Symp-ly News
We’ve entered the hot, hazy, and humid summer season here in the Northern Hemisphere. Looking out the window can be a distraction to work, but we soldier on. Of course, the view each of us has is considerably different this time of year as the views from Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Iowa, and Iceland all look different! Whatever the view out your window may be, I hope you are enjoying some great family time along with a healthy work life.
Rightsizing Information Architecture
We talk a lot about information architecture (IA) at Sympraxis. When we ping each other in Teams on a given day, it’s a decent bet that the topic will be something about a better practice or a trick for IA. The thing is, many parts of a great IA can be subjective: there may be better ways to do things based on our experience, but it’s both an art and a science.
One of the reasons we discuss it so much is that we try very hard to match the information architectures we build with the maturity levels of the organizations who we build them for. Not every organization wants or needs to have the “best” IA in the world. What most people agree on is that they want their work to be easier and more effective.
Given that, often a sophisticated IA is pointless unless the people using it can understand it and gain benefit from it. It also doesn’t make sense to take a purist’s view of IA if it doesn’t bring direct benefit to most users who will interact with it. For example, how many of us have encountered a form which asks for information we know isn’t part of the process? Or maybe site URLs which can only make sense to a robot?
IA and AI
Getting “ready for AI” – in Microsoft 365, that means Copilot – means looking at your current IA and making sure you’ve got it right. One of the most important aspects for AI in this context is permissions. Copilot will find whatever content the current user has permission to as part of creating its responses. If those permissions aren’t right, then Copilot may provide answers which are meaningless, proprietary, or out of date. Taking a pass through your environment to check how things are really set up – not how you think they might be – is going to be key.
The Right IA
In the end, the right information architecture for you is going to be what you need, not “what everyone else is doing”. “Right” isn’t an absolute thing: it’s based on experience and a lot of trial and error. It’s truly a case of the dreaded consultant’s answer: “It depends.”
- Marc D Anderson
