Governing the Information Architecture

The enterprise is ever changing, and the information architecture (i.e., content model, taxonomy and metadata) should and will evolve. This evolution may include developing new content types, expanding/collapsing the taxonomy and modifying the metadata, as well as relationships between content types and its associated business rules. This effects all of your applications (including customer facing websites and intranet sites) and a plan to manage and govern its use must be put in place.

By managing the Information Architecture you can promote the consistency of the information used across all organizational areas, teams and systems. The content model facilitates consistency in storing, retrieving, and presenting content while improving the search (“findability”) of content. By managing enterprise content (information and knowledge), its metadata, and associated taxonomy, the customers (internal and external) that use these various applications will find the content they are looking for when and how they need it.

The following gives some brief information on managing the Content Model, Taxonomy and Metadata Schema:

Content Model - The Content Model (CM) represents the graphical “road map” of content in support of the customer along with their associated relationships. The intent is that all software systems using content across the enterprise will align with the CM. Situations will arise where changes to the model will be needed, certain business activities may in fact necessitate a change to the model. Managing the changes and understanding the impacts downstream (taxonomy, metadata, and systems) must be coordinated and acted upon.

Taxonomy - Taxonomies evolve as the business grows, extend as additional technology-related functions are incorporated, and morph as the business model changes. Once implemented, it is imperative to conduct frequent and consistent pulse checks with the business to continually gauge the taxonomy’s fit and relevance. Armed with this information, the appropriate governance measures can be taken to adapt the taxonomy to meet evolving requirements.

Metadata - The metadata schema governance represents the business discipline for managing the metadata about the content of the organization. The intent is that all software systems using content across the enterprise will incorporate the recommended metadata associated to the content. Metadata governance will ensure consistency of name and meaning of metadata fields and its associated values (i.e., reconcile the difference in terminology such as "clients" and "customers," "revenue" and "sales," etc.). Metadata governance will also ensure clarity of relationships, by resolving ambiguity and inconsistencies when determining the associations between entities stored throughout content environment. For example, if a customer declares a "beneficiary" in one application, and this beneficiary is called a "participant" in another application, metadata definitions would help clarify the situation.

So, the question is are you managing/governing your Information Architecture? If not, why? I am very interested in hearing your thoughts on this subject!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Case for Developing an Enterprise Information Architecture

If your organiation has the need to find pertinent content quickly, not return 1000's or 100's of rows of information during a search, leverage content to assist in making decisions and/or use content to guide customers, then your organization has a need for an Enterprise information Architecture!

Below is a brief description of the Enterprise Information Architecture document that is the primary mechanism to communicate the purpose, scope and organization of information within the enterprise:

Brief Description

The Enterprise Information Architecture is a business driven process that details the enterprise's information strategies, its extended information value chain, and the impact on technical architecture.

Purpose

The purpose of the Information Architecture document is to clearly capture the decisions concerning the data and their relationships that support the information infrastructure knowledge and content within the enterprise.

Scope

The information architecture represents the organization of information/content which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Images, etc., to maximize the information’s usability, manageability and improve search capabilities. This document is a living document that will be modified to detail the decisions made during the content delivery process (audit, migration, creation, metadata tagging). This document presents a detailed Enterprise Information Model that describes the relationships of information, information sources, and is a key to metadata identification and repository site structure creation and taxonomy. This document will also include details concerning information business rules, records management, controlled vocabulary (glossary), information security and information governance.

The information model will:

• Support the metadata that will be used to characterize the content
• Support organization/taxonomy of content in knowledge repositories and document libraries
• Support templates to use for creating content
• Serves as the information structure enabling search and “findability”
• Support how tools such as SharePoint, eGain, and SalesForce.com is organized into a hierarchy of landing pages, site collections and sub-sites
• Support how the hierarchy is exposed in the site’s navigation features
• Contributes to enterprise search engine optimization (SEO)

If your organization is considering implementing or has implemented an enterprise information architecture and/or enterprise information model I would like for you to share your experiences. Also, join me at the KM World Taxonomy Boot Camp in October in Washington DC later this year!