Intranet Journal
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You Might Be an Intranet Pack Rat If …
Paul Chin
(www.paulchinonline.com)
7/25/2007
You really have no idea how much junk's lying around your house until you actually have to move. I became intimately aware of this fact when I recently helped my mother pack and move 20 years worth of accumulated possessions -- things she put in the closet to be sorted out "later," things that she thought would be handy when she bought them but are still in their original packaging two decades later, things that were given to her as gifts and never used. And of course, there's the basement -- the graveyard for a household's unwanted garbage.
Intranet owners can experience this same rude awakening when they go through a system migration or content audit. If they aren't diligent enough in their content management, they'll eventually discover that a lot of it needs to be dumped on the curb for the garbage collectors. The old platitude about content being king is not entirely accurate; relevant content is king. And sometimes you just need to boot the king on the backside and start hitting the key.
I admit that I used to be a content pack rat. As a writer and journalist, I squirreled away every piece of interesting information I got my hands on -- from feature articles in newspapers and trade magazines to simple blog entries. You never know when an obscure little tidbit of information will form the basis of a future article. At least that was how I rationalized my pack rat behavior.
I categorized and filed all this information away in a simple searchable database for easy reference. But in all honesty, I think I referenced my database only twice within the two years I maintained it. It dawned on me, after a time, that I was simply going through the motions. I was storing content for the sake of storing content, and hardly made use of it. When I came to my senses, I went on a massive deleting spree.
So why did I save all this content to begin with? I did it for the same reasons intranet content owners do it:
Fear of missing out on information. You might not need it now, but who knows what will happen in the future. It's that "who knows" possibility that traps people into saving every scrap of content they find or receive - even if it has only the slightest hint of relevance.
The content selection process becomes automatic. If you do something long enough, reflex can take over good judgment. The vetting process eventually degrades from reading through the entire document to simply reading the title.
Lack of time for content review. You save content temporarily because you're too busy to read it when you get it, and you convince yourself that you'll deal with it later. That "later", however, can turn into weeks, months, and years.
Dangers of Being a Content Pack Rat
Any intranet professional should know that one piece of high quality content is worth more than five pieces of mediocre content. It's a mistake to think that storing extraneous content on an intranet is harmless. Intranets are used as content management systems, not content storage systems. All that content white noise can have a negative impact on your intranet:
Pollutes and draws attention away from newer, more relevant information.
Affects users' overall perception of an intranet. Since users have a tendency to see things as a whole, the poor content will mar the good content, or worse, the entire system.
The longer you keep old content on an intranet, the more difficult and time consuming it will be to clean up later.
Affects the quality of an intranet's search engine results page (SERP).
Affects the performance of the search engine's indexing routine.
Gobbles up storage space on your intranet server(s) and your backup media. Although storage is cheap, why use up more than you have to?
Avoiding and Surviving Content Pack Rats
Most of us who have had to deal with junk around the house come up with one of two solutions: throw it away or hide it. Unfortunately, the "out of sight, out of mind" solution doesn't work. You can't simply hide things because, sooner or later, you're going to have to deal with it. And when that time comes, the more you have to clean up, the less you'll want to do it.
The effort required to deal with extraneous or expired content in the future is entirely dependent on what you do now:
Perform the occasional intranet content audit and delete or archive old content to prevent it from piling up.
Time stamp content and have your technical staff implement automatic housekeeping jobs that can clean up expired content with little-to-no human intervention.
Conduct an intranet user survey and review the system's logs to identify what types of content is be accessed most and what isn't even being looked at. If you know that users aren't looking at certain types of content, you'll know not to include them in the future.
The best way to avoid having to clean up years worth of junk is not to collect it in the first place. Try to be more selective about what you post. It will take a little more time to review each piece of content, but you'll save yourself a lot of work in the long run.
Make sure that the people you task with managing your intranet content actually want to do it. If you pull someone in to fill that role against their will, don't be surprised if they just mechanically save every piece of content in front of them.
If your intranet is new, extra care must be taken as to what content to include. During an intranet's infancy, content owners might be a little trigger-happy, loading up the empty system with everything they come across in an attempt to populate the system as quickly as possible. This can set the tone, and an unwanted precedent, for future content submissions.
Closing Thoughts
People have a tendency to fill things to capacity just because they have the space. The bigger the house, the more junk you put in it. The bigger the intranet, the more content you store. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. The true worth of an intranet is not measured by how much content it has, it's how much quality content it has.
While you might think that you're doing your users a favor by providing them with mounds of information, that superfluous content will do nothing but detract from the system and the truly valuable content. All that content is going to stay locked up in some dusty old corner of your intranet until one day you'll have deal with it. Let's just hope you don't strain something when you do.
Paul Chin (www.paulchinonline.com) is a freelance writer and IT consultant. He has previously worked in the aerospace and competitive intelligence industries as a software developer and intranet specialist. He currently writes on a wide range of IT topics, including systems development and security, digital communications and media, content management and web design.
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