busi · ness strat · e · gy n.

1. Information Architecture Designing and Organising Digital Information SpacesPart VII. Enterprise IA

2. busi·ness strat·e·gy n. • Defining how an organization will use its scarce resources to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.

5. The Origins of Strategy • “That general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.” circa 500 BC • Sun Tzu, The Art of War

6. What is Strategy? • strat·e·gy • The science and art of using all the forces of a nation to execute approved plans as effectively as possible during peace or war. • The art or skill of using stratagems in endeavors such as politics and business. • strat·e·gem • A clever, often underhand scheme for achieving an objective.

7. What is Business Strategy? • “Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities.” • “But the essence of strategy is in the activities – choosing to perform activities differently or to perform different activities than rivals.” • Michael Porter, Harvard Business School • in his book On Competition

8. Strategic Fit at Vanguard • Early in its history, Vanguard established“a mutual structure without precedent in the industry – a structure in which the funds would be operated solely in the best interests of their shareholders.” • Since“strategy follows structure,”it made sense to pursue“a high level of economy and efficiency; operating at bare-bones levels of cost…for the less we spend, the higher the returns – dollar for dollar – for our shareholders/owners.” • John C. Bogle, Founder of The Vanguard Group • http://www.vanguard.com/bogle_site/october192000.html

9. Vanguard’s Activity System Map. Adapted from On Competition • Featured in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web • http://webword.com/download/chapter18.pdf

11. Strategy Revisited • “We are the blind people • and strategy formation is • our elephant. Since no one • has the vision to see the • entire beast, everyone has • grabbed hold of some part • or other and railed on in • utter ignorance about the rest.” • Henry Mintzberg, McGill University • in his book Strategy Safari • (written with Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel)

12. 10% • The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning by Henry Mintzberg (1993) 90% 90%

13. Strategy Defined as 5 P’s • Plan. A direction, guide, course of action. • Pattern. Consistency in behavior over time. • Position. Locating specific products in specific markets. • Perspective. Way of doing things (The HP Way) • Ploy. Specific maneuver to outwit. • From Strategy Safari (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, Lampel)

14. In today’s marketplace, it is the organizational capability to adapt that is the only sustainable competitive advantage. • Willie Pietersen, Reinventing Strategy

17. Pace Layering on the Web

18. Enterprise IA • For an excellent overview, read: • Enterprise Information Architecture: Don’t Do ECM Without It • By Tony Byrne, EContent Magazine, May 2004 • “Two questions resound throughout the content industry: Why do Enterprise Content Management (ECM) projects take so long to implement? And why do they fail with such alarming frequency? While all enterprise-level IT projects prove to be difficult and risky undertakings, a deeper examination of the ECM challenge in particular will reveal an endemic inattention to—or at best belated appreciation of—its critical corollary: the need for Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA).”

19. http://www.louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/images/EIAroadmap.pdfhttp://www.louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/images/EIAroadmap.pdf

20. Case Studies

21. Case Study: MSWeb • 3,100,000+ pages • 50,000 authors/users in 74 countries • 8,000+ separate intranet sites • Employees spend more than one hour per day seeking information • Create a unified enterprise information portal

22. MSWeb: An Integrated Solution • Multi-Disciplinary Team • Integrated Information and Technology Architecture • 3 Types of Taxonomies • Category Labels • Metadata Schema • Descriptive Vocabularies • geography, languages, proper names, organizations / business units, subjects, products, standards / technology

23. MDR

26. Case StudyHP Employee Portal • Methodology (9 Weeks) • Opinion Leader Interviews • User Research • Content, Classification & Search Log Analysis • Deliverables • User & Opinion Leader Reports • Strategy Recommendations Report • Final Presentations

27. Employee PortalMajor Problems • Extremely difficult to find things via the portal • No idea what category to select in taxonomy • Misleading labels (e.g., “HP Policies”) • Search is important for users but works poorly • Employees use “wrong” keywords • Employees feel guilty using alternative navigation tools • 19 of 44 user testing sessions (43%) expired unsuccessfully at 3 minutes

28. Employee PortalRecommendations • Provide Multiple Finding Tools • classification schemes (taxonomies) • search • site index • Leverage CMS • distributed responsibility (metadata) • content value tiers (authority, strategic value, popularity) • incentives to authors/owners • Improve Search • integrate with browsing • filtering, zones, synonym management

29. Employee PortalRecommendations * implement in short-term

30. home

31. formatslevel 1

32. formatslevel 1

33. siteindex

34. http://www.louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/images/EIAroadmap.pdfhttp://www.louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/images/EIAroadmap.pdf

35. IA Therefore I Am • Peter Morville • morville@semanticstudios.com • Semantic Studios • http://semanticstudios.com/ • Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture • http://aifia.org/ • Findability • http://findability.org/