Intranet ice age

On Members Day before jboye08, practitioners from our communities of practice got together to share experiences. This year we had a long discussion about migrating intranets and freeze periods.

Freezing an intranet solution means, that for a period of time, content cannot be updated and preserved because the programmers are working on moving the old content from one system to another.
A freeze period is something that most intranet managers will go to great lengths to avoid but in the end it is often a decision forced upon them by factors outside their own control.

• On the positive side a freeze will show whether the application, especially collaboration spaces, are used or not. Active users will be displeased to have their tool disabled. In many web teams it can be a true revelation what people miss and how many people miss it when it is not available.
• On the negative side, the intranet team will take most of the criticism for the freeze and it will reflect badly on them if it is not communicated properly. Even then, as users have difficulties distinguishing IT from intranet management, the goodwill of the intranet team is likely to suffer.
• Another negative aspect of a freeze is that momentum is lost. People who have changed their habits and got used to working via the intranet very quickly loose momentum and go back to their old habits.

A freeze should always be as short as possible. But a programmer’s estimate and expectation of the necessary length of a freeze can, and will unfortunately often be, wrong. As an intranet manager your only remedy is to try and get as short a freeze period as possible and stay true to the users of your application. It is important to be honest to them about what can be expected and proactively inform them of delays.

If you have to freeze, offer an alternative to the frozen channel of communication and collaboration. Perhaps collaboration can take place in a simpler tool from where data can easily be moved when the main solution is unfrozen again? It can be worth a bit of extra work just to make sure that you don’t have to reinvest in changing the organisation’s ways and habits again when the ice age is over.

Has your intranet been in the freezer lately? What did you do, and how did you get your annoyed users warmed up again?

Join our full day seminar, the International Intranet Day, on March 24 in Copenhagen, to learn from case studies from several organisations and network with other intranet professionals.