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the Free CMSWire NewsletterSo you may have experienced the good, the bad and the ugly around SharePoint information architecture (IA). In this post, I’ll address common concerns surrounding SharePoint IA and discuss how a better understanding of IA can help you to improve the effectiveness of your SharePoint environment.
I see a lot of SharePoint in my work with clients: safe to say that 99% of them have SharePoint in some form or other, and 75% have a substantial SharePoint footprint enterprise wide.
And while each client’s experience with SharePoint is distinctive, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t see some common threads across my clients:
- Struggle to create, enforce, maintain basic governance — once the SharePoint genie is out of the bottle, it takes on a life of its own; and folks like IT, legal, records management, corporate communications and HR have their work cut out for them trying to manage end-user behavior.
- Difficulty realizing the full benefits of using SharePoint — SharePoint is a tool that holds great promise for organizations looking to improve their information lifecycle management; but figuring out how to deploy SharePoint so as to deliver on this promise has proved more difficult than anyone could have imagined. At most of my clients, SharePoint’s main use case is basic share drive replacement…and in most cases it provides little added benefits over those share drives.
- Conflicts with other enterprise applications — SharePoint is a bit of a jack of all trades application: it tries to deliver “good enough” functionality across lots of enterprise content management (ECM) areas, e.g., workflow and collaboration, document management, portal/web content management and records management. But most organizations already have other systems doing some (or all) of these, so figuring out which system should do what is a real challenge.
Given these common themes, one of the planks in my SharePoint soap box platform is information architecture (IA), i.e., the way your SharePoint environment is organized, from the overarching structure of all your sites down to how documents are named and stored. And while taking the time to address IA concerns isn’t a silver bullet to solve the three issues above, you definitely can’t solve them without it.
Let’s take a look first at what IA is and then how it can help you improve the effectiveness of your SharePoint environment.
A (Very) Brief History of IA
Richard Saul Wurman is widely considered to have coined the term Information Architecture in the mid 1970s. He describes the information architect as one who:
- Organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear
- Creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge
- Addresses the needs of the age focused upon clarity, human understanding, and the science of the organization of information (Wurman, Richard Saul; Bradford, Peter; eds. Information Architects. Zurich, Switzerland: Graphis Press; 1996)
IA as it’s commonly approached today is a discipline and a set of methods that aim to identify and organize information in a purposeful and service-oriented way. (Some of you may also be familiar with it as a term used to describe the resulting document or documents that define the facets of a given information domain.)2
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