6 things you should do to stay in control of content migration

Do you find content migrations a challenge? Quality not what you were expecting? Business is complaining about it? Struggling to get the input of the business embedded in the process? Here’s 6 things you should do to gain total control and get the most value from your content migration.

1. Create better content

Intelligent classification ensures better content in your ECM, which creates higher value of the total system. User acceptance, the most important driver in success of an ECM implementation, will be way better if they notice their content is easier to find and use than before. Being more in control and improving user acceptance will be any ECM project manager's dream.

2. Improve quality by using own knowledge and in house domain experts

Heavily involve the knowledge of your business users. Don't create an IT migration that the business will hate because metadata is improperly applied or the new structure is not what business users expected. Make use of knowledge of your local content experts for defining your classifications, creating training sets and giving feedback. This will improve the classification quality immensely. Of course you can automate classification as much as possible based on language processing techniques, but combining this with business knowledge is the true key to quality.

3. Use a solution in which you can plan and schedule the migration

Of the ECM implementations and upgrades I have seen, almost all have planning issues. Migration is complex and difficult, often being treated as an after thought. It's out of control of the project manager because it is always an IT project and perceived as a minor component at the end of a long difficult implementation project. How about being able to schedule the migration within a migration tool, plan in advance and see the times needed. This will be of great value to any migration project.

4. Speed up and gain quality by distributing workload

Distribution of a migration has multiple advantages. You can speed up the total process by doing migrations in parallel, and you can assign specific migrations to content owners that know about that specific content source or project folder. Of course you can use general rules to filter and enrich content at first but the final tweaks and okay can be made by business. This is all improving quality and reducing total processing time.

5. Remain flexible during total process with real time insights

As a manager responsible for the delivery of the migration, you are always in total control of the process. By establishing clear phases in your migration you can see who has done which tasks, how are automated classifications going, what's the progress on the manual restructuring. Most importantly perhaps, how is the quality of the metadata?

6. Do it cheaper and predict the total costs

Using your local domain experts to set up migration rules and classification means fewer expensive consultants are needed during your project. Their content expertise will also drive higher quality content in the final result. Predicting the total costs becomes easier when the migration is managed in house, alongside the IT side of the project.

Can't wait to also migrate your content like this? Want to know more? Please get in touch!