Cleaning up intranet content
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I’m speaking today at a number of conferences in Copenhagen, Denmark. In a break, I heard a great story from one of the participants about their experiences with cleaning up content.
The organisation is a well-known global business (hint: open up your fridge and you’ll find one of their products!). They had a huge 500,000+ page intranet, filled with lots of good content, and just as much rubbish. A decision was made to clean up the content.
They went through a two-month process with publishers, discussing what they were planning to do. They didn’t ask publishers to delete content, instead they asked them to update the content if they wanted it kept.
On the big day, they went through and automatically deleted (archived) every page that was older than a specific date, that hadn’t been reviewed. This eliminated 50,000 pages in a single act.
On the day, they set up a “war room” within communications, and a second “war room” within IT, to respond to the complaints and questions. That day, they received 3 emails and two calls. That was it. After the first day, no complaints. Six months later, people are still thanking them for cleaning up so much rubbish out of the intranet.
While this isn’t a complete solution, it does show that a big change can sometimes be made with surprisingly little resistance.
What have your experiences been with doing a big intranet cleanup?
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
2 Comments:
A similar event, using the search engine to refine a shortlist of ‘web sites’ that needed to be archived due to outdated content base, lack of ownership etc.
The reversed set of queries to the huge intranet, made it pretty visible to the top management about the critical state of having 30% or more outdated content.
Second action, using the same refinement techniques to get a short list of web chunks where there were no trace what so ever of the actual owner: hint no way finding a responsible person to contact manually to improve…
Lastly archive stuff that didn’t ‘change’ similar to the example mentioned in your blog.
James, thanks for sharing this story. We suffer similar challenges within my organization – outdated, irrelevent content. I often think we should just ‘unplug’ the intranet and see what sites are the most requested as ‘necessary to get the job done.’ But instead we’re in the process of doing a cleanup – identifying sites that have not been touched in ‘x’ period and remove; identify sites that have not had content updated since ‘x.’ I’m very interested in hearing what others have to say on this topic.