21st Century Enterprise - Collaborative Information Architecture

The advent of Internet technology brought with it an incredible amount of information that has enabled millions of people around the world to take advantage of. However, sometimes information can be a double-edged sword. While many people would consider it a benefit to have so much information now available at our disposition, critics argue whether the 21th century didn’t bring with it an overload of information.

Fortunately, the field of Information Architecture (IA) was devised as a way of helping people to manage the incredible overload of information we are faced with. The significance of this field was even closer brought to light with the invention of easy-to-use content management systems such as Sharepoint, Drupal, DNN, Joomla, Wordpress, etc. that have enabled even the most rogue Internet user to quickly build a website and organize their data.

The general perception of Information Architecture is about laying down the design of a website to organize and manage large amount of data but it doesn't end with websites only. For enterprise, it actually becomes a defining factor of a business success or failure when it comes to organize the data in such a way that it becomes a useful information which can be shared by desperate systems and people to derive informed decision at every level. This is what we call Collaborative Information Architecture (CIA). A blend of artificial and human intelligence where you align humans and machine to achieve a single purpose.

When it comes to CIA, finding an equilibrium between artificial and human intelligence is one of the toughest piece of the puzzle and whoever nails it down WINS!

Following are some of the fruits enterprises can have if they leverage CIA

1. Transparency from top to bottom
2. Easy to pass down and follow the mandate
3. Precise decisions or strategies 
4. Increased capacity & quality
5. Status quo degeneration to elimination 
6. Strong processes echo system
7. Promote standardization
8. Promotes objective thinking
9. Promotes modernization
10. Promotes internal competition 
11. Efficiency improvement

The list can go on and on, but if any of the above mentioned benefits clicked you, then CIA is for you!