Building the Foundation: Creating a Results Driven Information Architecture Strategy Webcast Series: Part 1

Editor's Notes

• #4: Goal: Highlight Tallan, but focus on SharePoint Practice.
• #5: Thank you all for taking the time to attend today’s webinar on building a foundation through an effective Information Architecture. Today’s webinar is the first in a series of webinars on creating a strategy to build effective enterprise portals using SharePoint. We have planned out 2 other webinars in this series around social enterprise, Search and Find-ability, and finally what we call the integrated portal. Where we will discuss and demonstrate how to integrate external systems such as LOB applications and BI Dashboards in SharePoint Our objective for this SharePoint strategy series is two fold: Outline a specific process that you can follow to design an enterprise Intranet Portal with productivity, collaboration, and findability at its core… and Share with you tools and techniques that we have found useful from our SharePoint engagements, that you can use to implement exterprise portals
• #7: For today’s discussion, we will focus on building a foundation or blueprint for your enterprise portals. We will first cover the key challenges that information workers face when working with content, the state of intranets and portals today. We will look at some common scenarios that employees and organizations face when working with data and then go through some best practice IA process to help manage the assets in your organization – these could be conversations, ideas, surverys, documents, meeting minutes, videos, images, people and their expertise and so on. We’ll go through a demonstration of a functional SharePoint environment where some of these IA principles have been applied. Finally, you will get a sneak preview of the content for our next webinar in this series.
• #9: How do you see information management at your organization… is it just an unsurmountable mess or tucked away in filing cabinets and shared folders, difficult to get to. Do you see your organization as a well oiled machine were data flows seamlessly or is information contained in silos.
• #10: In most organizations, the environment for information workers is horribly disorganized and wasteful There are over 100 million intranet and portal users today… Half of them spend three hours or more per week just looking around for stuff, and a quarter, spent four hours or more. One-half of your workforce wastes 10% of their workweek just looking around for stuff. That doesn't even begin to calculate the time they waste redoing work that actually exists somewhere, but they weren't able to find it
• #16: Attempt to use single shots where possible – compress for time.
• #20: The BluePrint Accelerator is developed based on industry best practices around information architecture and content structure strategies in conjunction with pragmatic and practical experiences. Users are core and central to the success or failure of any system and your intranet is no different. Have you stopped and considered the irony that we spend all our effort trying to make our customers and clients happy but when it comes to our own employees we think a well designed and thoughtful architecture is not important. If your employees can’t find information and get their job done efficiently, how can you expect that to translate into a happy experience for your customers and clients. Coming back to the core tenants of the blueprint, we argue that if we can identify the audience profile of your intranet/extranet portal, inventory their needs and workflows, then the task of actually categorizing and organizing your content becomes that much more easier. Once this is done, we translate that into taxonomies and in some cases ontologies. What you get in the end is a well thought of, intuitive site structure, and user interface… where the user is king! Adoption then becomes automatic….
• #21: A Mind Map is…how you visualize the information space Once you have created a nice Mind Map, and gotten all the stakeholders to agree on the Scope and Investment priorities. It’s important to recognize that a Mind Map is NOT a site map or navigation structure. Yes, there is another small step before you get down and start making your portal a reality… Rather than simply mirroring your org chart, you can better enhance usability by creating an information architecture that reflects how users view the content. In each of our intranet studies, we've found that some of the biggest productivity gains occur when companies restructure their intranet to reflect employees' workflow.
• #22: So you take the mind map and items in your requirements/product backlog, to start the card sorting process. This exercise is where you transform the concepts in your mind i.e. mind map to a site structure Ask each user to sort the cards into groups, placing items that belong together in the same group, and to name the different groups A common mistake is to take the mind map and interpret that yourself into a sit structure without involving the users. The participants should be actual end-users (not managers or stakeholders).
• #23: Including users in these exercises is crucial but often difficult. Most times there are just too many users and chaos ensues… nothing really gets accomplished. Choose a representative set from you user pool. A good number to start is around 5. Remember to: Use their time judiciously Guide them through the process Prepare and plan before your meetings with detailed questions that will help the users respond accordingly Be agile, instead of developing copious amounts of requirements that are difficult to change… create just enough documentation so as to be able to create your IA assets Things will change, people think organically, content evolves organically, the interrelationships and context in which a particular content is used evolves over time… so should the system you are planning to build
• #28: A Taxonomy-driven portal, with search as the main vehicle for finding content Originally if you are used to putting things in folders, search will still find it. But now, because of a taxonomy-driven search, you’ll be able to find information HIERARCHICALLY, As well as UNSTRUCTURED data, regardless of where they reside