Communicating Information Architecture to Managers and Executives

By Tricia York Garrett

Other articles in this special edition of Intercom describe how to measure the business value of your information architecture (IA) initiatives. This article provides some tips for communicating that business value—and your overall IA vision, plans, and progress—to upline managers and executives.

Don't just communicate your plans, plan your communications (“Genre”)

In his business parable, Death By Meeting, Patrick Lencioni compares good meetings to good screenplays. First, Lencioni asserts, good meetings are anything but dull or pointless because they proceed quickly to the area of conflict, the problem to be resolved, or the course of action to be decided. Second, each meeting adheres to a distinct genre; an effective meeting features a well-defined, well-understood structure and purpose. Viewers know what to expect from a feature film, as opposed to a miniseries or weekly drama on television. Or, if you prefer the publishing world, consider how immediately you're able to grasp that some writings follow the conventions of poetry, while others are novels or stage plays.

Similarly, your communications are more likely to have the “crispness” they need to resonate with managers and executives if each communication has a distinct purpose and corresponding structure to support the purpose. While you aren't always the one initiating an executive meeting, you still can lead your manager and team to consider which genre best fits the task at hand. Table 1 summarizes a genre-based communication approach that was successful during my role as information architect for a large IBM technical writing team. The remainder of this article delves into the details of frequency, story and subtext, style, substance, and overall objective of the communication.

Table 1. Genre-based approach to communicating information architecture to managers and executives

Beating the drum (“Frequency”)

Frequency is about establishing a cadence and momentum by checking in on a regular basis with your managers and executives. There are several points to consider when planning the frequency of communications.

First, communicating regularly throughout the year can ensure continuity. However, without up-front planning, your busy team might not do it.

Second, when presenting to an executive or upper manager, keep in mind that this person is unlikely to have received an update (at this level of detail) from your team for weeks or months. Communicating not only with deliberate timing, but with a clearly defined genre, can accelerate the context-setting part of your meeting. In short, it will be easier for you and the recipient of your communication to “get on the same page.”

Third, presenting to executives on a regular basis throughout the year, with a distinct purpose for each update, can help your team remain prepared. This approach gave my team the incentive to keep our IA scorecard updated between executive meetings. Preparing for executive communications can require a lot of time and energy. Don't underestimate the momentum established by maintaining regular communications.

Fourth, allocating the time to update upline managers and executives on a regular basis helps to keep the value of your team and IA initiatives top-of-mind, establishing a relationship in which your team is more likely to be considered to provide a solution when a new challenge arises. You also are more likely to hear about the need for a mid-year course correction.

Although making room to address an urgent concern or putting some of your initiatives on hold while addressing a matter of higher priority to an executive can require some mental fortitude, developing this kind of agility and adaptability is important for advancing your goals in the long term. For example, our team added cloud computing as a fifth key IA initiative area (theme) for the year, after our executive asked whether and how cloud computing would change our information development and delivery strategy. Management consultant Peter Drucker is attributed with saying, “Efficiency is doing things right; Effectiveness is doing the right things.” Regular check-ins with upline managers and executives can help your team avoid becoming an arrow flying rapidly and efficiently at the wrong target.

Does anyone know where I left my executive? (“Story”)

Don't lose your executive. Keep him or her with you as you explain your IA initiatives.

At a macro level, define three or four coherent themes or umbrella initiatives by which to group your IA projects and tasks. Examples of themes include:

• Quality and currency: Continually improving information quality and speed of our information delivery and uptake
• Retrievability: Ensuring users can find our content effectively and easily
• Reuse: Increasing our organizational productivity and ability to produce new deliverables sought by users
• Right information, right channel, right time: Coordinated delivery of technical information from a shared understanding of user needs

Here is how our team used themes successfully to unify and simplify our communications throughout the year, and from year to year:

• We derived our themes for the year by analyzing trends in user feedback and other strategy inputs.
• In communicating our vision, we positioned the themes as a small number of easily explained pillars on which our vision is based.
• In communicating our plans, we used each theme to organize multiple project plans, again reducing the number of parts to comprehend.
• In developing our scorecard, we used each theme to aggregate and summarize milestones and metrics for several projects.
• In providing quarterly previews, we often kept the scope manageable by focusing the latest news about projects under a single theme or two.
• In reviewing our progress, we used the themes to convey “the forest for the trees” by summarizing dozens of achievements from several projects.
• In looking ahead to the next year, we used the previous ’year's theme as a starting point, rather than starting from scratch.

At a micro level, organize each communication to tell a story. For example, strive for each presentation chart's heading to convey a headline, and for all of the headlines to convey a coherent narrative. It sounds basic, but outlining your chart headlines before you fill in each chart's details will keep you focused and provide criteria for deciding which IA details to include, omit, or place in backup slides (just in case).

Some examples of common stories or structures used in presentations include:

• Past, Present, and Future (or Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow)
• Problem, Solution, and First Steps Toward Solution
• Vision (Where to Go), Roadmap (How to Get There), and Next Steps
• Where We Are Now, Where We Want to Be and Why, How We'll Get There, and Risks and Considerations

The target (“Objective” and “Subtext”)

Objectives are explicitly stated goals, such as: “Today, we'd like to update you on our progress in the past month.”

Subtext is the unstated undertone of your communication, such as: “We have our plan under control. You can allow our team more autonomy.”

Similar to setting an intent or picturing a win, develop your communication materials and enter each meeting with both of these aspects clearly defined for yourself and your team. This will help you and the rest of the team present your core material as well as respond to any executive or management questions in ways that support the underlying objectives and subtext.

Review Table 1 for specific examples of objectives and subtext for various IA communications.

Do cluttered charts signify a cluttered mind? (“Style”)

Much has been written about the meaning, if any, of a messy desk. Can it benefit or undermine your career? Whatever you believe the reality is or should be, strive to make a conscious decision about the level of polish you put into each communication.

I've had times when I felt as though a presentation to managers or executives was something to dispense with quickly so that I could return to my usual work. As with every task, you must decide how much effort on style is warranted, based on your audience. Presentations to upline managers and executives often are so tailored to the individual and occasion that they seem to offer little opportunity for reuse, which admittedly sometimes raises my hackles as an information architect. You might have other mental resistance to spending time on managerial and executive communications.

Is it worth pushing past your reservations, or simply your seeming lack of time, to hone your communication style? I believe so. The style of your presentation or other communication vehicles is a key way to communicate the subtext. How do you want your IA vision and initiatives to be perceived?

Style (in this context) refers to all of the visual and emotional aspects used while delivering the substance of your communication, such as:

• Adopting the latest recommended presentation templates
• Using white space and call outs (text bubbles) to reduce text density
• Applying Gestalt principles, such as anomaly; for each page, ensure the key items “jump out” by using different typography or visual elements for them
• Including tables, images, and other devices, acknowledging that “a picture is worth 1,000 words”
• Incorporating metaphors, carefully used humor, or other hints of personality and authenticity
• Starting with the key information—remember that “inverted pyramid” writing style from journalism school!

A rose by any other name is an aesthetically optimized predator deflection system (“Substance”)

Learning to communicate at the correct abstraction level for upline managers and executives can be a difficult skill to master; thorough understanding of a technical subject often precedes being able to explain it clearly and simply to others. I know firsthand that although you might be able to explain the technology that you are documenting as a technical communicator, this does not guarantee you will be able to explain the information architecture that you are using to document it. Omitting or glossing over details to simplify the explanation of your IA projects can feel contrary to the technical or scientific tendencies that make you good at your job.

Tip 1: Consider which facts and details will resonate with your audience because they align with executive or managerial concerns.

As a professional communicator, you're familiar with identifying and writing for your audience. Apply this skill to your managerial and executive communications. Consider the following:

• What concerns her, in general and right now?
• What initiatives does she champion?
• What is her personality?
• Does she prefer a lot of facts and figures, or get bogged down in too much detail?

When you're accustomed to writing for a broad audience, it can seem strange to put so much effort into tailoring your message for relatively few people. However, if your message is given but not really received, your communication effort will be wasted, and you might invite more involvement in your determining your IA projects and their details than you would prefer.

Tip 2: Carefully consider the abstraction level and terminology you use to summarize the business value and results of IA projects.

By my experience, information architecture can be difficult to communicate without quickly getting into the weeds. You sometimes have to educate your management and executive team about your role and how it differs from and complements other roles in your content-producing team, such as technical writer, editor, or team lead. On top of this baseline education level, it can be challenging to decide which and how many technical details to communicate about templates, single sourcing, navigation design, search engine optimization, and other juicy technical underpinnings of your IA vision, plan, and projects.

With effort, you can avoid jargon and omit marginal details. Here are some before-and-after examples of how I explained IA projects to upline managers and executives. I credit my immediate manager and her manager with the patience to iterate several times until the message was clear enough for our executives to understand its business value. The following examples are in the context of IA initiatives for an information development team documenting software products:

Table 2. The same IA projects described at three different levels

You might be bristling at the vague nature of the statements in the “Describing IA as Bottom-Line Outcomes for Users” column. For example, optimizing page titles and short descriptions is just one of many ways to ensure that users can find information. Facilitating the ability of users to define custom documents from sets of topics without incurring numerous broken links is just one of many goals that can be supported by adopting DITA relationship tables for linking. Perhaps true, but the point is to focus on why to implement a technical project or solution.

What will the positive outcome look like for users, clients, and the executive to whom you are communicating? In general, asking yourself this question will focus you on an appropriate level of abstraction for communicating IA to upline managers and executives. Don't forget to include the “why” or business value to complement the technical details you provide about how you will implement your IA to achieve the desired outcomes.

Tip 3: Be a leader. Express opinions and conclusions about the technical facts in which you are fluent—namely, IA.

A manager once pointed out to me that technical leadership can be summarized as having an opinion—founded in technical expertise, of course. Develop enough passion and ownership of your IA initiatives to be outraged or inspired sometimes. Where I work, technical leaders rise when they prove themselves as trusted advisors to business-focused executives who must make decisions at a harrowing pace. Technical leaders who can combine executive and technical skills rise to the highest ranks. Choose a topic or two about which you feel really passionate (ideally an initiative that aligns with your company's business strategy), become fluent in its business and technical aspects, and have and express opinions about it.

Now you are newly motivated and armed with a framework to communicate your initiatives more productively. At a minimum, you'll probably wonder why an advertisement for your favorite television drama reminds you to schedule a quarterly IA catch-up meeting with your manager.

In all seriousness, although I still find executive communications one of my most challenging growth areas as a technical leader, it took me a few years of high anxiety and mixed results before settling into a systematic approach. May you accelerate rapidly along your learning curve and find these skills transferrable beyond IA, whether you apply this framework, improve it, or develop your own. Finally, to complement your framework, strive to remain flexible and open to change. My appreciation to author Patrick Lencioni for his inspiration.

Software engineer Tricia York Garrett offers her insights from 15 years of crosstraining as an information architect, technical writer and editor, team lead, and user experience designer for enterprise software development teams. She is pursuing a clinical informatics degree at Duke University to apply these disciplines to the healthcare industry.