Throughout the spring of 2000, Cable and Wireless Communications Plc (CWC) demerged its corporate and consumer operations such that these could be separately acquired by Cable & Wireless Plc (C&W) and NTL Inc. (NTL) respectively.

At the time, CWC operated an established Intranet, known as Planet. This comprised approximately 36,000 content files and a number of applications. As with many of the company's resources such as departments, facilities, properties and staff, the Intranet required demerging. This was necessary to allow C&W and NTL to assume ownership of the appropriate knowledge and data assets held within it, according to the terms of the business separation.

Erudite Internet joined an on-site team comprising KPMG management consultants, IBM global services, CWC internal communications staff and a number of other independent consultants for a unique Intranet demerger programme.

The content of Planet was owned and managed by approximately 75 authors, geographically dispersed and possessing varying degrees of web development ability. It was generated using a variety of applications, predominantly Net Objects Fusion.

In brief, the Intranet content demerger was driven by the results of a file metadata collection process (Definition: metadata is data about data). A bespoke data collection application was used to capture this information from the owning authors and populate an asset database. Reports from this database in conjunction with several automated processes migrated the content from the old web server onto one or both of two new servers.

Initially, authors were presented with a listing of the URLs occurring on Planet. They were then required to claim their files from this list and assign metadata to or tag each file with a number of attributes, including its ownership and post-separation business destination.

Once file tagging was complete, and the automated migration had been performed, a quality assurance (QA) phase was instigated. The authors were managed through a Development and QA environment with a number of manual and semi-automatic processes moving the new intranets towards an acceptable status.

Finally, with QA complete, the new intranets were migrated into production. A successful cutover delivered uninterrupted access from the old to new intranet environments.

Erudite Internet was specifically involved in:

• Performance testing of the data tagging application's functional and technical behaviour.

  Erudite Internet worked with the application developer to debug the program and advise on usability modifications, which were incorporated into the production release.

• User training and support of web authors in the operation of the data tagging application.

  Presentations were made to group sizes of up to ten and on a one-to-one basis. Hands-on training sessions were then conducted to ensure that personnel who had travelled to attend courses gained the maximum benefit from face to face support.

• Development and maintenance of user support web site.

  This supported the content tagging process, relaying project progress statistics, contact details and frequently asked questions to the authors at their remote locations.

• Process Definition of several project stages and Technical Authoring of corresponding documentation.

  Concise, professional and clear presentation of procedure and sign-off documentation engendered reciprocally professional behaviour in the authors in undertaking the tasks required of them.

• Expediting authors towards the timely completion of the work involved.

  Accurate progress monitoring and reporting was delivered daily for reactive resource deployment and analysis by board level management.




• Advising Project Management on recommended actions to keep the project within scope and time constraints.

  Acting as an interface between the business and the technologists brought clarity to the "technology grey cloud". This ensured the project's primary business objectives were met ahead of and without sacrifice or exposure to any ancillary "technology perfection" solutions.
  

The project was completed on time and below the initial budget. It received praise from business management and users alike for its precise and clear execution and delivery.

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