Tech is the Easy Stuff
Posted on May 1, 2008
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.
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4 Responses to “Tech is the Easy Stuff”
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Great post Phil. To your credit, they should be glad that they have you on the team to even consider this at the start of the project, organization is usually an after thought.
One could say that the Internet as a whole is facing this same challenge. As publishing becomes so easy by such a large and diverse population, organizing content so that it can be found and used becomes increasingly difficult - but also much more important.
SB
Scott, I do see this as a systemic problem that is poorly understood by many folks in high places. Hopefully the awareness of the issue will continue to grow and drive both technological advances to assist the process and work it’s way into the brain-trust of key thinkers.
Great Post Phil! I never gave thought to those being the two ways to organize data. Of course, you could probably do both.
I had the opportunity to play a little bit with MOSS 2003, and one feature I really liked was the search capability. I was able to index Terabytes of files, and exchange public folders. Some people at the company wanted to get a google search device, and the costs were extremely prohibitive since it was based on the amount of data indexed.
With MOSS 2003, I had a lot of trouble getting the organization organized, as I remember there were several levels for the site structure, and it wasn’t intuitive. Hopefully they fixed that in 2007.
I wouldn’t say SharePoint ‘07 is terribly intuitive. (We are actually upgrading to MOSS 2007 this weekend). But from what I’ve seen they have advanced the features and it is possible from an end-user standpoint to develop the site in a fairly intuitive manner. Really, the most compelling reason to go with MOSS, I would say, is the integration with Office ‘07, which by-the-way I really do like. Out of all the MS products they’ve developed Office tops the list.