|
|
|
Information Architecture Review © Jon Blunt 1997 As TiAC looks forward to its fifth year, I wanted to take the time to stand back and try and summarize the problem of Information Architecture as I see it. Here, I am using the word problem in the same way that a philosopher would talk about the "problem of consciousness". Consciousness exists but we can neither adequately explain or describe it. Similarly, in the last decade of the twentieth century and the fifth decade of the computer age, no company or organization is without an information architecture. That still leaves the question of what issues an organization is attempting to address when they form an information architecture group and the larger question of what issues they should be addressing. Because I have had the opportunity to work and meet with so many involved in the field over these years I am becoming more confident in answering these questions. Before proceeding, first let me state that observation has convinced me that the answers are different. In other words, I believe most companies with information architecture groups have not positioned them, or empowered them, to provide the greatest benefit to the organization. Strategies for the Computer Age In the last fifty years, and most directly in the last twenty years, computers and telecommunications have changed our capability to organize and manage organizations. The amount of data and information flowing through a company is an ever larger stream. Computers make possible the design and delivery of personalized services and the development of mass customization and small batch manufacturing. Managing the introduction and application of information technology is therefore one of the skills an organization must master if it is to be able to respond to changes in its environment. For many organizations a passive strategy may be appropriate. In some industries there may be no competitive advantage from pioneering new technologies. However, a passive strategy is not a blind one. The organization still needs enough of a formal and informal decision process to knowingly adopt this strategy. Even when a passive strategy is appropriate for investing in technology, a company must have the skills to implement successfully those projects it does undertake. Restated, even where innovative use of information technology is not a critical success factor, poor implementation can be a critical failure factor. Dependence on information technology for daily operations has also led organizations to develop more or less sophisticated operational capabilities in areas such as disaster recovery, while, at the same time, the impact of computers on society has ensnared public and private sector organizations in issues of data privacy and ethics. In summary, information technology is a vital resource for many organizations. It creates many opportunities and imposes a significant number of burdens and responsibilities. Unfortunately the rapid evolution of the technology has amplified these issues. Traditional corporate planning and depreciation cycles have been made obsolete as each generation of technology surpasses the last. This dynamic creates the opportunities for changing the definition of markets and for building significant and sustained competitive advantage. However, rapid change has also made it difficult for companies to integrate information technology and business planning. Until recently, most companies delegated the whole management of information technology to specialized Information Systems groups that often remained outside the mainstream of the business. Where a business unit or functional group took ownership of their information technology resources this often generated significant conflict with the central IS groups trying to integrate and coordinate the organization’s investment in technologies and skills.
Onward, onward Today, compared to ten years ago, many more middle and senior managers are computer literate. Yet the technology has not stood still and, as networks become the dominant technology, the models and paradigms for managing IS formed in the era of mainframes or stand alone PCs need to change. It is to be hoped that the experience of living through dramatic change has made today’s managers aware of the continuous nature of that change, and prepared them to make better use of the knowledge of their junior subordinates than did their managers. For the information technology revolution, like the industrial revolution before it, places a premium on knowledge, at the expense of wisdom. When change is slower longevity and experience are more valued. But when change is faster, knowledge of new technologies and methods can be found outside the organization and often in the younger generation. The mismatch between technical knowledge and managerial authority places a strain on traditional organizations. Many organizations, therefore, face a number of barriers to using information technology more effectively.
Faced with this reality it is not surprising that the information technology planning and the business planning cycle are out of phase, or that consequently IS is seen as a restraint on the organization rather than an enabler. The picture is not completely negative however. We no longer program major business systems in assembly language. Data is usually stored in relational databases, not in program specific file structure. Object oriented methods, if not object oriented languages, promise to improve the reusability of software. Last, the Internet is forcing the accelerated development of standardized techniques for cooperation between distributed applications, extending to the creation and management of multi-platform, multi-organization systems. Indeed, these two pictures are the heart of the paradox. Technology races ahead, rapidly expanding the realm of the possible, but many organizations are crippled in their ability to respond adequately to the challenge.
Information Architecture Given the direction technology is going it is not surprising that most organizations’ information architecture efforts have focused on bringing order to the technology. In the last ten years IS has matured through three major generations of IT:
Each of these transitions has introduced more variety into the technology mix. Even the hegemony of Microsoft in PC software is no comparison to the lock IBM had on Information Technology architecture in the sixties and early seventies. The scale of the investment and the impossibility of changing simultaneously from one generation of technology to another has forced the development of tools for designing and modeling systems, and for managing rolling migrations of systems, data and users from one generation of platforms to another. Again, at least in concept, we have moved far along the path from the islands of automation of the mainframe era. The need for an enterprise information base is widely recognized even if there are still departmental files. Unstructured applications, such as e-mail, now span companies and in some cases their business partners. Many organizations are building data warehouses and data marts to provide widespread access to historical data. It is these integration forces that have led the development of system and information architectures. IS discovered it needed a representation of these evolving systems that was not made immediately obsolete by the next upgrade. One of Eberhard Rechtin’s heuristics in his book, Systems Architecture, is that "The leverage is at the interfaces." This truth is borne out by the high prominence in these architectures to interfaces and protocols. These models are also highly influenced by the ADA language and object-oriented programming which separate internal processes and structure from the external interface. In those cases where a system is suitably partitioned this lends considerable flexibility and scope for evolution. Since the internal structure of a model is hidden it can be changed so long as the external interface does not change. This principle is behind the development of "object brokers" which allow a local application to find a remote service to supply a specific capability, e.g., modeling or credit checking, without having to know anything more than how to ask for the service.
Architecture at the Boundaries: The Man Machine Interface This focus on managing the technology is unfortunate because it does not address the equally important questions of purpose and obtaining value for the organization. Instead, the realization that technology is complex and difficult tends to reinforce the divisions between IS and the rest of the business. The interface between the information systems and the organization is just as interesting as any network protocol, and often more intractable. Interesting boundaries occur at several levels of aggregation from the individual to the whole enterprise. Man machine interface is usually interpreted as the interaction between an individual and a system, including both physical and mental aspects. Understanding of the interface includes both how easily an individual can survey and assimilate the information presented, and how in turn the user can give instructions or make requests of the system. The next level of aggregation is to understand how a system affects teams and decision making. As electronic communication replaces, or enhances, personal communication this is becoming more important. The impact a technology with a large social content has on a team is often not deterministic. Left to themselves some of the teams will adopt the technology and move on while others will exhibit lower productivity. The field of socio-tech design focuses on these small group and team interactions. Last, the opportunities created by information technology are so large that they produce a set of dynamic relationships between the organization and the system. These issues are usually the concern of middle and senior managers, though they have a much wider impact. The financial cost of systems can be high but the cultural and political costs can be even higher. Information redistributes power and resources around the organization. Investments with the greatest potential may be ones that directly challenge some of the basic tenants of the organizational culture. A decision to outsource some activities, or to home base some employees, may be just obvious rationalizations that networks make feasible. Yet, for other organizations, these decisions can require them to set aside some cherished principles. It is clear that most IS managers are ill-equipped to deal with these questions. Unlike the tying together of technology these issues are both ill-defined and highly emotional. They often do not respond well to the rational decision making process with which so many IS managers are comfortable. However, these issues do not go away if ignored; they directly bear upon how the organization thinks about its investment in technology and, implicitly, those it has employed to mange it. Most organizations have not developed a design and decision making framework that adequately integrates the technical, social, and political aspects of the management of information technology. I do not know if this is what senior management means when it asks if we have an information architecture. I do not think they mean the IT/IS centric version that so many companies have. "Do we have an information architecture?" is short hand for, "Tell me why I don’t need to worry about this." Just knowing that the implementation of the systems has high integrity probably does not answer that question. An incomplete list of relevant questions could be:
Now if these questions are being addressed adequately that is fine and then information architecture is probably appropriately positioned. But architecture is too useful a word and concept to be limited to the technical space.
Design and Discourse Taking the highest level view, an organization is a system for producing "value" from a set of resources that includes technology and people. The requirements for this system are not totally defined but some general operating conditions can be stated. The environment of the organization will change, presenting it with new challenges. The processes put in place should survive the loss of key individuals. Within this system there are one or more sub-systems whose function is to obtain "value" for the organization from the application of information technology, usually in combination with other inputs. These sub-systems are the appropriate domain of information architecture. The information architecture should cover all the aspects of creating continuing value. This includes the human resource functions, technology scanning and acquisition, and the development and implementation process as well as the design of the technology itself. There are some contrasts between this concept of architecture and the more common technology focused ones. Technology architectures tend to be closely related to the domain of system engineering where there are well defined requirements and quantifiable metrics. Where technology, organization and business meet, the evaluation of a design has to fall back on conformance to some general principles that can be tested not by rules but by judgment And this introduces the other element that is so often missing in organizations’ IT planning dialog. Most of the hard issues an organization has to address in developing and implementing plans are the political and cultural barriers. Yet the complexity of the technology throws barriers to engagement with the business. IS needs more Trojan horses, mechanisms to get discussion of IT issues happening in the business. Architectures in this sense are languages for shared design. Architectures have several valuable characteristics:
These are the characteristics that so much IS planning lacks. The relentless drive of technology has absorbed most of the creative and managerial energy in the technology staff, and their architectures are too often inward looking, concentrating on the concerns of managing the technology. Yet the IA groups in most organizations do not have the mandate or credibility to manage the cross organizational dialog envisioned here. The next step for information architecture requires a radical rethinking of the relationship of IS to the rest of the organization. It is not clear if IA can be the catalyst for this change, or can only mature when some of the organizational constraints have been removed Summary This paper has stated that there are large issues about the integration of IT and business planning that are not being adequately addressed. A tool, information architecture, is available to create frameworks and structures for addressing these problems, but the training and inclination of IS professionals has kept this in a technical domain. Organizations need to develop their architecture for the integration of technology and business management if they are to realize the potential of their investment in information technology.
|
