Section 19.5. Doing the Work and Paying the Bills

19.5. Doing the Work and Paying the Bills

The evolutionary path described earlier ends with the seemingly optimistic outcome of a separate EIA business unit, independent of the baggage of IT, Marketing, Corporate Communication, or other parent groups. Why are we fans of the go-it-alone approach?

Efforts to knit together an enterprise's information architecture naturally require extensive cross-departmental communication and involvement. And business units typically don't trust other business units to do the right thing. An effort to centralize an enterprise-wide architecture will be tough enough without including the baggage of that effort's foster parent, Department X. And if Department X's mission in life is operating the corporate WAN or maintaining the corporate brand, its managers won't typically understandmuch less fully supportEIA efforts; they're not likely to fit any existing department's core mission and goals. So why force it?

Additionally, because efforts to centralize are long-term and ongoing, and information architecture and content management have become a permanent part of the scene, a support infrastructure for these efforts is a necessity. Enterprises simply can't afford to "re-do" their information architectures every year or two; the direct costs are high, and no organizational learning is retained. For these reasons, EIA is ideally owned and operated by an independent infrastructural unit with its own budget and managers.

Interestingly, when the second edition of this book (published in 2002) suggested standalone EIA groups, the idea wasn't popular; it seemed too optimistic given both the lack of acceptance of IA in many enterprises and the economic conditions of the time. Yet today this model is becoming widespread, because many organizations find it impossible to make progress with EIA unless it's the responsibility of an (at least somewhat) autonomous and baggage-free business unit. There really are few viable alternatives.

19.5.1. Build a New Business Unit

The idea of a standalone business unit begs the question: how will it be funded? New cost centers do get established from time to timeat some point, IT, HR, and other groups found the funding they needed to address the needs of the entire enterprise. But, admittedly, such events are infrequently witnessed in the enterprise landscape. So where will the money come from?

Nothing is impossible, and there are a variety of potential sources of income that merit consideration. Here are five possibilities:

Seed capital

In some cases, organizations see enough value in a new project to at least grant it an initial investment. Seed money is a fixed financial injection, usually to be used over a predetermined block of time and intended to support the new business unit until it can stand on its own feet. It should be carefully budgeted to cover the initial years of a project, gently winding down as revenues projected from other sources begin to grow.

Operating expenses

Central funding can also come in the form of operating expenses that all business units (including new ones and especially cost centers) can count on to pay for the basics, like desks, roofs, and possibly administrative staff. These funds aren't typically available to cover much else beyond a business unit's basic "cost of living."

Flat tax

Some cost centers derive income from client business units to cover the cost of basic services and shared services that address the needs of the entire enterprise. A good example in the EIA context is the ongoing maintenance and tuning of a search system that provides access to the enterprise's entire body of content, regardless of its originating business units.

Income for special enterprise-wide projects

Occasional big-ticket items, like a new content management platform and content migration, are also costs likely to be borne by all business units. These are usually assessed as one-time fees, requiring agreement from all other business units; alternatively, the bill is footed by the enterprise's central administration, which sees such projects as being important to the success of the enterprise as a whole.

Income for services rendered

The standard "chargeback" model; services are paid for by client business units just as they'd pay external vendors. In an ideal world, the EIA unit ensures its independence by sustaining itself on the fees of a loyal in-house clientele; unfortunately, this model often runs counter to certain organizational cultures, especially those in the nonprofit and academic sectors.

Figure 19-9 shows how these sources of income might vary over the first few years in the life of an EIA business unit.

Figure 19-9. Diversified revenue stream to support a standalone business unit responsible for EIA

Which (if any) of these revenue sources makes sense for you depends on how business gets done internally within your organization. For example, some organizations live and die by the chargeback model, while it wouldn't even receive 10 seconds of consideration in other settings. Clearly, the best approach is to try to "diversify your revenue stream" and not place too many eggs in one basket. And, hopefully, your Advisory Committee and Strategic Board (or equivalent thereof) will take the lead in determining the appropriate revenue model; ideally, they have prior experience doing so within your enterprise.

19.5.2. Build an Entrepreneurial Business Unit

We especially advocate reliance on one of the above-mentioned revenue streams: billing internal "clients" for services rendered. Obviously, a standalone cost center will be better off if it becomes responsible for its own income. Seeing the enterprise environment as a local economy, and seeking to function as a service provider in that environment, acknowledges a critical truth of the enterprise: nothing succeeds without trust and incentive.

We've already discussed how business units don't tend to trust other business units, and how the new and baggage-free EIA unit might fly under the radar. It may not achieve trust, but at least it might avoid mistrust. A more important way to achieve trust is to behave in a way that's familiar to your "clients." In other words, if they're operating within the corporate economyfunctioning with budgets, costs, and revenuesthen you should, too. If they see you operating by the same rules, they'll understand and trust you more than if you appear to be some vice president's ephemeral pet project. By acting as an entrepreneurial service provider to the enterprise, you will craft a menu of services catered to your clients' true needs (more on these services shortly).

In terms of trust, people can't trust what they don't understand. So, like any entrepreneurial organization, a standalone EIA team needs to take seriously the role of marketing its efforts. We've found that one of the best ways to market an abstract concept like information architecture is through education. A program of introductory information architecture seminars, repeated regularly throughout the year, can help potential clients understand that their problems aren't unique, that there is a nomenclature they can use to express these problems, that a field (information architecture) exists to guide them, that others within the enterprise suffer similar pain, and, ultimately, that the EIA group is there to provide real assistance with such problems.

Where does incentive fit in? Simply put, a self-funded business unit has greater incentive to do good work, especially because it often faces competition from external service providers. Self-support means that the EIA group will become better at listening to clients and discerning their pain, developing appropriate services, and communicating the benefits of its own services versus those of competitors.

Incentive is a two-way street. Should the EIA unit not justify its budget to clients, those clients will not have a good sense of what value information architects bring. They often don't know what these services cost, never having purchased them before. Divorcing level and quality of service from some monetary equivalent muddies the waters, leading to relationships between the EIA team and its clients that are more likely to be fraught with misunderstandings and miscommunication. In effect, other business units don't have incentive to be good clients.

19.5.3. Provide Modular Services to Clients

What types of services should you sell to clients? Naturally, they will be limited by the EIA team's expertise. Basic market-research techniques will help you understand what exactly your clients need, whether it's help configuring that search engine or designing better navigation systems. The important thing is to delineate services that are concrete and modular. By doing so, you are in effect making information architecture itself more concrete and less of an intimidating unknown. Therefore, it's more likely to be an attractive and justifiable purchase for your clients.

Table 19-3 shows just some of the services the EIA unit might provide to clients around the enterprise.

Table 19-3. Possible services of the EIA unit

Content acquisition	Content archiving
Content authoring	Content management tool acquisition
Quality control and editing	Content management tool maintenance
Link checking	Search engine acquisition
HTML validation	Search engine maintenance
Designing templates	Autoclassification tool acquisition
Applying templates	Autoclassification tool maintenance
Overall information architecture design	Training of business unit staff in IA/CM
Overall information architecture maintenance	Publicity of new and changed content
Indexing (manual)	Standards development
Indexing (automated)	User testing and feedback evaluation
Controlled vocabulary/thesaurus creation	Search-log evaluation
Controlled vocabulary/thesaurus maintenance	Interaction with visual-design staff
Content development policy creation	Interaction with IT staff
Content development policy maintenance	Interaction with vendors
Content weeding and ROT removal

This list of services is focused on information architecture and, to a lesser degree, content management. It could be expanded to include other aspects of the user experience, such as visual design, interaction design, application development, media production, copyrighting, hosting, and publicity.

Developing a list of potential services is also a useful exercise to help you determine just what your team can and can't do. Don't have anyone on staff who can develop a thesaurus? Now you know that you'll need to find that expertise, whether in-house or from external vendors. This exercise helps you begin the process of resolving your team's strengths and weaknesses, and points out expertise gaps that could be filled with external talent. In effect, you'll now have the answers to your questions regarding when to bring in outside expertise, as well as what kind of staff to hire in-house once there's sufficient demand. (This is a much better method for incorporating external expertise than is typical; outside contractors and consultants are often brought in at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons.)

Consider creating two versions of each service: a free "loss leader," and a premium version that clients pay for. Because IA is still so new to so many within your enterprise, you should provide them a chance to dip their toes in and try your offerings. Ideally, they'll like what they see, find it indispensable, and eventually "upgrade" to the premium version. Table 19-4 shows an example of one such item on the menu.

Table 19-4. Free versus premium versions of a service

Service: Content Acquisition
Basic-level service description	Basic service pricing	Premium-level service description	Premium service pricing	Client requirements
Interview client and no more than 5 users to determine content needs. Identify free and proprietary sources of content.	First 25 hours free; then $125/hr.	Same as basic level, plus: interview 15 users total, and develop plan for integrating new and existing content, including plan for metadata integration.	$5,000 for 60 hours; then $125/hr.	Client agrees to identify, contact, and arrange meetings with content stewards and sample users for interviews regarding content needs.

Aside from free versus fee, consider other ways of making your fee structure attractive. For example, clients may appreciate the opportunity to pay for certain service charges as fixed, such as a retainer fee for weekly spidering of content, versus flexible, such as an hourly charge for occasional search engine configuration.

Finally, you might also consider incentive programs; for example, you might reward a business unit with a discount for frequently updating its content or religiously following certain manual-tagging guidelines. There are whole information economies, like evolt.org (described in Chapter 21), that manage to inspire broad community participation and exchange of information without a single penny ever changing hands. Blogs and wikis are increasingly being explored as knowledge management tools within enterprise contexts. It's worth reviewing such innovative approaches when considering how your own business model will function.

Before determining service fees, consider the models already in place within your enterprise. Are there organizations that already provide centralized services? The IT department is one logical place to look; others include the library or research center, the division that manages the enterprise's office space, human resources, and so on.Your goal is to find out how they provide their services. How do they study market demand, how do they publicize their services, and how are they funded? What works and what doesn't?