September 29, 2003

DC-2003: Meeting Employee Needs through Enterprise IA

The plenary speaker is Mary Lee Kennedy of Microsoft's Knowledge Network Group. She is speaking on meeting employee needs using information architecture and management. I'm going to jot down some rough notes. If I can find a copy of her presentation, I'll link to it.
The focus is really on the employee and the business, rather than the technology. Good start.
They've identified six criteria of information excellence. An excellent information system should help employees:

  • Find the right quality and quantity of information.
  • Find relevant information.
  • Ensure the trust and authority of the information.
  • Find who else has the knowledge they're looking for.
  • Find the same information through any starting point (portal, search, etc).
  • Ensure that employees can learn about new relevant resources. "People want to know what they don't know."

Their area of focus is organizing the intranet, finding the right information, and finding people and their knowledge.
One of the places they started at was talking to people about information lifecycle management. They thought this would be hard, but it turned out that people got the concepts very easily.
Then, they built a site directory. Each site within the intranet is tagged with a variety of metadata, allowing users to find their way to the sites via the main microsoftweb portal.
Microsoft's internet and intranet share a taxonomy (probably multiple taxonomies). One nifty application for the intranet was a glossary lookup tool. This tool simply exposed some of the taxonomy data in a simple way on the intranet. The hope was that this tool would help address the problem of employees using similar terms to mean different things.

Kennedy outlined the four key pieces of their enterprise architecture:


  • The technology platform (MS stuff, naturally. Lots of Sharepoint.)

  • Taxonomies.

  • Content Management

  • Shared services management

She finished by talking about the challenges Microsoft faces in this arena:


  • There is now an expectation that information will be managed, but it often isn't.

  • Putting content into context, especially as contexts can change rapidly.

  • Automation. As she said, "We need to automate, but there are so many solutuions." It difficult to mix and match the approaches in the right way.

  • Standards. She didn't say anything else. Heh.

  • Integrating internal and external info.

Over all, it was a good talk. I've heard a good deal of the detail before, but she put it together in a nice way.