SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Architect's Guidebook

14

Designing Your Information Architecture

By Brian Wilson

In the fantastic book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, 2007), Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld highlighted a great quote from Winston Churchill: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” This is profoundly true for SharePoint 2010 information architecture and your business.

The term “information architecture” has reached “buzzword” status in the SharePoint world. Unfortunately, the term has come to mean different things to different people, based on their roles, project experience, and skill sets. This contributes to a lack of clarity for the activities required to diligently define your SharePoint 2010 information architecture.

So, what then is “information architecture”? Let's go back to the non-SharePoint and “pure” definition. The Information Architecture Institute defines information architecture as follows:

• The structural design of shared information environments
• The art and science of organizing and labeling websites, 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

For more information, see http://iainstitute.org/documents/learn/What_is_IA.pdf.

What is “SharePoint information architecture”? SharePoint ...