Chapter 12: When the Intranet Gets Too Big

Overview

Author: John Colby

• How big is too big?

• How did this situation arise?

• Solutions

What is "too big"? Big can mean "absolutely huge" or it can mean "too big to be able to know where everything is" or anything in between. The person who defines the "bigness of big" will probably impose their own views on the situation. They may have their own agenda, be involved in a power struggle, be a senior manager, or any combination of factors. The skill you will have already developed is to recognize this and deal with it, but let's say that for the purposes of this argument that "it's too big" means "it's got to change and become more manageable.".

What we'll do in this chapter is to assemble a collection of strategies that can work together to bring your intranet under your control and include sites that are part of an internal web resource that had not been widely publicized. In this type of case you may not have been aware of their existence. Of necessity you will have to tailor any strategy to suit your local conditions and management. This is not an exact science -there's no magic cure to intranet consolidation that will satisfy everyone in the company, so compromises have to be made somewhere. There's no guarantee that the final solution you adopt will even be the best one as you see it, but that's the art of compromise.

We'll be using case studies in this chapter to illustrate some of the concepts I'm trying to put over - and your own situation may have certain similarities them.

• How did we get into this situation?

• Where are you now and where do you want to be?

• Think before acting

• Setting the foundations

• Communication and marketing are key

• Design matters

• Transition strategies

• Future-proofing