By Andrea Ames | Fellow and
Alyson Riley | Member
This column explores the strategic aspects of information architecture and the tools to equip information architects (IAs) for success. Topics will address the business, strategy, user experience, and implementation of strategic information architecture, including organizational, content management, and tactical considerations. Send your comments, questions, and suggestions for future articles to thestrategicia@pobox.com.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years—and by a rock we mean living with no Internet access—you’ve heard about the impacts of the global economic meltdown. You’re probably sick of it, truth be told, and want things to return to “normal.” Depending on the part of the world in which you find yourself, you might be seeing signs of positive economic growth (such as the 4 March 2011 economic news release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics [see www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm] or the Bank of Canada’s January 2011 Monetary Policy Summary [see www.bank-banque-canada.ca/en/mpr/pdf/2011/mprsumjan11.pdf]) and be tempted to think that things are on their way back to pre-2008 “normal.” We hate to be the bearers of bad news, but we are convinced—and we’d like to convince you—that it just isn’t so, even if those statistics actually start to look good. The changes spurred by the 2008 economic meltdown are not trends but transformation. The businesses that will survive these challenging times are those that:
-
Improve productivity by transforming legacy business models, organizations, infrastructure, and processes
-
Strengthen growth areas by protecting opportunities and funding for innovation
-
Maintain intense, urgent focus on reaching customers more effectively
-
Deploy scarce resources strategically in order to cut costs
At the same time, today’s markets are experiencing a sea change: Our colleagues and customers are more mobile, socially networked, and global than ever before in human history.
Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t throw in the towel just yet! We also come bearing good news. The good news is this: The strategic aspects of information architecture offer resources to:
-
Contribute to our companies and clients such that they not only survive but also thrive through these challenging times
-
Enable us to demonstrate our business value as IAs
-
Ensure our place in the organizational charts of the future
The classic concerns of business take on new urgency in this new economic environment—concerns like the drive to build mind- and marketshare increase customer satisfaction, and deliver significant return on investment. Information architecture contributes in measurable ways to each of these areas that are so vitally important to survival in today’s marketplace, but to deliver on that promise, we must leverage the tools of our discipline strategically and develop the rhetorical skills necessary for communicating with our colleagues in business strategy and finance. This new column is our proposal that it’s time to explore the strategic aspects of information architecture so important in today’s economy and a call to the IA community to engage in a conversation about our future and the strategic nature of our discipline.
First, we assert that the strategic IA begins the architecture process by identifying what’s important to the business and planning how to communicate impact relative to business strategy. For example, the strategic IA might be working as part of a multidisciplinary team to develop a new version of a product. She knows that building product awareness, interest, and ultimately sales opportunities are critical. In response, her focus becomes contributing to these business objectives by improving content visibility and retrievability, search rankings, hits within one’s domain, and the social capital generated (blogs, links, tweets, shares, likes, and so on). These goals drive her work, manage her time, and set her priorities. When the product goes live, she is equipped to measure and illustrate, in both quantitative and qualitative ways, intangibles such as mindshare and marketshare.
Second, we assert that the strategic IA pairs classic tools with business strategy to deliver increased impact. In another example, the strategic IA might be working with her team to improve customer satisfaction with a poorly performing product. The effective use of classic information architecture tools—such as scenarios and use cases, user roles and personas, wireframes, and hierarchies—paired with strategic thinking about measuring customer satisfaction is key. In this example, the architecture tools bring precision to the process of identifying the things that users value and those that they don’t. With business objectives in mind, the IA can demonstrate how the outputs of the architecture process lead to higher customer satisfaction when the function delivered to market maps to user wants and needs. The pairing of strategic thinking and classic information architecture techniques can also help the IA contribute to user-aligned experiences with both the product and the information, ensuring that the core value propositions of an offering ripple throughout the messaging and structure of the user experience, from pre-sales technical marketing collateral; to product-embedded user assistance; to post-sales user documentation; to forums, blogs, and tweets; and all the user pathways in between.
Third, we assert that the strategic IA does the job in new ways that are born of an urgent desire for marketplace impact and that eliminate low-value work products. In a final example, the strategic IA challenged to create a company-wide information experience might forego creating an all-inclusive, top-down information model. Instead, he might deploy the architecture in an incremental, Agile way, through low-fidelity pilot projects tied directly to research and development. He delivers prototypes instead of whitepapers and blueprints; he gathers tweets and public comments instead of feedback from expensive face-to-face focus groups. In such an example, results are fast and measurable, and the architecture is nimble and responsive to change. This approach emphasizes measurable results, direct impact on the marketplace, and immediate feedback from the target audience.
Our examples are just that—examples—and we recognize that the way one does the IA job differs depending on the context of the work. However, in all of the preceding examples, we assert that the IAs involved are doing what we do best: Gathering and interpreting user data, then balancing user wants and needs against the realities of the market and the business to deliver optimal information experiences that help clients achieve their goals. So what makes the work strategic? The fact that the IAs tied their deliverables, processes, and measures of success to business strategy, delivering not only an ideal information experience but measurable value to the business where it counts—marketplace impact. In addition, we assert that the IAs in our examples not only executed the information architecture work, but also exerted significant influence over the product team’s strategy, plans, and goals to ensure that the work was completed across all affected functions. They also ensured that their results were understandable to those in leadership roles within the workplace. In other words, the IAs applied the longstanding mantra of “making the complex clear” to their own work—they made clear to an audience of businesspeople the value and results of the complex art and science that is strategic information architecture. To ensure our ongoing value to our businesses and ultimately the survival of our discipline, it’s time to get smart about our work. In short, it’s time that IAs tie their deliverables to measurements of market success and business results and learn to speak the language of business.
To that end, we’re pleased to share with you a birth announcement, the birth of a new Intercom column—The Strategic IA. We’re so convinced that the strategic aspects of information architecture are critically important to our discipline in these transformative times that we will use this space in Intercom to explore those aspects on a regular basis. (Watch for this column in future issues.)
In addition, we ask you to think about the ways in which business strategy intersects with the discipline of information architecture in your domain. We’re guest editing a special issue of Intercom to be published in January 2012 where we’ll have room to explore these topics—with help from our talented community of IAs—in greater detail (see the Call for Proposals). We hope you will consider contributing to the conversation.
Finally, we can’t end a column without mentioning what we’re reading. (In addition to a shared love of strategy and dogs, we’re both bibliophiles.) Each Strategic IA column will close with a suggested reading section that documents our current reading lists.
What We’re Reading
Alyson just finished reading (for the 82nd time) Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, a compelling exploration of the psychology of leadership and team dynamics, plus the added bonus of aliens and cool technology. She’s now knee-deep in Audience, Relevance, and Search: Targeting Web Audiences with Relevant Content by James Mathewson, Frank Donatone, and Cynthia Fishel, a ground-breaking read for anyone interested in ensuring that the content they create will actually reach their target audiences. She will then move on to Leading Change by John Kotter.
Andrea is currently embroiled in Human Factors for Technical Communicators by Marlana Coe, a classic text addressing the cognitive functions of information processing and from which she teaches a class by the same name for the University of California. She will tackle next Influencer: The Power to Change Anything by Kerry Patterson et al., which purports to give the reader the power to change anything—woo hoo! Sounds like a plan!
Andrea Ames and Alyson Riley are veteran, strategic information architects with more than 35 years of combined IA experience ranging from large enterprises to small start-ups and from commercial to public-sector/government to academic environments. You can reach them at thestrategicia@pobox.com.
