In a complex information society information architecture has never been more vital for organisations to be effective. I caught up with Alex Dean, an information architecture and Microsoft SharePoint expert, to find out ‘what everybody ought to know about information architecture’. Alex also partners with Equinox to deliver our Introduction to Information Architecture training course.



Brendon: What is information architecture?
Alex: When information architecture first came out it was about creating a glorified site map for public facing websites to help figure out what piece of information goes where on a website and to help users find that information. Effectively the essence of what information architecture tries to do has stayed the same – giving users the ability to find information within a web structure such as an intranet or internet website.

The problem that we are facing is that there is too much information, leading to information overload. Just having information structured in one single rigid way is not good enough anymore. So information architecture tries to look at the information and tries to figure out multiple ways of storing, sorting and classifying information. So when we look at modern information architecture a lot of it has to do with classifying information which then creates a taxonomy for users to store their information. What you would do is not create one single classification but multiple classifications so that when different people want to find information they’ve got different ways of getting to it.

When we look at what we try to classify, it is pretty much any piece of information that an organisation produces – this could be documents, emails, contacts or calendar entries. Anything that consists of some form of information can be classified, stored, structured and information architecture will help you to not only store it in the right place but most importantly retrieve it.

Brendon: What happens when information architecture is not done well?
Alex: Well, effectively the ‘needle in the haystack syndrome’ is the result. People are looking for crucial and important pieces of information and either they don’t know where to look or even if they do know where to look they still can’t find it. This is mainly because information architecture was neglected when the system was implemented.

The most traditional storage areas that we have are the file shares that have been overloaded with files. And then what happens is you get duplicate files. People create their own copies and then you have different versions and you don’t know which is the most up-to-date version; - it becomes quite chaotic. Whereas when you design information architecture that keeps in mind the way the organisation works, people should be able to find what they are looking for.

Brendon: Who should be involved in information architecture?
Alex: I can tell you who shouldn’t and that is the IT department. The IT department should provide the technical capabilities for supporting the information architecture, but actually building the information architecture should be the organisation itself. If you want to get it right you need to get as many different levels of the organisation involved – effectively the people who are working with the information, the people who are storing the information and the ones who are trying to retrieve it as well. You have to identify how does your organisation see your content and how does your organisation actually treat your information. Then build an information architecture that supports the way that they work. So you should have management involved and general staff involved, but try to keep the IT involvement at the technical level and not on an architecture level from an information perspective.

Brendon: What is an information architecture secret that everybody ought to know but most people don’t?
Alex: Well, I think everyone knows already but they don’t realise how important metadata is. The term metadata had a big hype in the 90s when people realised that when you add some extra descriptive data to your webpages, search engines could identify better what the page was about. Well, ever since Google managed to throw that overboard by identifying what the page is about from the actual content, metadata has not been quite as popular in the web sphere.

But metadata is still very crucial in the organisational sphere because if you add valid metadata to your documents you can start looking at your documents from a different perspective and you will have multiple different people looking at documents differently. The project manager will want to have all of the documents grouped by project, whereas the solutions architect will want to have all of the documents grouped by type of document. The finance manager will only want to see all of the invoices, sorted by customer and not by project. So all of a sudden you have all of these different requirements for finding information or finding documents that contain information. So if you add metadata to all of your documents, in a structured and organised way, suddenly you can actually accommodate those different ways of looking at documents and most importantly finding documents.

You then don’t have to have one rigid structure like your traditional file shares, but you can start designing multiple structures, which if the system supports it you can flip and change. You can have different ways of looking at information simultaneously. That is where the power of an information management system and document management system come in.