morville@semanticstudios.com 1 information architecture designing and organising digital information...

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Information Architecture Information Architecture Designing and Organising Digital Information SpacesDesigning and Organising Digital Information Spaces

Part VII. Enterprise IAPart VII. Enterprise IA

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busi·ness strat·e·gy n.Defining how an organization will use its scarce resources to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.

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The Origins of Strategy

“That general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.” circa 500 BC

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

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What is Strategy?

strat·e·gy• The science and art of using all the forces of a

nation to execute approved plans as effectively as possible during peace or war.

• The art or skill of using stratagems in endeavors such as politics and business.

strat·e·gem• A clever, often underhand scheme for achieving

an objective.

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What is Business Strategy?

“Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities.”

“But the essence of strategy is in the activities – choosing to perform activities differently or to perform different activities than rivals.”

Michael Porter, Harvard Business School

in his book On Competition

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Strategic Fit at VanguardEarly in its history, Vanguard established “a mutual structure without precedent in the industry – a structure in which the funds would be operated solely in the best interests of their shareholders.”

Since “strategy follows structure,” it made sense to pursue “a high level of economy and efficiency; operating at bare-bones levels of cost…for the less we spend, the higher the returns – dollar for dollar – for our shareholders/owners.”

John C. Bogle, Founder of The Vanguard Group

http://www.vanguard.com/bogle_site/october192000.html

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Vanguard’s Activity System Map. Adapted from On Competition

Featured in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web

http://webword.com/download/chapter18.pdf

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“We are the blind people and strategy formation is our elephant. Since no one has the vision to see the entire beast, everyone has grabbed hold of some part or other and railed on in utter ignorance about the rest.”

Henry Mintzberg, McGill Universityin his book Strategy Safari (written with Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel)

Strategy Revisited

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The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning by Henry Mintzberg (1993)

Strategic Planning

UnrealizedStrategy

Plans Executed

EmergentStrategy

Realized Strategy

10%

90% 90%

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Strategy Defined as 5 P’s

Plan. A direction, guide, course of action.

Pattern. Consistency in behavior over time.

Position. Locating specific products in specific markets.

Perspective. Way of doing things (The HP Way)

Ploy. Specific maneuver to outwit.

From Strategy Safari (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, Lampel)

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Prescriptive Descriptive

Top-Down Bottom-Up

Planned Emergent

Stable Adaptive

Centralized Distributed

In today’s marketplace, it is the organizational capability to adapt that is the only sustainable competitive advantage. Willie Pietersen, Reinventing Strategy

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Stuff

Space Plan

Services

Structure

Skin

Site

1 day - 1 month

3 - 30 years

7 - 15 years

30 - 300 years

20 years

EternalStewart Brand in How Buildings Learn

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Pace Layering on the Web

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Enterprise IAFor an excellent overview, read:Enterprise Information Architecture: Don’t Do ECM Without It

By Tony Byrne, EContent Magazine, May 2004

“Two questions resound throughout the content industry: Why do Enterprise Content Management (ECM) projects take so long to implement? And why do they fail with such alarming frequency? While all enterprise-level IT projects prove to be difficult and risky undertakings, a deeper examination of the ECM challenge in particular will reveal an endemic inattention to—or at best belated appreciation of—its critical corollary: the need for Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA).”

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http://www.louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/images/EIAroadmap.pdf

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Case Studies

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Case Study: MSWeb

• 3,100,000+ pages• 50,000 authors/users in 74 countries• 8,000+ separate intranet sites• Employees spend more than one hour per day

seeking information• Create a unified enterprise information portal

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MSWeb: An Integrated Solution

• Multi-Disciplinary Team• Integrated Information and Technology

Architecture• 3 Types of Taxonomies

Category Labels

Metadata Schema

Descriptive Vocabularies geography, languages, proper names, organizations / business units, subjects, products, standards / technology

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MDR

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Case Study

HP Employee Portal

Methodology (9 Weeks)

Opinion Leader Interviews

User Research

Content, Classification & Search Log Analysis

Deliverables

User & Opinion Leader Reports

Strategy Recommendations Report

Final Presentations

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Employee Portal

Major Problems

Extremely difficult to find things via the portal

No idea what category to select in taxonomy

Misleading labels (e.g., “HP Policies”)

Search is important for users but works poorly

Employees use “wrong” keywords

Employees feel guilty using alternative navigation tools

19 of 44 user testing sessions (43%) expired unsuccessfully at 3 minutes

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Employee Portal

RecommendationsProvide Multiple Finding Tools

classification schemes (taxonomies)

search

site index

Leverage CMSdistributed responsibility (metadata)

content value tiers (authority, strategic value, popularity)

incentives to authors/owners

Improve Searchintegrate with browsing

filtering, zones, synonym management

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Employee Portal

RecommendationsClassification Schemes

Sample Terms

Topics* Enterprise-wide subject hierarchy.

Organizations* Businesses, functions, departments (authors/owners).

Countries & Locations* Geographic indicator of intended audience.

Products & Services Complete range of HP products and services.

Formats Content/object types that are meaningful to employees.

Roles Major employee roles (e.g., managers, admins).

Languages Language of documents.

* implement in short-term

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home

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formatslevel 1

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formatslevel 1

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siteindex

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http://www.louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/images/EIAroadmap.pdf

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IA Therefore I AmPeter Morville

morville@semanticstudios.com

Semantic Studios

http://semanticstudios.com/

Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture

http://aifia.org/

Findability

http://findability.org/