Place To Be: Intranet Information Architecture Best Practices

When I was younger, younger than before
I never saw the truth hanging from the door
And now I’m older see it face to face
And now I’m older gotta get up clean the place.

And I was green, greener than the hill
Where the flowers grew and the sun shone still
Now I’m darker than the deepest sea
Just hand me down, give me a place to be.

A Place to Be
Nick Drake (1948-1974)
English singer songwriter of truly magical ability

 

As we all know, Australia is a place to be, and equally this seems to hold true in their information management practices.

I simply don’t know why this is the case historically, but nevertheless the fact is that this country has, quite disproportionate to its size, spawned a series of EDM systems, and their government consistently adopts an outstanding stance on information management.

Anyway, the tradition continues to burn bright in the publication of Intranet Information Architecture: Best Practices Analysis (from the e-Government Resource Centre, Victoria State Government, Australia, December 2008).

And while this is focused on one particular Intranet implementation (and strictly speaking is not just about IA), the applicability and pedigree of this report makes it worth consideration, and includes findings and summations from the following stellar references in the web fields of usability, information architecture and intranets:

•  Jakob Nielsen (User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group)
• Louis Rosenfeld (independent information architecture consultant, and founder and publisher of Rosenfeld Media, a publishing house focused on user experience books)
• Gerry McGovern (widely regarded as the number one worldwide authority on managing web content as a business asset) and
• James Robertson (Managing Director of Step Two Designs).

And while not specifically focused on technology, this best practice report is absolutely worth your time if you want to use SharePoint internally.

It is not phenomenally detailed, but in my book that is a virtue.

In my ongoing work with SharePoint I still see so many project teams struggling to provide clarity even on the basics in their own Intranet solution design, and yet this short read suggests some of the key – platform agnostic – practices that you need to think about in implementing an Intranet on SharePoint.

Twenty-three pages later and maybe you’ll see some “truth hanging from the door….”

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Gantt Charts or How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

[Strangelove’s plan for post-nuclear war survival involves living underground with a 10:1 female-to-male ratio]

General “Buck” Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious… service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor. 

Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

 

This film is pure genius from Stanley Kubrick.

Made in the months just following the Cuban Missile Crisis, Dr. Strangelove (starring Peter Sellers) is a wonderful satire on the sheer insanity of rationally trying to cope with the Bomb. After all, it’s not possible to uninvent something is it – whether patently useless or downright dangerous.*

In my humble opinion, the Gantt chart (in relation to web development, at least) is an equal plague on this earth….

The Gantt Chart: Better than Concrete?

And whenever I am asked by a client to produce a “project plan” using this tool I feel a certain resignation setting in (i.e. I immediately suspect that if we are not exceptionally careful then we are in for a very tough time).

Sure, it’s a perfectly reasonable request; after all, from a rational perspective the client needs to “understand” just how long a project might take to complete.

But equally I think that this type of “planning” approach shows some signs of insanity in the setting of software development.

It is as though I am being asked to magic a rabbit out of a hat (i.e. the mythical “end date”); all the while knowing full well that this level of certainty about a software project is quite simply an illusion designed to make someone else feel comfortable in their own skin.

And I liken it to trying to pretend that “software engineering” is like building bridges where you know the tensile strength of steel. Whereas, in reality, you know that the discipline is a dynamic team-based process that is almost wholly dependent for success on a small set of people’s individual skills, experience and knowledge (… and whether they got out of bed the right way that morning).

And what makes such procrustean planning even more difficult is that this dynamic can change radically from project to project, even within the same general setting (i.e. a specific “type” of solution in web development).

Having said this however, as a trained project manager I naturally believe very strongly in planning and analysis, the identification and sequencing of tasks, and then the constant re-calibration of a project’s progress on a weekly (or even daily) basis.

And yes, I believe in trying to estimate as early as possible the essential parameters of a project (more on this soon in a separate post actually about SharePoint).

After all, it’s just basic business practice to know something of what you are dealing with as soon as you possibly can. It helps in no small way reduce project confusion, risk, and, most importantly, imparts some early clarity to the team process.

 

* Believe it or not, we actually managed to uninvent concrete for about 1300 years (as usual, the dates vary). The Colosseum (AD 80) in Rome is made out of the stuff, and yet the secret was somehow lost until the Late Middle Ages.

One, therefore, lives in hope with Gantt charts.

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SharePoint Solutions for the Masses

As someone that likes his books, yesterday I discovered that a new book entirely devoted to solution planning using MOSS 2007 was on the cards.

MS SharePoint Planning, Information Architecture & Design Bible

This is probably very old news for those interested in this specific area, but nevertheless I am very interested in the appearance of this book.

It’s indicative of the growth of the global industry spawned by SharePoint that this specialist title is on the way at all (all 792 pages of it). As an ex-Commissioning Editor myself, I know that Publishers simply wouldn’t be bothered with this book if they didn’t think there wasn’t a viable market.

There is, for instance, very little risk in publishing SharePoint for Dummies (released 5 months after MOSS 2007 RTM-ed in late October 2006) and clearly no-one in publishing is going to get sacked for making that call.  However, it is quite another decision to publish a book that is for a specialist, and somewhat non-technical, sub-audience of the platform 2+ years later. It shows one just how much the MOSS market has grown in the interim period, and where some of the attention in implementing ECM solutions on SharePoint is now being focused. 

And a quick search on Google for “SharePoint Information Architecture jobs” reveals just how much SP Products and Technologies is starting to dominate – rightly or wrongly – the ECM industry. When a product starts to generate this sort of specialist role requirement it’s yet more evidence of a healthy future.

I don’t know David Sterling’s work – as an MVP he has published books on MOSS previously. And while I didn’t like the more general Bible title on MOSS  – the word “bible” says it all, really – and so I gave up on it quickly, the one above has a guaranteed book sale of at least 1 in the UK when it RTMs.

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The City of Organised Thought and its Town Planners: SharePoint & Information Architecture – Part 1

As one of the softer web disciplines that lies at the heart of Microsoft SharePoint as a software product and its central importance in the implementation of countless solutions, I have read a lot of articles and book chapters about SharePoint that stress the importance of “getting your information architecture right”.

The quality of this thinking is not always quite what it might be. The analysts at Forrester, for instance, tell us (seemingly with great authority):

SharePoint buyers expect intuitive navigation, contextual search, and easy administration out of the box. But such benefits depend on how content is structured, labeled, and categorized, and they require a nuanced understanding of how different audiences will navigate and search for information.

The information architecture (IA) behind a SharePoint deployment has lasting consequences for the end user experience and for Web site management. Information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals should use their SharePoint implementations as an opportunity to set solid information architecture in place that turns today’s information overload into tomorrow’s valuable information assets.

The upshot?

Information workers will finally be able to find the critical information they need to do their jobs.

(See Forrester: The Critical Role of SharePoint Information Architecture, http://blogs.msdn.com/architectsrule/archive/2009/02/26/forrester-the-critical-role-of-sharepoint-information-architecture.aspx)

Ok … so far, so good, but where exactly does this get us?

 
Town Planning… 

Town Planning (© things magazine)

In early 1998 Louis Rosenthal and Peter Morville made their name in publishing a bestselling book entitled Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (now in its Third Edition!).

As a newly appointed e-business consultant working for The iGroup at Computercenter in London, I remember avidly reading their – essentially very simple – book and thinking “Wow, these guy’s have got it right!”

Switch to mid 2009 and inevitably the practice of building websites is far more sophisticated, and hopefully I am little less naïve than I used to be.

Superficially, at least, it seems that those professionals who devote their lives to working on the web are now much more qualified to provide a sophisticated response to the question of what makes a “perfect” information architecture. One that takes into account so-called “best practice” in emergent web disciplines as diverse as needs analysis, stakeholder and user audience profiling, content analysis, information science and classification, usability and accessibility, wire-framing, web and user interface design.   

Yet growing sophistication in the field comes with a price.

Quite simply, it is very hard for a busy web professional – and I include myself in this category – to have a genuine appreciation of all these burgeoning web disciplines to allow true mastery over the undoubted “art” of information architecture. 

In my personal view, therefore, the vast majority of those who construct information architectures for a living are informed not by a deep understanding (of a myriad of web sub-disciplines), but rather by a mix of unvalidated opinions, their personal preferences, and a partial understanding of their trade.

 

In the City of Organised Thought

What of the subject matter of the information architects – the  websites, extranets and intranets?

Essentially, all these forms of “web patterns” reflect human activity in all of its diversity. This relationship is undoubtedly an organic thing that both evolves overtime and exhibits great complexity.

Think, for instance, of an Intranet that must by necessity reflect an organisation’s ever changing social, political and informational life, and you realise that this is indeed a complex undertaking. Likewise, a website that marries a particular content focus with this or that user audience – the latter always demanding, whoever they are.  

As such, these generic “web patterns” are capable of order and structure – indeed in many ways they exhibit and need such order – but the kinds of order that are possible vary enormously even within the same general setting.

Sure, these different kinds of order may be related as “patterns”, but equally they cannot be mutually reduced except by gross simplification.

Recognition of this awkward fact – i.e. a singular lack of neatly tended streets in our metaphor – also tends to be fiercely resisted by professionals who are engaged in theoretical system building both to justify their profession and the need to prove that they “know their stuff”.

And because they have succeeded in introducing an impressive kind of order they are always tempted to extend it more widely than they should. In effect, they have formulated a neat and tidy “theory” and as such want to place that above all others.

Cityscape (© CGZool)

It is as though they have the ambition of knocking down the irregular and awkward city streets that disrupt their thinking, and rebuilding them to their vision – with a strong preference for unfailing regularity in both architectural design and pathways. 

 

Beware the Despotic Pattern with SharePoint

What then are some general pitfalls in town planning with SharePoint Products and Technologies?

First, there is the ever present tension of dealing with a software product in solution design. It is obvious that the very fact that SharePoint is a product both structures and constrains your thinking in relation to the practice of information architecture.

And while there is little doubt that MOSS 2007 as a CMS has an elegant hierarchical model enshrined in its Content Database structure:   

• Site Collection
  • Sites
    • Content Types
      • Page Layouts
        • Controls  
        • Site Columns
          • Content
          • Metadata

Yet MOSS is known to be hard to customise….

As a consequence this model tends to impart a strong solution preference in formulating an IA within SharePoint. Effectively, out of the box MOSS 2007 – in either its Publishing or Collaboration Portal mode –  will do what it wants to do very well indeed; but it is not quite so good when your architectural design does not conform to SharePoint’s particular blueprint.

There is, therefore, no doubt that it is very easy to lose honesty very quickly in the overwhelming desire to avoid the pain of customising SharePoint to meet a requirement for implementing even a moderately awkward neighbourhood.

Try, however, to resist the lure of this particular siren!

As we have discovered at Storm just recently there are some very real benefits in remaining honest. This being due in the main to the technical brilliance of my colleagues – in particular Tom Travers – who have succeeded in opening up MOSS 2007 to customisation in a number of different areas. Town planning being one of them.

Second, beware Greeks that bear false gifts… and retain a healthy skepticism towards the town planners of this particular product (i.e. the SharePoint analysts that solemnly tell you how to formulate that perfect IA). Telling is one thing; doing is quite another. Thus, treat with caution – though clearly don’t dismiss – their formulas and pronouncements as they relate to the complex and difficult task of town planning.

And, finally, never lose sight of the fact that in constructing an IA – regardless of whether it is for SharePoint or not – there is no substitute for deep understanding, imagination, and, yes, a lot of hard work.

Note: This post is the first of an occasional series that attempts to explore the discipline of information architecture in relation to SharePoint. And my advance apologies if this first post mentions relatively little about SharePoint! I am simply trying to explain how I see the landscape of the discipline before turning my attention to SharePoint proper.

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Intranets: What you need to “Know”

James Robertson – the CEO of  Step Two Designs – doesn’t know it, but I have long been a big fan of his work.

Last month (May 2009) he released his latest offering in “guide” format. A short and eminently practical book  that gives the inside track on how to think about and progress the soft tasks involved in planning, establishing and continuing to evolve an Intranet.

What Every Intranet Team Should Know

As any Intranet Manager knows only too well there are few silver bullets to achieving effectiveness. That said, however, after some twenty years of praxis in the field of Intranet design there are emergent guidelines – some might say “best practices” – for achieving success in what is a graveyard slot in web solution design (i.e. I suspect that even my colleagues at Storm ID find it weird that I “like” working in this area).

Quite simply, Robertson’s (and his colleagues) book is excellent, and quite unique in the field. Without going into detail, the material is based on a summation of his company’s ongoing work in providing practical consulting advice on Intranets to a wide range of companies. What’s gratifying about the book is that within this slim volume there is gold which can only be found by working on the front line.  

What’s this got to do with SharePoint I hear you ask?

Well – to be honest – everything!

Despite the ongoing debate on the web by journalists and analysts, users and consultants, it is hard to come to anything other than the conclusion that (if well conceived) MOSS 2007 is a strong and viable software platform to establish an Intranet or Corporate Portal.

Yes, undeniably, SharePoint still has weaknesses in the 2007 version (and quite frankly it was very poor in its 2003 offering), but yet it does most of the basics reasonably, and more than a few things very well, in the Intranet space.

On this, more later….

But Intranets don’t magic themselves into existence and they don’t maintain themselves. This then is a frontier of Intranet solution design where we need pioneers like Robertson’s Step Two Designs. As the hackneyed saying goes, a SharePoint Intranet is far more than just a technology solution; rather, it has an intimate political, social and informational relationship to the organisation in question that means that the softer elements of solution design must be attended to if you want success.

Thus, if you want success, you could do a lot worse than by trying this guy’s book. It can be ordered from Step Two Designs for a mere Aus $89. It is well worth the dosh, and will save most – if not all of us – in the field a great deal  of misguided effort in what is a clear and simple read.

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