6 Things You Should Do To Stay in Control of a 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 are 6 things you should do to gain 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 for the total system. User acceptance, the most important driver in the 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

Actively engage your business users throughout the migration process. Avoid IT-driven migrations that miss the mark because metadata is misapplied or the new structure fails to meet business expectations. Leverage the expertise of your internal content specialists to define classifications, build training datasets, and provide feedback. This direct involvement will significantly enhance classification accuracy. While automation through advanced language processing techniques is valuable, combining technology with business knowledge is the true driver of high-quality results.

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 afterthought. It's out of the 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, and see the times needed? This will be of great value to any migration project.

4. Speed up and gain quality by distributing workload

The 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 who 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 the business. This all improves quality and reduces total processing time.

5. Remain flexible during the 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 automated classifications are going, and what the progress on the manual restructuring is. 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.

Want to migrate your content like this?  Please get in touch!