Filed under Architecture
First, enterprise wide Content Experts should be assigned. These individual(s) are charged with gathering and analyzing the content. A key consideration should be to have both a business and technical representative that support users when the system goes in operation. While the business rep focuses on content use, the tech rep can bring awareness to the technical implementation.
Second access is obtained for all the existing intranet sites and analysis performed to infer what types of content is present. Fortunately most intranets host common forms of content, site, pages, types of content (news, announcements, events, etc.) so reverse engineering is affective for a first pass. The analysis is capture in the vary tool used to develop the solution, SharePoint. Content falls into the category of structured and unstructured. It is just as important to identity unstructured content as structure, thought structured is more pressing because it is these forms of content that tend to cause discussion as what a unified definition of the content is. The structured content then needs a baseline definition of the attributes for each. Each attribute should have the label, data type (open text, date, number, etc.), and definition. Typically the largest, most mature intranet is chosen as the baseline.
Once the Content Experts have inventoried as much as possible, the first phase of validation is performed. Before engaging the business it is most affective to engage the IT content experts within the respective divisions.
With the Content Experts up to speed, content documented, a first round of validation with the divisional IT staff, the team is then ready to engage the business to discuss the second phase of validation where emphasis is placed on the normalization of the structured content. This can be touchy but with the amount of “homework” performed, the business is more apt to respect the findings and recommendations of the team.
Once consensus is found, content requirements are finalized, and the technical specifications drafted!
