How to Plan a Smooth Current Awareness Migration

Migrating to a new current awareness platform isn’t just a tech switch - it’s a strategic opportunity to modernize workflows, enhance content delivery, and align your systems with business goals.

However, it can be easy to underestimate the work involved, and how far in advance you may need to plan to ensure everything goes smoothly. Don’t panic - we’ve guided clients through this process hundreds of times and can share best-practice tips for an effortless implementation.

Here’s how to plan it effectively.

Audit and Assign Roles

Before you migrate, make sure you know exactly what you’re working with and who’s responsible for what.

The first step in planning a smooth migration is to identify your current baseline, so you can see what needs to be done. The benefit of measuring this baseline is that it helps you determine improvements once you’ve implemented your new current awareness system - essential for proving ROI and measuring the value of your new processes.

Review existing alerts, newsletters, and sources to determine their relevance. Remove anything redundant and identify where improvements can be made. This single step often makes a major difference in streamlining your migration.

Next, define the scope of the project - will this be a full migration or phased? Consider how both may impact your business.

Plan Around Your Budget Cycle

Your budget timeline can make or break your migration success - start early to secure funds and avoid last-minute pressure.

Aligning your budget cycle with migrating from a legacy system can be challenging, which is why preparation is critical. Our experience shows that many companies don’t give themselves enough time to handle both hurdles - leading to last-minute panic as deadlines approach.

We recommend exploring your options six to nine months before your contract renewal. This gives you time to review alternatives, schedule demos, and build a strong business case.

If your budgets are annual, prepare your plan outlining costs and reasons for migration at least a month before they’re due. If you’ve already drafted your business case - including pain points, usage data, and projected ROI - you’ll be far more prepared and more likely to gain approval.

While this may seem like a long lead time, early planning prevents you from being forced into renewing with a vendor you want to leave, or rushing through procurement without time to develop a detailed business case.

Communicate Early and Often

Keep everyone in the loop - consistent communication builds buy-in, reduces resistance, and ensures smoother implementation.

Communication is key to any project, but it can be tricky to know what that looks like in practice. We recommend engaging senior stakeholders early for buy-in and budget support. Ensure you have a strong business case explaining why you’re migrating, as this helps bring stakeholders on board. We discuss how to build an effective business case in Migration Made Easy.

Once stakeholders are aligned, communication shouldn’t stop there. Throughout the process, continue to communicate clearly and frequently with key people across your organization.

Keep everyone informed about progress, and gather feedback on existing processes (you may have started this during your initial audit) to shape and improve your new workflows.

Always link your messaging to how the migration supports ROI and efficiency. This matters for all communications - not just with executives - because the more your organization understands the “why” behind the migration, the more likely they are to support it.

Create Contingency Plans

Even the best plans need backup - prepare for delays, overlaps, and unexpected challenges before they happen.

Even with the best-laid budgets, unexpected issues will arise. Remember to factor in overlap costs - to maintain service continuity and get your library team up to speed, you may want to run the old and new systems in parallel for a while.

While planning, make sure to account for:

• Staff time for setup and testing

• Internal communications and user training

• Content cleanup and taxonomy improvements

• As the saying goes, expect the unexpected - build flexibility into your plans to accommodate adjustments. This is far easier if you’ve allowed yourself plenty of lead time.

Implement and Roll Out

Start small, test often, and refine continuously - a phased rollout helps your team adapt smoothly and ensures lasting success.

Once your budget is approved, your plan is in place, and you’ve set your contingencies, you’re ready to begin migration. Like any major project, it’s more manageable when broken into smaller tasks.

You can migrate in stages rather than rolling out to the entire firm at once. It’s perfectly fine to start small with a pilot group of core users, then scale up as you see results.

Test alerts, monitor performance, and refine as you go. You’ll have migrated the alerts, newsletters, and sources that survived your audit, giving you breathing room to fine-tune.

To get your team up and running, consider quick-start guides and support channels. Identify internal “champions” who can become experts in the new platform and assist others.

A major software change comes with a learning curve - even when it’s a positive one - so be patient and keep the communication flowing.

Optimize Post-Migration

The work doesn’t end once you migrate - continual monitoring and refinement will maximize ROI and long-term efficiency.

Once you’ve migrated, there’s no time to rest - it’s time to optimize. Gather user feedback and use in-platform analytics to identify your best-performing alerts, then fine-tune the others. Retire low-value content and sources that made it through your initial audit.

As noted above, refining and adjusting continuously will help you get the most out of your new current awareness system. Treat migration as an opportunity to implement ongoing improvement, not just a one-time project.

Key Takeaway

Treat your migration as a business transformation, not just a technical upgrade.

Plan your migration like a business project - not just an IT task - and you’ll end up with a more efficient, future-ready current awareness service.