19.2. What's the Goal of EIA?We haven't yet encountered an enterprise site that didn't suffer from problems associated with decentralization. Put another way, it's the rare site that is too centralized. Now that the Web's novelty has started to wear off, and web sites are recognized as a foundational component of doing business in the 21st century, many early sources of resistance to centralization are wearing down. Business units are beginning to understand the benefits of shared resources and coherent user experience, for their sites' users as much as for their own bottom lines. 19.2.1. Getting Everyone on the Same PageBut it's still not clear to everyone why some measure of centralization is worth pursuing. So the following list of benefits of centralization might come in handy:
19.2.2. Centralization Above All?Considering all those good outcomes, it's tempting to consider centralization as the ultimate goal of enterprise IA (which, admittedly, we did in this book's second edition). It does sound like a nice way to deal with the problematic intranet described in the example above. Just design an information architecture that knits together all units' content silos in a rational, usable way, and then implement across the organization. This kind of thinking is common in many enterprises. And anyone who's been through such an exercise knows just how difficult it is to force business units to comply with common standards. It's not completely impossiblefor example, IBM.com's pages now all use standard templates, which is quite an impressive achievement considering the size of the site and diversity of its numerous ownersbut many aspects of a centralized IA are more difficult to understand and, therefore, to comply with. For example, while common page templates are a tangible aspect of the user experience, the more abstract concepts, like shared metadata, are not quickly grasped much less adoptedby many enterprise decision-makers. 19.2.3. So What Is the Goal?The goal of enterprise IA is not to centralize everything you see. In fact, the goal of EIA is no different than any other flavor of IA: identify the few most efficient means of connecting users with the information they need most. That often might involve adopting some centralizing measures, but it could also mean a highly decentralized approach, such as enabling employees to use a social bookmarking tool to tag intranet content (as the aforementioned IBM is doing). The point, as always, is to apply whatever approach makes the most sense given your organization, its users, content, and context. Naturally, this is a more thoughtful approach than simply seeking to centralize the information architecture; put another way, it's more work. But don't dismay: patterns are emerging to describe common enterprise IA challenges and solutions. In the remainder of this chapter, we'll describe how an EIA typically evolves in terms of design, strategy, and operations, and how you can have a positive impact in each case. |