Most organisations aren’t naturally information-centric: they are focused on people and processes. But information is a crucial asset to any organization, and as such it has to be structured and managed appropriately in order to support:
- Fast, easy access to relevant information
- Interoperability of information in disparate systems
- Sharing of implicit and explicit knowledge across the organization
- Rationalization of information management resource
- Publishing content created for one output (e.g. print) to other outputs (e.g. web)
- Creation of new products and services from existing material
- Re-engineering of systems which have become cumbersome as more data is added
- Enforcement of editorial disciplines to support effective search and presentation
Metataxis has many years’ experience helping organizations to understand their content, and designing information architectures to fit their specific goals, whether it’s the delivery of a new web site, the production of multi-format referenced works, or a full enterprise information architecture combining document and records management with standard data models. Typical IA deliverables are:
- An information inventory, which could give a high level overview of content and its management and use, or at the other end of the scale, a detailed description of each information collection within the organisation. See our information inventory services.
- A content model, describing the appropriate levels of granularity for the information and the relationships between the different parts (for example, a report and its constituent sections)
- A find strategy, which sets what kinds of search or browse techniques and tools are required to support user requirements for discoverability. See our findability services.
- A metadata framework, defining the policies, processes, metadata and controlled vocabularies required to tag content (documents, records, folders, sites, web pages, etc) to support its creation, management, discovery and retrieval, use and disposition. See our metadata services.
- A taxonomy, thesaurus or ontology, to support discoverability via search or browse
- A site map, showing the content and navigation throughout a web site
- A file plan, giving the folder structure for a repository (which in the case of SharePoint would include Site Collection and Site structures)
- An addressing framework, defining a set of namespaces to conceptually group documents, together with a document identifier syntax which will allow all documents to be globally and persistently identified.
We can help you realise your information architecture in SharePoint (2007 and 2010), and can also help you migrate your content into your new repositories. |
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Recent IA projects
Open Access Training
 Metataxis run a number of open access information architecture training courses including:
- Introduction to taxonomies, London - 13 October 2010
- Taxonomies: theory and practise, Manchester - 22 October 2010
- Faceted taxonomies, London - 11 November 2010
Bespoke Training
We can also deliver bespoke training targeted to your organisation's needs. This can be done either in-house or at a dedicated location of your choice and can be cheaper and more focussed on your particular requirements. Contact us to discuss your requirements. |