Intranet Strategy & Architecture: ASIS&T 2002

The preconference seminar Intranet Strategy & Architecture, taught by Peter Morville, emphasized the “strategy” portion of the title. After a brief discussion of IA ( “it’s a balance of art and science, more importantly it’s not an exact science” ) he quickly moved on to business strategy, a topic to which I sorely needed an introduction. Three books Peter mentioned were On Competition, Reinventing Strategy, and Strategy Safari.

Some things to consider when building an intranet or redesigning one

• have a collection development policy
• retain what works with the old system
• our information seeking often begins with finding the individual that knows something about what we are after

Since we use people to find content (and content to find people) socially translucent systems help us work with these natural tendencies. (See Semantic Studios, “Social Network Analysis” ) Examples include:

• Babble (see “Socially Translucent Systems: Social Proxies, Persistent Conversation, and the Design of Babble” )
• purchase circles (like on amazon)

We ended the seminar by coming up with four different scenarios for four different environments devised by considering the crossing of two continuums. How can we make decisions now that will take care of these scenarios? We must come up with strategies to deal with them. Had to consider

Tasks Virtual Work place (telecommuting) outsourcing multimedia privacy copyright avoiding redundancy accessibility personalization issues and privacy

Speaking of personalization, the WSJ had an amusing article on personalization gone awry, (via SIGIA-L).