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 Role of the Information Architect

The Role of the Information Architect

Often when I am working with organizations to implement a Knowledge Management (KM) Solution the role of the business and more specifically the users of the application are discussed. The users of the proposed KM application will determine its worth to the organization. If the system is not used and/or is poorly received the organization would have wasted time and valuable resources in developing the KM solution. When this occurs KM in many instances receives a negative view in the minds of the people at the organization and this leads to the abandonment of KM entirely. To prevent this unseemly situation and to get your organization started in the right direction I would recommend bringing in an Information Architect. In this role the information Architect will be the catalyst to bring the users together, along with specific business objectives to enable the KM solution to be adopted by the users and embraced by the organization.

One thing you may be asking is “How does the Information Architect accomplish this?” The information Architect Instead of focusing on typical IT problems, comes to the project with a threefold focus: Users of the Information, the Information Itself and the Business/Organization. With this focus the Information Architect will perform the following tasks:

·       Gather Requirements pertaining to the content and structure of the KM solution (SME’s and Users are heavily involved here)

·        Construct the Information Model (SME’s and Users are heavily involved here to further define and validate Content)

·        Instantiate Business Rules (depicted as relationships) onto the model (SME’s and Users are heavily involved here to further define and validate Content Relationships)

·        Develop the Taxonomy (categorizations of content (information & knowledge) for the KM Solution

o   SME’s and Users are heavily involved here

o   Card Sort exercise is often used to solidify the Content Categories and Taxonomy

·         Develops the Metadata Schema (specific information about the content)

·         Develops Standards for Content Assembly

·         Contributes to the development of the Style Guide for Content Delivery

·         Contributes to creating an authoring Environment that would leverage the Standards and Style Guide for Content

When developing your KM solution having an Information Architect (or team of Information Architects) will ensure user and business involvement as well as the adoption and use of the KM solution. This is a step in the right direction to contribute to KM being viewed as a positive influence and having value within the culture of your organization.

If your organization is considering developing or enhancing a KM Solution and are using or considering using an Information Architect I would like to especially hear from you!

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!

Selecting The Enterprise Search Engine

The final post in this series puts all the parts together that we have been talking about and incorporating a viable enterprise search engine that will satisfy our needs. Depending on your platform of choice and your search needs there are several search engines to select from. To get a jump start on determining what search engine works for you I have included information from New Idea Technologies on Enterprise Search Engines by Mark Bennett.

In his article Mark Bennett presents a summary of the core features and functionality that many enterprise search engine customers are concerned with (see diagram on the left). To summarize his findings Bennett points out that the majority of customers want the capability of the search engine to crawl large numbers of documents, enable secure content features, provide search analytics and content promotion, enable metadata & tagging, the ability to search (crawl) multiple repositories, while also providing faceted and taxonomy based searching.

In addition Bennett identifies the various vendors that are prominent in the search engine space and how they stack up against each other (see diagram on the right). You have your usual suspects such as Microsoft and Google, but he also mentions other vendors such as Lookout Software and IBM along with Oracle who are becoming more involved in the search market. The bottom line is determining what are your specific search requirements, identifying the vendors that meet those requirements and letting them show you (not just tell you!) how they will meet your needs.

I would like to know what your experience has been in identifying and selecting an enterprise search solution and vendor. I look forward to your comments,

What About the Content? Crafting the Content Migration Strategy

In this continuing series about finding pertinent content on our knowledge repositories we must not forget about how we are going to get the content on to the knowledge repository. Having a clear, concise and workable plan for content migration is a critical ingrediant in our ability to later find "knowledge nuggets" that will help us in performing our tasks. The following steps outline best practices that should be considered when developing your content migration strategy:

1. Content Identification – Each business area involved in the content migration to the new/existing knowledge repository must perform a knowledge audit, developing an inventory of what the area has and how it relates to the users. This is the most time consuming task in the effort.

2. Content Analysis – Once existing content has been inventoried the analysis of this content can begin. This analysis will determine what content is to be moved, re-purposed, archived, or deleted. At this stage content can be properly tagged with appropriate terms/keywords. In addition during this step discovery of knowledge gaps will occur and must be documented.

3. Stakeholder/Management Engagement – In managing this effort it is essential that stakeholders understand the effort, it is properly scheduled, staffed and expectations managed.

4. Knowledge Repository Design – Before content migration begins the Knowledge Repository design must be completed with all associated components including look-and-feel and navigation of the environment.

5. Taxonomy, Content Types and Metadata Mapping – Content mapping activities provide the opportunity to understand how content will be placed into the taxonomy of the Knowledge Repository.

6. Training – In order for the appropriate staff to start migrating content on to the Knowledge Repository they must be trained on how the system works and the steps necessary to “on board” content on to the environment.

7. Content Migration – Now it is time to populate the Knowledge Repository with content. In order to successfully perform this task specific steps communicated in training must be executed.

For additional information on crafting your Content Management Strategy check out the resources below and I look forward to comments and discussion!