The CX Blog

I’ve been reading Information Architecture for the World Wide Web–a title that bugs me since it sounds so…I don’t know, 1996. But it’s a good read and pulls together a lot of different threads to discuss a field that is still in the process of being defined:

We use the term information to distinguish information architecture from data and knowledge management. Data is facts and figures….Knowledge is the stuff in people’s heads. Knowledge managers develop tools, processes, and incentives to encourage people to share that stuff. Information exists in the messy middle. With information systems, there’s often no single “right” answer to a given question. We’re concerned with information of all shapes and sizes: web sites, documents, software applications, images, and more. We’re also concerned with metadata: terms used to describe and represent content objects such as documents, people, processes, and organizations.

In other words, information is everything–from the web site look and feel, to the experience of knowledge sharing, to structure and applications behind the website…And knowledge is the content, the learning stuff.

Say you went to a restaurant and ordered a Caesar Salad. You’re not just getting the Caesar, you’re getting the ambiance, the table setting, the pace of delivery, the floor plan and layout, the history and culture of the restaurant–your brain is taking in a lot more than the Caesar. And that “a lot more” is the information architecture of the restaurant, where the salad itself is more like the knowledge.

In a corporate setting, then, it’s not enough to have a great Caesar Salad, as it were. As Morville and Kennedy show well, the average employee spends an extra 5 minutes per day searching for something that should be more accessible–every single employee. That’s a lot of time every day. The architecture around that information may have some or many pieces missing, broken, poorly thought out or unusable resulting in a situation where even if the knowledge is there to share, the poor shlub looking for it may never find it.

More on this later!