Summary: Planning a website migration

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Subject: Planning a website migration

Presenter: Natalie Meystre

Participants: 20

Introduction

This is a summary of the Swiss Knowledge Management Forum (SKMF) round table held at EPFL Lausanne on July 2 2009. The subject was the migration of the EPFL.CH website to a new content management system and graphical design. The round table was facilitated by Natalie Meystre from the EPFL IT department in charge of this migration.

EPFL.CH is a huge web galaxy containing more than 1’000 websites representing EPFL units (research labs, administrative units, services, projects…). Each unit owns its website and manages it autonomously. Most units dedicate one of their members’ time to administering their website. There is little design unity between the websites. This may confuse visitors of the EPFL domain, resulting in rumors about its quality.

This can be seen as the direct result of academic freedom that is a basic value of an academic institution such as EPFL

The Knowledge and Information System group (KIS) within the EPFL IT department is in charge of web policies and tools. It was mandated to improve this situation. A study on users’ habits (focus group) was made. An update of the Content Management System (CMS) is planned, and new design guidelines (a new graphic & content Chart) are at work with an external agency.

The project is called Web2010.

Our challenge is to persuade the individual units to accept the new CMS and the design guidelines, and change their website accordingly.

Participants’ Questions

  1. How come the situation so complicated?
  2. Why do people place personal information and pictures on their EPFL pages?
  3. Is it chaos or anarchy?
  4. What are the (more precise) objectives of Web2010?
  5. Why migrate?
  6. What will the stakeholders gain from this migration?

Predrag Viceic’s Table Summary

  • Make a list of the stakeholders’ benefits: 
    This proposal was made with different formulations by every table. It is important to list the benefits that a unit can expect from a standardized website (technical, social, reputation, ranking, usability…) and communicate them widely.
  • Provide help:
    Tell unit managers (e.g. professors) that KIS can help them analyze their site and manage “assistants étudiants” who will do the migration work.

Alexander Samarin’s Table Summary

All pages of epfl.ch could be classified in 3 categories: corporate (official informations), personal (information about people, social network), intranet (internal informations).  Define policy of use for each category and get it accepted by all stakeholders.
The KIS policy would be ‘Provide (services) but check’.
KIS must tend to a reduction of webpages quantity (utopia ?)

Separate official, professional and personal data, docs, etc.
Introduce policies: full control for www.epfl.ch,partcial control for labs.epfl.ch
Estimate the cost of running all 1000 sites
Develop risks metric for “wild” web sites and ask management to define acceptable level of those risks
Provide a set of building blocks for centrally managed information, e.g. person name, lab, phone, etc.
A general tip – people are more receptive to what they may lose than to what they may gain.

The following arguments can convince units to change their website and practices.

  • Risk reductions: use the argument that units may have illicit content on their servers that they don’t know of.
  • Make units aware of the operational cost of their site
  • Make a contest for the best website, with link on the homepage as a prize
  • Promote links instead of duplication

Gabriel Klein’s Table Summary

  • Use social networking tools to ease the migration
  • Create a buzz on social platforms to find the stakeholders (Facebook)
  • Make the stakeholders speak with each others to define their needs
  • Make a planning and make it widely available
  • Propose more attractive and dynamic widgets and presentation for the people’s pages (people.epfl.ch)
  • Get rid of old contents
  • Don’t mind too much about hard critics and opinions

Walter Gaxer’s Table Summary

  • Find a sponsor (with power) and lobbyists
  • Understand what exactly EPFL management wants to communicate
  • Make a competition for the best site or best migration
  • Make a competition for the worst site
  • Prizes: site of the month with the right to park next to the office – link on the homepage – lab of the month
  • Identify early adopters, target them first, pay special attentions to them

Natalie’s Summary

Even if most participants in the round table felt a little sorry for us and were preoccupied with this big challenge, I retain the good energy and all the positive aspects you brought up.

This round table was very useful for me and my colleagues. It provides us with a higher points of view.

I retain the following points to go ahead with this migration

  1. Communicate a list of benefits to the stakeholders  / Present systematically and widely the benefits of the operation
  2. Create a community of supporters and feed them with information… and rewards
  3. Find a sponsor and some lobbyists in top management
  4. Use this occasion to get rid of obsolete data.
  5. Make people more responsible for their content.
  6. Better classification between corporate/social/internal data. 

Introduce fun by some contest among websites

Thank you for your participation

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