User Research, Information Architecture, Content Strategy, Collaboration
Information Architecture often shouldn’t mirror an organisation’s structure because:
Occludes information in silos that are hard to monitor or understand.
Presumes that users know, or care, about the organisational structure.
Silos change with restructuring. Information architecture is rarely that responsive to change.
Invites design by politics and ego.
The people farthest from understanding the technology are often the ones making the strategic decisions Dennis Kardys Great opening quote in Paul Boag's book Digital Adaptation. The inference is that the people most removed from digital publishing are senior management and their influencers. This is often true, certainly in the higher-education sector. However I might extend the point of reference…
Those with the silo mentality allow a situation to develop where the customer is presented with a jumbled set of jigsaw pieces. One thing is for certain: customers do not visit you in order to do jigsaw puzzles.
No link is an island on the Web. No content is a silo. In a network, it pays to network.