*As seen in the Wall St Journal

Taming the Jungle

At oil giant Royal Dutch Shell PLC, the main issue faced by intranet manager Andrew Fix was not that information was missing, but that there was simply too much of it. With more than 140,000 users, the things people needed to find had become scattered across too many separate sites and lost among all the duplicated or out-of-date information. Even something as simple as lists of preferred hotels for traveling executives became impossible to find.

His solution was to centralize, consolidating the separate country sites into regional ones and then finally into a single global intranet using a single software program, Intranet DASHBOARD.

The initial consolidation of just the Asia-Pacific intranet reduced the amount of content to 20 sites and 30,000 pages from more than 1,000 sites and 212,000 pages. Duplicated and out-of-date material was weeded first by simply not allowing a mass migration of content from the old site to the new one. People in the various business units were required to re-post what they wanted to transfer with the new software, which was easier to use. Then Mr. Fix made sure there was much more coordination between the site’s administrators, and he added processes for deleting old information, so that the sprawl didn’t start building up again.

“We saw savings of more than $1 million” for the Asia-Pacific effort, says Mr. Fix, “purely through less need for infrastructure and expensive IT resources.”

Shell has since replicated this model for the rest of its businesses, seeing additional benefits beyond dollars and cents — mainly, being able to find useful information more quickly.