Complexity and the practice of web information architecture

Abstract

This article describes the outcomes of research that examined the practice of web information architecture (IA) in large organizations. Using a grounded theory approach, seven large organizations were investigated and the data were analyzed for emerging themes and concepts. The research finds that the practice of web IA is characterized by unpredictability, multiple perspectives, and a need for responsiveness, agility, and negotiation. This article claims that web IA occurs in a complex environment and has emergent, self-organizing properties. There is value in examining the practice as a complex adaptive system. Using this metaphor, a pre-determined, structured methodology that delivers a documented, enduring, information design for the web is found inadequate -dominant and traditional thinking and practice in the organization of information are challenged.The World Wide Web has evolved to become a major communicating and informing medium and few modern organizations would defy the societal demand to inform via an enterprise website. As the web continues its growth in significance to organizations for information delivery, effective structuring of online information is essential to support the business and communication endeavour. Intrinsic to the nature of hypertext, a website will have an information structures regardless of whether an organization consciously implements a process for web information architecture (IA) and assembles web information with awareness and expertise. Yet the ability of website users to find information is paramount and enabled by attention to information design. Effective online information structures are a vital organizational asset and are a front on which "the struggle for commercial supremacy through information is being fought" (Evernden & Evernden, 2003, p. 95).Among other systematic approaches, an evolving structured methodology for the practice of web IA, pioneered by information professionals Rosenfeld and Morville (1998), is widely acknowledged in the literature, in education, and by practitioners. It provides a methodological and theoretical backdrop for practice in large organizations. Structured approaches to web IA have drawn on the expertise of information professionals from other traditions who have signaled the need to take control of this emergent information space and introduce processes for organizing information. At the same time, the emergent nature of the web's growth and development and the ease of participation in website publishing by multiple organizational stakeholders introduce unprecedented challenges in the structuring of information in a new information environment without established traditions and practices.Researchers have targeted specific facets of organizing website information within the enterprise. Eschenfelder (2003) examines the organizational conflict involved in developing a web IA and finds that a website must often serve multiple audiences leading to goal conflict between different organizational subunits with different target customers. ...

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