on IA for the WWW, chapters 17 & 18

As someone already in the position of having to justify staff, student, consulting, and technical services expenditures to a variety of decision-makers, I cannot stress strongly enough how useful Morville & Rosenfeld’s chapter ‘Making the case for IA’ will be. Some of the tactics are familiar – the calculation of returns on investment based on sometimes unknowable numbers or points of comparison—but ultimately still worthwhile to review. Also, the information architecture value checklist should be distributed widely to any working IA, especially as each bullet begs to be illustrated with a quick example that can be shared with potential clients.

Regarding business strategy and aligning IA with that, the questions Morville lists on page 381 seem invaluable—especially, as Morville notes, if a business strategy is not clearly stated but parts of it can be gotten at through stakeholder interviews and the use of these questions, (“What is your company really good at? What is your company really bad at? What makes your company different from your competitors? How are you able to beat your competitors? How can your web site or intranet contribute to competitive advantage?”). The usefulness of identifying all of the invisible base of information architecture cannot be overstated, either. In much the same way that a solid base can form the foundation for a building, as well as its successor buildings over time as the structures give in to stress and time (but the foundation remains intact), Morville posits a solid information architectural base (from addressing content, context, and users, on through using good classification schemes and IA strategies) can support a lasting, changeable top-level IA.

References

Morville, P. & Rosenfeld, L. (2006). Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (3rd ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.