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Several years ago, when I worked in corporate marketing, my team tackled an information beast. 

As part of redesigning our intranet (internal) site, we took the virtual brooms to our company’s Outlook public folders. The public folders were filled with long-forgotten spreadsheets, shared calendars and various other files from departments.

The painstaking clean-up process, led by our intern, involved contacting each department with a list of their public folders files. They were asked to remove old information and move everything else to the new intranet.

At the same time, departments were trained to use the intranet’s new content management system. The goal was to establish the intranet as the company’s essential information source.

I was reminded of that arduous task as I read Gerry McGovern’s latest post on content migration. From McGovern:

From a management perspective, content has little or no value. It does not even deserve to be managed. Whether it is good or bad is irrelevant. Just shovel it onto the website. If it was written for print, so what? Just shovel it onto the website. The old website didn’t work? Buy new technology and hire a fancy graphics agency. The content? Just migrate/shovel it over from the old website.

At times, our departments definitely shoveled content from public folders to the new intranet. They moved files with little regard for how they were used, or who used them. Layout and usability were rarely considered.

In one sense, we succeeded: We cleaned up public folders, which directed more employees to the intranet.

Looking back, however, it’s questionable whether we streamlined employee tasks or made them more productive. Maybe we simply centralized the clutter.

As McGovern notes, content quality – focused on solid strategy, user needs and web-writing fundamentals – should’ve been as important as the technology and the process.