before the proposed go live date! Luckily we have years of experience in delivering content migrations to very strict deadlines, so were able to plan an approach with the customer and successfully execute the migration of 18 large sites on schedule and with a content freeze measured in hours rather than days.

This type of migration, very complex and with tight timescales, is only possible using the power and flexibility of Vamosa Content Migrator. Other migration frameworks can’t cope with this level of complexity and are restricted to moving only the CMS content and normally in quite an inefficient way. Content Migrator uses the core APIs of the target web portal and CMS and as a result achieves high performance through a reliable and secure interface provided by the portal and CMS vendors.

So, the moral of the story is: don’t be scared of a challenge, confront it head on with the right team and nothing is impossible!







Download the 'Content Migration: Seven Steps to Success' White Paper to further understand the steps required to achieve a successful migration project.