Digital White Papers

7 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Architecting Information for Business Transformation Where Are We Going? The first step in implementing an information architecture program is to understand the strategic direction the business is heading in for the short- and long-term. Transformative IA initiatives do not fail because they are technically difficult (though oen they are), they fail because they do not provide the right support for the business objectives. Spend time with executive sponsors and other stakeholders to understand their vision for the future and the driving forces behind today's and tomorrow's business needs. Aligning business stakeholder support early on ensures the right direction of the information architecture program and facilitates the program's success. Technology innovations have made information available to users in ever-changing ways; what we might not realize is that technology has also shied how users think about creating, managing and consuming content. It is important to understand equally how people behave with information today and how they could behave with it in the future. Technology's Role in Information Architecture Although information architecture is a business conversation, you will not get very far without technology support. Technology plays several integral roles in both planning and implementing a good strategy: Technology provides valuable opportunities for information managers and architects to leverage developments that can help facilitate their work. Effective modeling and analytics tools can make the information architect's work much easier. Technology plays an important role related to the availability and security of information as it is distributed across systems and processes. Technology can help to ensure that information is connected, accessible, reliable and protected across mixed sources and locations. The growing demand for flexibility and agility in our business applications has led to increasingly complex systems, which, in turn, add layers of complication to the architecture of information. Key to any good information architecture strategy is a strong understanding of the relevant integration points between systems. Technical infrastructure is critical to the support of an information architecture strategy. It needs to be large enough to support the volumes of data we create and agile enough to meet both anticipated and unanticipated business needs –– often that come on short notice (e.g., interacting with rapidly deployed cloud services).

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