At the risk of sounding repetitive, this is still the number one complaint of most employees at most organizations, regardless of size, industry and geographic location. Notwithstanding the effectiveness of the search engine which, more often than not, is rated as being somewhere between ‘awful’ and ‘piss-poor,’ information architecture is often the top priority of most intranet managers when undertaking a redesign.
Information architecture (IA) is mostly science with a dash of art. As it relates to the intranet, the IA is best represented by a site map or organization chart of the major information or content categories (parents) and the sub-categories (children) and how they all relate to each other.
IA is defined by the Information Architecture Institute as:
- The structural design of shared information environments.
- The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support findability and usability.
- An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.
Read my full column: Reinventing intranet information architectures
Further adding to the complexity of the Internet is the ability of more than one computer to use the Internet through only one node, thus creating the possibility for a very deep and hierarchal sub-network that can theoretically be extended infinitely. cluburi sibiu
I would view Information Architecture as a part of the overall Enterprise Architecture. It like healthy blood (Tuned IA) flowing through a healthy body (tuned EA).
Regards,
Deepesh Joseph
http://informationmanagementresearch.blogspot.com