Getting My Bearings: Enterprise Information Architecture in Context My work recently shifted from the comfortably concrete world of Web sites and portals to the cloudy conceptual world of enterprise information architecture. The folks I’m working with …

They’re beginning to understand the concept; the “how we achieve it” however is much more difficult to explain and get commitment for (ie. the individual components of your diagram).

One step at a time as they say…

James Melzer has cerated a very interesting poster outlining enterprise information architecture in context. To quote: I created this graphic to give everyone a starting point, a point of common understanding. The graphic depicts how enterprise informa…

There is some reasoning behind the three ‘kinds’ of content I used (content/document/record). First, there is a statutory definition for record, so that one stands out clearly from other kinds of information. Second, I wanted to use known and established kinds: there are whole communities of practice and enterprise systems designed around the idea of managing content, documents, and records separately. This may not have been wise, in hindsight, but that’s the world we live in. Lastly, the scope I wanted for the diagram was content management, however broadly defined. Some of the entities you suggest (e.g. wisdom) are not content at all. Here I am defining content as narrative, visual, or audio information recorded to serve a business purpose.

I now see the need for another layer of labels. The things in the RM/DM/Portal/Web set were hard to label – I called them publications/collections but that connection is not as clear as it might be. These tend to become systems, although I am not representing the systems. So, for example, a Web site might be considered a publication. An organization might have three Web sites all driven out of the same system. They might have an intranet and a Web site run out of the same system. They might do records management and document management out of the same system. But the business purpose and audience for these publications are different, so the structures to organize them are different. The organizations Web site and intranet are rarely organized the same way (if they are any good).

To answer your last question: The communication is still a work in progess, I’ll report when I have more perspective.

On the “managing content” section, I am a bit confused with the “documents / records / content” section along with the “records management / document management / portal/intranet / web” sections. The terms just don’t seem as logical to me as they could be.

For the former, I might vote for delineating something like “data / information / knowledge / wisdom” or “tacit / explicit content.” There just doesn’t appear to be enough differentiation between the terms you’ve used.

For the latter, it appears as though you mix tasks (ORGANIZE – records/document management) with vehicles for delivering content (PUBLISH – portal/web). My vote would be to further differentiate between the tasks by possibly color coding and labeling the “organize” components and “publish” components.