Section 20.2. Challenges for the Information Architect

20.2. Challenges for the Information Architect

The flip side of this problem is how these numbers affect the people who are responsible for making Microsoft's content or aggregating that content into portals. Let's make another comparison to the broader Web. Building and maintaining the Yahoo! portal was a huge undertaking, spanning years and a gigantic collection of contentthe Web as a whole. MSWeb is a portal, too, and though 8,000 sites is a much more manageable number than what Yahoo! faced, consider the varying motives and concerns of those who own and maintain those independent sites. And Microsoft can't charge or compel site owners within the company to register. Instead, the MSWeb team has to create incentives for participation in its model. But the owners of the intranet's various sites are too distracted by other concerns (such as serving their own constituencies) to consider how their site fits into the bigger picture of Microsoft's intranet.

When a site is brought into the MSWeb fold, it comes with its own information architecture. Its organization, labeling systems, and other tricky information architecture components must be integrated into the broader MSWeb architecture or be replaced altogether. For example, as many as 50 different variants of product vocabularies had been created in the Microsoft intranet environment. Fixing such problems is a messy and complicated challenge for any information architect.

And it gets even worse: all of those Microsoft intranet sites are backed up by a technical architecture of some sort. Some are designed, built, and maintained by in-house technical staff and are quite advanced and elaborate. At the other extreme are sites maintained by hand or by a simple tool like MS FrontPage. The technology architectures that support the Microsoft intranet environment vary widely in complexity, and the MSWeb team must determine ways to normalize and simplify the environment to make content management easier and more efficient. Additionally, many of these technology architectures are not designed to support a portal or any other sort of enterprise-wide information architecture, so that's another crucial factor the MSWeb team must account for.

Does your head hurt yet?