This is the first post in a series(2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) on the challenges organisations face when they move from having online content and tools hosted firmly on their estate to renting space in the cloud.  We will help you to consider the options and guide you on the steps you need to take.

In this first post we show you  the most common challenges that you are likely to face and how you may overcome these.

A fast migration path, to become tenants in a cloud apartment housing unfolds a set of business critical issues that have to be mitigated:

• Wayfinding in a maze of content buckets and social habitats.
• Emerging digital Ghost Towns due to lack of information governance.
• Digital Landfills without organising principles for information and data.
• Digital Litter with little or no governance or principles for ownership, with redundant, outdated and trivial (ROT) content.
• With no strategy or plan, erodes any possibility to positive business outcome from moving to the clouds.

“WagonTrn” by Tillman at en.wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia by SreeBot. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The way forward is to settle a sustainable information architecture, that supports an information environment in constant flux. With information and data interoperable on any platform, everywhere, anytime and on any device.

You need to show how everything is managed and everyone fits together.  A governance framework can help do this.  It can show who is responsible for the intranet, what their responsibilities are and fit with the strategy and plan.  Making it available to everyone on the intranet helps their understanding of how it is managed and supports the business.

The main point is to have a governance framework and information architecture with the same scope to avoid gaps in content being managed or not being found.

Both need to be in harmony and included in any digital strategy.  This avoids competing information architectures and governance frameworks being created by different people that causes people to have inconsistent experiences not finding that they need and using alternative, less efficient, ways in future to find what they need to help with their work.

Background

Building huts, houses and villages is an emerging social construction. As humans we coordinate our common resources, tools and practices. A habitat populated by people needs housekeeping rules with available resources for cooking, cleaning, social life and so on. Routines that defines who does what task and by when in order to keep everything ok.

A framework with governing principles that set out roles and responsibilities along with standards that set out the expected level of quality and quantity of each task that everyone is engaged and complies with, is similar to how the best intranets and digital workplaces are managed.

In the early stages with a small number of habitats the rules for coordination are pretty simple, both for shared resources between the groups and pathways to connect them. The bigger a village gets, it taxes the new structures to keep things smooth. When we move ahead into mega cities with 20+ million people living close, it boils down to a general overarching plan and common infrastructures, but you also need local networked communities, in order to find feasible solutions for living together.

Like villages and mega cities there is a need for consistency that helps everyone to work and live together.  Whenever you go out you know that there are pavements to walk on, roads for driving, traffic lights that we stop at when they turn red and signs to help us show the easiest way to get to our destination.

Sustainable architecture and governance creates a consistent user experience. A well structured information architecture that is aligned with a clear governance framework sets out roles and responsibilities. Publishing standards based on business needs that supports the publishers follow them. This means wherever content is published, whether it is accredited or collaborative, it will appear to be consistent to people and located where they expect it to be.  This encourages a normal way to move through a digital environment with recognizable headings and consistently placed search and other features.

This allegori, fits like a glove when moving into large enterprise-wide shared spaces for collaboration. Whether it is cloud based, on-premises or a mix thereof. The social constructions and constraints still remain the same. As an IT-services on tap, cloud, has certainly constraints for a flexible and adjustable habitual construction to be able to host as many similar habitats as possible. But offers a key solutions to instantly move into! Tenants share the same apartment building (Sharepoint online).

When the set of habitats grow, navigation in this maze becomes a hazard for most of us. Wayfinding in a digital mega city, is extremely difficult. To a large extent, enterprises moving into collaboration suites suffer from the same stigma. Regardless if it is SharePoint, IBM Connections, Google Apps for Work, or a similar setting. It is not a discussion of which type of house to choose, but rather which architecture and plan that work in the emerging environment.

Information Architecture for Digital Habitats

If one leans upon linked-data,  linked-open-data, and emerging semantic web and web of data standards, there are a set of very simple guidelines that one should adhere to when building a Digital Village or Mega City. The 5 stars, our beacon of light!

All collections and shared spaces, should have persistent URI:s, which is the fourth star in the ladder. When it comes to the third star of non-proprietary formats it obviously becomes a bit tricky, since i.e. MS Sharepoint and MS Office like to encourage their own format to things. But if one add resource descriptions to collections and artifacts using Dublin Core elements, it will be possible to connect different types of matter. With feasible and standardised resource descriptions it will be possible to add schemas and structures, that can tell us a little bit more about the artifacts or collection thereof. Hence the option to adhere to the second star. The first star, will inside the corporate setting become key to connect different business units, areas with open licenses and with restrictions to internal use only and in some cases open for other external parties.

Linking data-sets, that is collections or habitats, with different artifacts is the fifth star. This is where it all starts to make sense, enabling a connected digital workplace. Building a city plan, with pathways, traffic signals and rules, highways, roads, neighborhoods  and infrastructural services and more. In other words, placemaking!

Placemaking is a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces. Placemaking capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential, with the intention of creating public spaces that promote people’s health, happiness, and well being.

We will cover more about how this applies to Office 365 and SharePoint in our next post.

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Fredric Landqvist research blog
Mark Morell intranet-pioneer