Information Architecture & Governance

People using platforms like Microsoft Teams or SharePoint often wonder why nothing much changes or improves in their organization once they have rolled things out. Most often, we find its because content is moved into SharePoint or Teams without any sound organizing principles. Instead, the content just becomes shared folders in the cloud. What’s missing is usually good information architecture and governance.

Information Architecture

Information architecture (IA) describes how we store, organize, find, and work with information to make it more understandable and useful. We’re all familiar with the organizational structure of places like grocery stores but we often struggle with organizing our work in similar ways. IA is as much art as it is science and we’ve painted many an IA picture over the years. Let us help:

• Create a robust content structure
• Design and optimize your navigation
• Develop and manage custom taxonomies
• Evaluate your search configuration
• Build an excellent user experience

Governance

Your governance plan has to be a living resource, just like your intranet. It’s not just some document you store away to say you have one. Governance is a way to oversee a solution after launch to ensure all employees are on the same page. It can be thought of as a rule book, a shared mental model, guidelines, whatever is the best framing for your culture and overall goals.

A good governance process ensures everyone has the same clarity around goals, identifies key players and their responsibilities, acts as a framework to improve your intranet over time, and helps reduce content sprawl. Even the simplest governance model is effective in ensuring continued success. Let us help you create or update a realistic plan that you can monitor regularly and modify as your business needs shift.

We guide you in communicating your strategy, business processes, and defining roles to support an actionable governance plan that works in the real world and will scale with your business by:

• Aligning with compliance and record retention needs
• Implementing change management and process controls
• Formalizing security & external sharing guidelines
• Maintaining content quality throughout the full lifecycle
• Creating a seamless user experience
• Identifying clear decision makers to support your governance long-term

Above all, the governance approach we build with you is right for your organization: there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all.

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