Information Architecture: Designing and Organising Digital Information Spaces

morville@semanticstudios.
com
Information Architecture
Designing and Organising Digital Information Spaces
Part VII. Enterprise IA
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morville@semanticstudios.com
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 Vanguard

“a mutual structure without
Early in its history, Vanguard established
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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Strategy Revisited
“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 University

in his book Strategy Safari
(written with Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel)
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10%
Strategic Planning Plans Executed Realized Strategy
90% 90%
Unrealized Emergent
Strategy Strategy
The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning by Henry Mintzberg (1993)
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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 1 day - 1 month

Space Plan 3 - 30 years
Services 7 - 15 years
Skin 20 years
Structure 30 - 300 years
Site Eternal
Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn
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Pace Layering on the Web
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Enterprise IA
For 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 19
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
Recommendations
Provide Multiple Finding Tools
classification schemes (taxonomies)
search
site index
Leverage CMS
distributed responsibility (metadata)
content value tiers (authority, strategic value, popularity)
incentives to authors/owners
Improve Search
integrate with browsing
filtering, zones, synonym management
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Employee Portal
Recommendations
Classification Sample Terms
Schemes
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.

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* implement in short-term
home
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formats
level 1
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formats
level 1
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site
index
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http://www.louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/images/EIAroadmap.pdf 34
IA Therefore I Am
Peter Morville
Semantic Studios
http://semanticstudios.com/
Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture

http://aifia.org/
Findability
http://findability.org/
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morville@semanticstudios.

Part VII. Enterprise IA

The Origins of Strategy

“That general is skillful in attack

What is Business Strategy?

“But the essence of strategy is in the

Michael Porter, Harvard Business School

Strategic Fit at Vanguard

Since“strategy follows structure,” it made sense to pursue “a high level

Vanguard’s Activity System Map. Adapted from On Competition

Henry Mintzberg, McGill University

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

Strategy Defined as 5 P’s

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)

In today’s marketplace, it is the organizational capability to

Stuff 1 day - 1 month

Pace Layering on the Web

“Two questions resound throughout the content industry: Why

Case Study: MSWeb

MSWeb: An Integrated Solution

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.

Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture

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