Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3rd Edition

Chapter 19. Information Architecture for the Enterprise

What the goal of EIA is (it’s not centralization)

Practical EIA design techniques for top-down and bottom-up navigation, search, and emergent or “guerrilla” approaches

How in-house EIA competency can and often does grow, both strategically and operationally

What EIA work needs to get done, and what kinds of people should do it

How to pay for and position an in-house EIA group

What EIA services should be provided

How to grow an EIA group over time

Information Architecture, Meet the Enterprise

What’s enterprise information architecture (EIA)? Quite simply, the practice of information in the enterprise setting.

Sorry, that definition was accurate but not too helpful. Let’s back up and make sure we understand what an enterprise is. Most would say that it’s a large, physically distributed organization—usually a corporation or a government agency, but we’d also count substantial academic institutions and nonprofits. Enterprises suffer from problems big and complicated enough to merit serious, expensive solutions. (Hence, software marketers have found that prepending the term “enterprise-class” to their products’ names is a reasonably reliable path to a condo in Aspen.)

But “large” and “physically distributed” aren’t what really defines an enterprise. In fact, the most telling attribute is a place where “one hand doesn’t know what the other one’s doing.” Or, one hand ignores or doesn’t care what the other’s doing. Or that first hand absolutely ...