10.1. Archipelagoes of Information
As do most of his books, James Michener's
Hawaii starts at the dawn of time. He describes
how the lovely Hawaiian archipelago grows over millions of years from
humble, organic beginnings, each island birthing and dying in
explosions of lava emanating from beneath the Earth's crust.
Large, complex web sites and intranets have similarly organic
beginnings. These sites are loosely connected archipelagoes of
information, starting slowly with one island, coming from sources
often unseen, exploding with change and growth, out of control. It
often goes like this: someone in the MIS department gets a web
server, sets it up, builds a small, experimental web site, and starts
having fun. Other early adopters check out this unofficial site and
get ideas of their own. The MIS boss finds out and, horrified by his
or her lack of control over the situation, forces the free-thinker to
terminate the maverick site, while enlisting someone from Graphics to
help start up the official intranet. The MIS boss later learns (to
her dismay) that the pesky Marketing Department has already decided
to contract their advertising firm to build an external site, and the
Human Resources people aren't far behind. And there are rumors
that both the Hong Kong and Hoboken divisions are setting up their
own sites....
Sites that grow this way within an organization are really a
collection of sub-sites. Their complexity runs deeper than you may
think. Indeed, the biggest challenge is often the degree to which
organizational politics intrude into the process. This isn't
surprising if we consider the differences between the ways modern
corporations and the World Wide Web work.
Corporations and other large organizations are traditionally modeled
hierarchically, structured as single entities with clear chains of
command. The power of a corporation lies in its ability to leverage
the sum of its independently working parts while laboring to keep
those parts from completely splitting apart. The Web, on the other
hand, goes completely against the grain of centralization, serving
instead as an agent of organizational chaos. Because web sites are
cheap and easy to create, corporations have a difficult time
controlling them.
As some poor souls try to bring all these separate efforts together
under the venue of a single corporate web site or intranet, the
politics can get especially ugly. Marketing wants links to its news
releases to go on the main page. Human Resources is convinced that
most of the users are going to be employees, and wants the employee
handbook front and center. And MIS's content already blankets
the main page. Meanwhile the Information Center has trashed the look
and feel of the site because they don't have the budget to pay
for professional graphic design. Have we left anyone out?
Oh, yes. The user.
The user, as we know, doesn't care about organizational
politics. The user wants information to be made accessible the way he
or she thinks, not the way the corporation thinks. Instead, the user
is often confronted with corporate jargon and organization schemes
based on corporate organization charts, and the site's value to
users and to the sponsoring organization plummet.
Unfortunately, this is a common situation. Fortunately, the
principles of information architecture can address and solve many of
these problems.
