IA Summit Slides: Effective IA For Enterprise Portals

I've posted slides for my recent Effective IA For Enterprise Portals presentation at the IA Summit in Miami. Portals are not a traditional space for user experience practitioners, so many thanks to the packed house that turned out, and stayed as we both started late to accommodate the crowd, and then ran long.

These slides include a substantial amount of case study and example material that I didn't cover directly in the talk. For the repeat session on Sunday, I showed additional examples beyond those included here in the starting slides.

Stay tuned for a more detailed writeup of both published and unpublished example material - one that shows the building blocks in action at all levels of a multi-year portal effort from initial strategy through design and into governance / evolution - in part six of the Building Blocks series running in Boxes and Arrows, due out once the post-summit flurry settles down.

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local tags: building_blocks, executive_dashboards, framework, iasummit2008, ia_building_blocks, portals, systems,, user_experience, ux

New Organizational Architecture & UX Group on Slideshare

I've just started a new 'Organizational Architecture' group on Slideshare, to explore links to user experience, and questions like these:

• What is organizational architecture?
• How does organizational architecture relate to user experience?
• What can user experience practitioners borrow from OA to become more effective?

Join now!

local tags: enterprise, organizational_culture, organizations, user_experience

The Organizational Architecture of Failure

The culture, structure, and workings of an organization often pose greater challenges for User Experience practitioners than any technical or design questions at hand. If you'd like to know more about the factors behind these situations, be sure to check out We Tried To Warn You: The Organizational Architecture of Failure, by Peter Jones, just published by Boxes and Arrows.

Peter is an independent consultant with deep expertise in research, product design, and strategy. His talk for the panel on failure at the 2007 IA Summit was insightful and in-depth, and this two-part series offers quite a bit more very useful material on the roots and warning signs of organizational failure (by comparison, consider the very brief post I put up on the same subject a few years ago.)

Peter's is the second written feature to come out of the failure panel (my missive on the parallels between entrepreneurial and societal failure was the first). I'm looking forward to part two of We Tried To Warn You, as well as additional features from the remaining two panelists, Christian Crumlish and Lorelei Brown!

Here's a snippet, to whet your appetite:

How do we even know when an organization fails? What are the differences between a major product failure (involving function or adoption) and a business failure that threatens the organization? An organizational-level failure is a recognizable event, one which typically follows a series of antecedent events or decisions that led to the large-scale breakdown. My working definition: When significant initiatives critical to business strategy fail to meet their highest-priority stated goals."

local tags: culture, enterprise, failure, organizational_culture, state_of_mind

Portal Building Blocks Intro on Boxes and Arrows

Boxes and Arrows just published part two of the Portal Building Blocks series - Introduction to the Building Blocks. This second installment covers the design concepts behind the portal building blocks system, and guidelines on how to flexibly combine the blocks into a well-structured user experience.

If you are working on a portal, dashboard, widget, social media platform, web-based desktop, or any tile-based design, this series should help clarify the growth and usability challenges you will encounter, as well as provide a possible solution, in the form of a simple design framework that is platform and vendor neutral.

Stay tuned for the third installment in the series, due out shortly!

local tags: building_blocks, dashboard, executive_dashboards, framework, ia_building_blocks, information_architecture, portals, system, ux

Moving Beyond Reactive IT Strategy With User Experience

For those in the enterprise IA / UX space, The next frontier in IT strategy: A McKinsey Survey centered on the idea that "...IT strategy is maturing from a reactive to a proactive stance"is worth a look.

This nicely parallels a point made about the reactive mindset common to IT in many large organizations, in discussion on the IAI mailing list last month. Lou Rosenfeld's post Information architects on communicating to IT managers, summarizes the original discussion in the IAI thread, and is worth reading as a companion piece.

Lou's summary of information architecture and user experience voices in the enterprise arena is noteworthy for including many examples of strong correspondence between McKinsey's understanding of how IT strategy will mature (a traditional management consulting view), and the collected IA / UX viewpoints on addressing IT leadership - typical buyers for enterprise anything - and innovation.

Dialogs that show convergence of understanding like this serve as positive signs for the future. At present, a large set of deeply rooted cultural assumptions (at their best inaccurate, usually reductive, sometimes even damaging) about the roles of IT, business, and design combine with the historical legacies of corporate structures to needlessly limit what's possible for User Experience and IA in the enterprise landscape. In practical terms, I'm thinking of those limitations as barriers to the strategy table; constraining who can talk to who, and about which important topics, such as how to spend money, and where the business should go.

Considering the gulf that separated UX and IT viewpoints ten - or even five - years ago, this kind of emerging common understanding is a good sign that the cultural obstacles to a holistic view of the modern enterprise are waning. We know that a holistic view will rely on deep understanding of the user experience aspects of business at all levels to support innovation in products and services. I'm hoping the rest of the players come to understand this soon.

Another good sign is that CIO's have won a seat at the strategy table, after consistent effort:

Further evidence of IT's collaborative role in shaping business strategy is the fact that so many CIOs now have a seat at the table with senior management. They report to the CEO in 44 percent of all cases; an additional 42 percent report to either the chief operating officer or the chief financial officer.

Looking ahead, information architecture and user experience viewpoints and practitioners should work toward a similar growth path. We fill a critical and missing strategic role that other traditional viewpoints are not as well positioned to supply.

Quoting McKinsey again:

IT strategy in most companies has not yet reached its full potential, which in our experience involves exploiting innovation to drive constant improvement in the operations of a business and to give it a real advantage over competitors with new products and capabilities. Fewer than two-thirds of the survey respondents say that technological innovation shapes their strategy. Only 43 percent say they are either very or extremely effective at identifying areas where IT can add the most value.

User Experience can and should have a leading voice in setting the agenda for innovation, and shaping understandings of where IT and other groups can add the most value in the enterprise. To this end, I'll quote Peter Merholz (with apologies for not asking in advance)

"...we've reached a point where we've maximized efficiency until we can't maximize no more, and that in order to realize new top-line value, we need to innovate... And right now, innovations are coming from engaging with the experiences people want to have and satisfying *that*."

McKinsey isn't making the connection between strategic user experience perspectives and innovation - at least not yet. That's most likely a consequence of the fact that management consulting firms base their own ways of thinking, organizational models, and product offerings (services, intellectual property, etc.) on addressing buyers who are themselves deeply entrenched in tradtional corporate structures and worldviews. And in those worlds, everything is far from miscellaneous, as a glance at the category options available demonstrates; your menu here includes Corporate Finance, Information Technology, Marketing, Operations, Strategy...

BTW: if you weren't convinced already, this should demonstrate the value of the $40 IAI annual membership fee, or of simply reading Bloug, which is free, over paying for subscriptions to management journals :)

local tags: enterprise, ia, organizational_culture, user_experience, ux

Suggested Tag for Building Blocks Stuff

I've created a suggested (and highly original) tag for bookmarking items related to the building blocks:

ia_building_blocks

I've tagged a few items on del.icio.us - my default bookmarking service - and will monitor tag streams from some of the other bookmarking services.

http://del.icio.us/tag/ia_building_blocks

local tags: building_blocks, dashboard, executive_dashboards, framework, ia_building_blocks, information_architecture, portals, system, ux

Presenting for the Taxonomy Community of Practice: IA and Taxonomy

I'm presenting for the Taxonomy Community of Practice web seminar today. I'll be talking about a long-term, enterprise-level strategy and design engagement for a financial services client, sharing work that combines information architecture and taxonomy efforts over the past year.

The agenda for the call includes several other speakers; it should be a strong showcase of information architecture and taxonomy work from different settings.

If you'd like to listen, some details are below. Registration and more information is available from www.earley.com/events.htm

Date and time: Friday, December 1st, 2006 - 2:00 to 3:30 PM EDT

Duration: 90 minutes

Format: Teleconference

Cost: $50 per attendee

Register for the session (you will receive dial-in instructions and slides the day before the call)

Description:

User Experience design is often thought of as distinct or different from taxonomy design. What are good IA practices and how do they influence taxonomy design? In this session you'll hear from three experienced IA's who will share specific examples from their organizations and consulting projects that will illustrate principles that you can apply in your taxonomy projects.

In this session, hear about:

• a user experience design effort that combines information architecture and taxonomy approaches for a major financial services client


• specific experiences applying IA with Compaq and HP and "business taxonomies" - taxonomies that live within strict business limitations

Presenters:
Seth Earley, Earley & Associates

Joe Lamantia

Bob Goodman

Andrew Gent, Hewlitt Packard

local tags: enterprise, events, ia, information_architecture, taxonomy, taxo_cop