Rosenfeld explains Enterprise Information Architecture

Last week Lou Rosenfeld, a director of the new Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture and co-author of IA bible "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web", explained how to take on organisational resistance, to the London AIGA Experience Design meeting.

Rosenfeld addressed himself to the issue of practising information architecture in an unfriendly enterprise environment. Work of organisational change that is now frequently attempted in 3-6 months should take 3-6 years, he warned, and then went on to outline how to do IA the thorough and effective way.

The outcome should be entrepreneurial, he said, in that it involves services marketed to internal clients and has the goal of self-sustainability. Services should be presented in a modular fashion with a logical migration path and, critically, the changes to existing practice should be phased, starting with projects that are low hanging fruit and using a selective roll-out. He told his audience to use their early successes as models. He also suggested that they anticipate greater centralisation among and within business units over time and support different levels of centralisation concurrently.

He juxtaposed the trend toward autonomy inherent in the cheap, easy-to-use democratising technology of the Web, playing to the human tendency towards running things ones own way against the organisation's desire for centralisation to simplify and cheapen and users' desire for a single-point of access. 'These tend to cancel each other out, getting us nowhere,' he concluded.

Despite this, the prevalent culture is to expect any changes in IA to be conducted all at once - including all subsites, to be conducted immediately, and to be handled 'with few resources and people, such as one sad webmaster, and in a way that minimises organisational learning, eg. by hiring an outside consultant or agency'. He said this showed little understanding of what it takes, on management's part.

Not only was it essential to implement a bottom-up information architecture, but this needed to be carried out in such a way that the architectural designs could be implemented and maintained. To this end, he touched on six areas that need attention:

1. Structure: make IA a separate business unit,
2. Staffing: recognise the strategic and tactical components,
3. Economic Model: offer fee and free services; learn from existing models,
4. Offerings: provide a modular mix of services, tools, and consulting,
5. Timing: take a long-term vision; go for phased roll-out,
6. Marketing: take an entrepreneurial business model, with a service orientation and flexible scope and naming.

Rosenfeld was in town with the Nielsen Norman Group, delivering seminars in IA. An interview with him on more general IA issues and the emergence of the profession will appear soon. Meanwhile, see UN story Morville on Information Architecture and its new Institute for more on recent IA developments.

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