Information Architecture Designing and Organising Digital Information Spaces Part VII. Enterprise IA

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Information Architecture Designing and
Organising Digital Information SpacesPart VII.
Enterprise IA
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business strategy 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?

• strategy
• 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.
• strategem
• 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

• Early 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
  costfor 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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• Vanguards 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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90
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• The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning by Henry
  Mintzberg (1993)

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Strategy Defined as 5 Ps

• 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 todays marketplace, it is the organizational
  capability to adapt that is the only sustainable
  competitive advantage.
• Willie Pietersen, Reinventing Strategy

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Pace Layering on the Web
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Enterprise IA

• For an excellent overview, read
• Enterprise Information Architecture Dont 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 toor at best
  belated appreciation ofits critical corollary
  the need for Enterprise Information Architecture
  (EIA).

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http//www.louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/i
mages/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 StudyHP 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 PortalMajor 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 PortalRecommendations

• 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 PortalRecommendations
Classification 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/i
mages/EIAroadmap.pdf
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IA Therefore I Am

• Peter Morville
• morville_at_semanticstudios.com
• Semantic Studios
• http//semanticstudios.com/
• Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture
• http//aifia.org/
• Findability
• http//findability.org/