Intranet migration: A new platform won’t fix bad content
A new platform, a migration from an old intranet to a new one, has a curious effect on organisations.
It creates optimism. Budgets appear. Workshops spring up. Vendor demos become strangely persuasive. And somewhere along the way, the platform acquires magical properties it was never designed to have.
Often, migration becomes a rescue fantasy that’s expected to save everything. Poor findability. Duplicated content. Weak ownership. Confusing journeys. Years of publishing drift.
But a new platforms doesn’t erase these problems. It just relocates them.
Why lift-and-shift feels sensible
Lift-and-shift migrations feel deceptively safe – move everything, question little and hope the new technology improves the experience on arrival. But it rarely does. Instead, a lift-and-shift migration is often the most expensive way to keep your worst content.
To be fair, lift-and-shift is seductive. When migration deadlines loom and go-live pressure builds, “just move everything” feels practical. It feels safer than making hard editorial decisions.
Nobody has to decide what stays, what goes, or who owns the awkward archive full of duplicated guidance and abandoned pages. This is why migrations often become logistics rather than discovery exercises – a distinction we explored in our earlier post on intranet audits versus discovery.
And there’s understandable comfort in completeness – if everything moves, nothing gets missed.
Except that completeness and usefulness are not the same thing.
Most digital workplaces already suffer from abundance rather than scarcity. More tools, more channels and more publishing capability have not automatically produced more clarity or better employee experiences. If anything, the opposite is true. Employees encounter more information than ever while struggling to find what they actually need.
Lift-and-shift protects that problem. It moves the clutter without questioning it. And because migration programmes are expensive, organisations often end up preserving poor content at considerable cost.
The hidden costs of lift-and-shift migrations
The trouble with lift-and-shift is that content rarely travels alone. Along with the useful material comes everything else:
duplicate pages
orphaned documents
unclear ownership
broken structures
weak metadata
poor findability
The result is familiar: old problems relocated to a newer and more expensive home. As we argued in our earlier post on why the intranet isn’t dead, the publishing need does not disappear when platforms change. Poor content simply changes address.
This matters because every page carries hidden costs.
The first is obvious: creation cost. Somebody drafted the page, reviewed it, translated it, approved it and published it. Even with automation, content takes human effort.
The second is easier to overlook: consumption cost. Employees pay for content with attention. Every unnecessary page, duplicated instruction or long article asks people to spend time deciding whether something matters and whether it can be trusted. When information conflicts or overwhelms, trust declines and cognitive load rises.
Then there’s context cost. Most employees are not reading your intranet leisurely from a quiet desk. They’re working under pressure, switching devices, dealing with poor WiFi, cracked screens, interrupted shifts and competing demands. Content that ignores those realities creates friction.
And finally, environmental cost. Digital content is not weightless. Servers, storage, networks and devices all consume energy. Keeping redundant content alive has a footprint too.
The uncomfortable implication is simple. More content is not automatically more helpful. Sometimes it’s simply more expensive.
Migration is your chance for a fresh start
Migration deserves a different frame. It’s not primarily a technical exercise, it’s an editorial opportunity – and possibly the best one you’ll ever get.
Most organisations struggle to make large-scale content changes during business as usual, and legacy structures persist because nobody has permission or momentum to challenge them.
Migration changes that. Suddenly the organisation is already preparing to move, redesign and rebuild. Decisions that would normally feel disruptive become expected.
That makes migration a rare, sanctioned excuse to start fresh:
audit ruthlessly
challenge duplication
retire content that no longer earns its place
clarify ownership
perhaps most importantly, make publishing more deliberate
This is where a counterintuitive principle becomes useful. Make it harder to publish.
Not harder in a bureaucratic sense, but harder in a stewardship sense. Require ownership. Require audience definition. Require expiry dates and review cycles. Require enough friction that publishing becomes intentional rather than habitual. These disciplines sit firmly within content governance – something we explore in more depth in our companion governance post.
Publishing should be easy to sustain – not merely easy to start. Because improving and maintaining content is usually more valuable than creating another duplicate page.
What starting fresh actually looks like
Starting fresh does not mean deleting everything and hoping for the best. It means designing content around how people actually use it.
That starts with user-centred writing.
Who is this for?
What do they need to do?
And when does this apply?
If the answer to the first question is “everyone”, something has probably gone wrong already. Good workplace content usually has a specific audience and one primary job to do. One page, one job.
It also means taking findability seriously.
Metadata is often treated as admin work – tedious fields added after the real writing is finished. But metadata is not bureaucracy. It’s how people find content. Titles, descriptions, ownership, review dates and structured tagging determine whether search succeeds or fails. Enterprise search is not magic, and it certainly is not Google. Without structure, search cannot rescue weak content.
Accessibility belongs here too. Too often it’s framed as compliance. In reality, accessibility is usability under pressure. Plain language, semantic headings, captions, descriptive links and mobile-first structure help everyone – not just specific groups. Good accessibility improves comprehension, readability and confidence across the board.
And finally, resist the false choice between central control and publishing chaos. The healthiest models are usually hub-and-spoke. Central teams provide standards, governance and support. Local teams contribute nuance, immediacy and relevance within those guardrails. Enable, do not gatekeep.
Content is the experience
Employees do not experience your organisation through metadata schemas or vendor roadmaps. They experience it through content. The instructions they follow. The stories they read. The policies they rely on. The guidance they trust – or do not trust.
That’s why content matters so much. The platform is where the experience lives. The content is the experience itself.
So before your next migration becomes a hurried exercise in moving everything across, pause for a moment. Ask a harder question: “If this content did not already exist, would we create it again today?”
If the answer is no, perhaps it shouldn’t make the journey.
Digital Communications at Work explores this in more depth in Chapter 8, where we look at content strategy, lifecycle discipline, findability and governance – and why fewer, better pages often create the strongest digital workplace experience.
