Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Second Edition

A Framework for Moving Forward

In this chapter, we’ve mapped out a loose and ambitious framework that, even if you don’t agree with our specific recommendations, will provide you with ideas to mull over and react to as you develop your own approach. By breaking up overwhelming problems into digestible pieces, we hope that this framework will ensure that information architecture becomes a permanent fixture within enterprises that need it. By taking a phased approach, we believe this framework can stand the test of time. And by staying true to an entrepreneurial approach, this framework might defuse the urge to “force” autonomous business units to comply with centralizing efforts.

Ideally, this framework will be flexible enough to roll with the inevitable punches of corporate mergers, spin-offs, and reorganizations. We hope that it will help you and your organization avoid the waste and frustration of developing elegant information architectures on paper that can never be implemented in the distributed information environments that are proliferating within the modern enterprise.