Getting Buy-in for a Massive Drupal Migration - The USGS Web Re-Engineering Story

Presenters: jasonschulte

How do you "sell" Drupal to a large, geographically and technologically distributed government organization with a deeply entrenched do-it-yourself web culture? How do you communicate the benefits of migrating to a centralized Drupal platform to 1,000+ content authors and other stakeholders, while turning skeptics into enthusiasts along the way?

Tim Woods of the U.S. Geological Survey will share the story of that organization's massive, multi-year Web Re-Engineering Project, involving the migration of over 300 USGS science centers, research programs, and other organizational websites onto a single Drupal Platform-as-a-Service architecture, with many lessons learned along the way. Topics to be discussed include:

  • Navigating internal politics and entrenched attitudes about technical change.

  • Potential pitfalls of top-down approaches to changing organizational mindset.

  • Identifying Drupal-based tools and value-adds to incentivize migration buy-in.

  • Information architecture, content and taxonomy strategy for massively distributed Drupal.

Audience
Experience Level
Beginner
Schedule Info
Conference Year
2019
Status
Proposed
Session Track
Community and Being Human