Design Conversations: Envisioning Content-Rich Enterprise Systems

As the world enters into a new century and millennium, information technology stands at the cusp of a new era. The unification of all human intellectual knowledge is within our reach, if not our grasp. A variety of enterprises - businesses and governments, educational institutions and non-governmental organizations - have transitioned in a few short decades from ponderous, inward-facing, manual bureaucracies to highly automated electronic communities that freely and easily interconnect with others. The Internet forms a backbone over which travel the messages and transactions of a global marketplace of commodities and ideas.

There are, however, still numerous construction delays on the information highway. Envisioning these new systems is much harder than anyone ever expected. The premise of this book is that the design of complex, content-intensive systems - the hallmark of what we refer to as the content-rich enterprise - is problematic because our mental models of both the problem and the solution are inadequate. We don’t yet know how to converse intelligently about information architecture and system design - and yet, every non-trivial system starts its life in hour after hour of conversation among the decision-makers, end users, and IT staff.

This volume is a tutorial for managers, professionals, and IT staff in the concepts that can transform your organization’s fragmented and compartmentalized data stores into an effective repository of knowledge propagation, and the enterprise itself into a highly adaptable learning environment.

You’ll learn a pattern language for content-rich systems, an integrated set of concepts that makes immediate sense to those who work in information technology, but also comes easily and naturally to members of the decision-maker and end-user communities. You’ll see the new language in use in realistic design conversations where stakeholders struggle to understand the possibilities and find an optimal solution.

What emerges is a way of collaboratively envisioning and designing effective and adaptable information spaces. Where traditional architecture integrates materials and landscape to create an environment that is useful and esthetically pleasing, information architecture integrates an enterprise’s available internal and external content to form an environment for working and learning—an environment that is as pleasant to use as it is productive. It also structures safe access paths into the enterprise corpus for the general public as well as privileged outsiders, and help us to re-envision access to the Web itself as a tool for competitive advantage.

The time has come when information architecture is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for enterprises - corporations, governments, educational institutions, and non-profit organizations - that intend to survive and thrive in the vast ocean of facts and rumors that is today’s global information infrastructure. This book is an enjoyable and useful guide for the intrepid adventurers who navigate these as-yet-uncharted waters.