Just this past week I was appointed team lead on an intranet implementation team. Endeavoring to structure a site in a meaningful way that will serve the needs of different departments in multiple locations in America, Europe and Asia is more than a little challenging. It reminds me once again that technology per sa is not the most daunting challenge we face.
In this specific case we are implementing MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server). While I find some clunky aspects to the platform, overall it provides some pretty slick features out of the box and nice integration with Microsoft Office.
MOSS, much like blogging platforms or other Content Managed Systems, have evolved to the point where rapid publication is quite possible. The tough reality is effective implementation from an information architecture standpoint proves to be the real challenge.
Just yesterday, I was speaking with a friend of mine who is dean of the college of business at a local university. He remarked that they recently migrated their intranet over to MOSS as well. The ability to rapidly expand the site has, in some ways, proved to be to their detriment as it is becoming unwieldy.
As the tools continue to become more user-friendly the need for effective development of information architecture grows in direct proportion to the proliferation of information within a corporation.
There are two basic ways of categorizing information:
- Navigational Taxonomy – how the site is structured to maneuver through the information.
- Metadata Taxonomy – how the data is tagged for searching through the data.
Seems easy enough.
Navigational taxonomy in many respects proves to be the most challenging from a conceptual standpoint. Thinking of information from a landscape perspective can be challenging as one can only fit so much information on a screen. How do you go about making a large amount of information easily accessible without having to drill-down fourteen layers?
Metadata taxonomy, the basic means by which the web is structure, is much easier to conceptualize as a few descriptive tags to a document returns effective results in search. The major drawback however, is the human factor. People have been trained to stick information in folders, in locations rather than tagging information.
Effective planning and design of a system that’s the hard stuff. And if you are ready for a real challenge, take on training with the hope of behaviour modification of 750 people in how they do their job on a daily basis. Now that’s the tuff stuff.