Back at the beginning of October I spoke at the 2005 East Coast IA Retreat on Enterprise Information Architecture. The presentation was about using the language of Enterprise Architects to talk about IA and particularly content management among enterprise planning folk. So I went over the Zachman Framework and offered ideas on how to extend the framework to accommodate user experience (and IA). I am planning a more extensive post on the topic soon.
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Several people expressed an interest in a download version of the diagram: original v1.0 | final v2.0. Version 2.0 extends and enhances the original, which I blogged about here: EIA in Context diagram.
I created this graphic to give everyone a starting point, a point of common understanding. The graphic depicts how enterprise information architecture (EIA) relates to enterprise content management (ECM). I originally envisioned the two things as being part of the same overall process, but I came to a realization that they are better understood as two separate activities.
As I see it, ECM is a permanent ongoing process to control a never-ending stream of content – to file it, organize it, and deliver it to the people who need it. EIA is the intelligence behind content management. It translates user needs, business goals, policies, and standards into a coherent plan for content management.
On the left side of the document are the inputs that inform and drive EIA. Even in organizations where there is no formal EIA, these kinds of inputs exist and are actively sculpting the content landscape. My diagram is pretty specific to the federal government landscape in the US, but you can extrapolate the kinds of inputs that are relevant in your organization.
In the center of the diagram are the products of EIA, five kinds of structures. These structures are the key to everything. In fact, that part makes me a bit nervous, because they are very hard to define in such a small space. For examples of search and navigation structures, see Lou Rosenfeld’s EIA Roadmap diagram.
On the right side of the diagram, we see how these structures help people create and catalog content, organize and publish collections, and filter and deliver content to audiences. They are the translation of an entire organization’s rules and knowledge into a set of rules that help people find and use content they need to get work done. That’s pretty powerful stuff.