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2 - PRIMARY Keyword matches for ARTICLE
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Summary
Version history
Initial considerations
Conceptual underpinnings
Simple elements: pages, files, and stacks thereof
Creating relationships: connectors and arrows
All at once: concurrent sets
Breaking it up: continuation points
Commonalities: areas and iterative areas
Reusable components: flow areas and references
Basic concepts for conditional elements
Making choices: decision points
Pathfinding: conditional connectors and arrows
Multiple choice: conditional branches
Choose one or more: conditional selectors
One decision, many paths: clusters
Some restrictions may apply: conditional areas
Conclusion
Downloadable shape libraries
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Big Ideas - What is the future of Information Architecture? What are the critical issues of Interaction Design? When should it be called Experience Design? These articles help you get a grip on the big picture
Case Studies - Insightful accounts with lessons about what worked and what didn’t. First-hand accounts from an insider’s point of view.
Forerunners - Exploring the roots of our disciplines. Who were the heroes, the madmen, the innovators who laid the groundwork for us today?
How to: Deliverables & Documentation - Tips, techniques and step-by-step guides to creating effective deliverables.
How to: Methods & Approaches - When should you do a low-fidelity prototype? How about a site index? How does your work need to integrate with the branding? We look at both strategies for approaching problems and tactics for implementing solutions.
Interviews with today’s current and up-and-coming leaders in the field. Find out how they think and what they are doing next.
Professional Practices - Essential people-handling, project and business skills you wish they’d taught in school, as well as ideas that we can borrow from others.
Reviews - Find out the Boxes and Arrows take on the your favorite website, software or the hottest book before spending your hard earned money…
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6 - SECONDARY Keyword matches for INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
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Faceted classifications are increasingly common on the World Wide Web, especially on commercial web sites (Adkisson ). This is not surprising--facets are a natural way of organizing things. Many web designers have probably rediscovered them independently by asking, "What other ways would people want to view this data? What's another way to slice it?" A survey of the literature on applying facets on the web (Denton ) shows that librarians think it a good idea but are unsure how to do it, while the web people who are already doing it are often unaware of S.R. Ranganathan, the Classification Research Group, and the decades of history behind facets.
This paper will attempt to bridge the gap by giving procedures and advice on all the steps involved in making a faceted classification and putting it on the web. Web people will benefit by having a rigorous seven-step process to follow for creating faceted classifications, and librarians will benefit by understanding how to store such a classification on a computer and make it available on the web. The paper is meant for both webmasters and information architects who do not know a lot about library and information science, and librarians who do not know a lot about building databases and web sites. The classifications are meant for small or medium-sized sets of things, meant to go on public or private web sites, when there is a need to organize items for which no existing classification will do. It is certainly not the intent of this paper to show how to build another universal classification, nor to describe how a library that uses a faceted classification scheme can put their catalogue online.
There are four main sections to this paper: when to make a faceted classification, how to make one, how to store it on a computer, and how to make it work on the web. I will concentrate on the middle two sections. The question of when to use facets is not particularly difficult (leaving aside general questions about the purpose and usefulness of classifications). Detailed advice on the design and implementation of a good web site is beyond the scope of this paper and requires a companion web site, with examples, to be best understood (but see Nielsen ( ) for excellent advice). In the final section I offer some guidelines on what to consider when putting facets on the web, but the discussion is not lengthy. The two middle sections about how to make and store a faceted classification receive a much fuller treatment.
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. The KM opportunity
Some senior executives make the mistake of believing that knowledge management is an end unto itself and attempt to manage and measure KM success with that in mind. Rather, KM initiatives should be treated as intellectual capital investments aligned with specific, long-term business goals. For an organization to do this more effectively, it needs to leverage the Communities of Practice (CoPs) within its organization.
What is a community of practice? Brooke Manville, Director of Knowledge Management at McKinsey & Co., defines communities of practice as groups of people who are informally bound to one another by exposure to a common class of problems. These groups share their learnings and knowledge resources continuously and informally amongst each other for mutual benefit. Every organization has groups like these, which are typically loosely structured, decentralized, fluid, and built on personal relationships.
These CoPs are perfectly positioned to support knowledge management efforts. They are continuously capturing and sharing relevant knowledge with each other. Often, though, the knowledge captured is not directed towards a business objective and isn’t codified or validated in any formal capacity. Nor is the knowledge stored in a format that enables easy retrieval.
An organization can leverage these CoPs to further its KM objectives by stepping back and creating a list of priorities for what types of knowledge to capture and share. These priorities should directly map to the organization’s business goals and should represent what the organization needs to know to be more successful in the marketplace both at the organization and at the individual level. In other words, these priorities should be a list of "if only I knew" types of knowledge.
Once the business priorities have been identified, existing CoPs should be approached to more formally capture and roll out these organizational learnings in a piecemeal fashion using the intranet. If there aren’t any communities of practice naturally aligned to the business priorities, then new ones should be organized. Some large organizations with a history of knowledge management successes have already structured their communities of practice to do this for them on a regular, focused basis. However, these aren’t always successful initiatives because the CoPs have a hard time striking the right balance between knowledge explorations and being focused on the business goals.
Nevertheless, there are opportunities to further focus these communities of practice when using the enterprise intranet as a delivery mechanism. This is because collaborative environments such as enterprise intranets force the participants to be focused, thoughtful, and careful in their contributions. Knowing that what is published may potentially be viewed by the whole organization, or that other users may have the ability to rate the article, forces the participants to be more disciplined in their contributions. In effect, the collaborative, real-time feedback environments of a company intranet encourage self-policing and more strategic information sharing. The downside is that it can also discourage participants from sharing any information whatsoever .
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Show me a company that thinks it is using KPIs, which are measured monthly and quarterly, and I will show you measures that do not create change, alignment and growth and have never been KPIs.
Many companies are working with the wrong measures, many of which are incorrectly termed "key performance indicators" (KPIs). Companies with 20 or more KPIs lack both focus and alignment, and are underachieving. From my research, very few organisations really monitor their true KPIs. The reason is very few organisations, business leaders, writers, accountants, and consultants have explored what a KPI actually is. This article is part of a series that will shed some light into this important area, help reveal what a KPI is, and point to where to look for KPIs in your organisation.
. . .
The six characteristics of KPIs
Key Performance Indicators represent a set of measures focusing on those aspects of organisational performance that are the most critical for the current and future success of the organisation. They have certain characteristics.
KPI characteristics include
* Measured frequently e.g. daily or 24/7 (KPIs are not measured monthly)
* Acted upon by the CEO and the senior management team on a daily or 24/7 basis
* All staff understand the measure and what corrective action is required
* Responsibility can be tied down to the individual or team
* The KPI has a significant impact on the organisation e.g. it impacts most of the core critical success factors and balanced scorecard perspectives
* Positive movement affects all other performance measures in a positive way
. . .
Key Result Indicators (KRIs)
The measures commonly mislabelled as KPIs are return on capital employed, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. These measures have never been KPIs. They are something different, called "key result indicators."
KRIs (measures that have often been mistaken for KPIs) include:
* Customer satisfaction
* Net profit before tax
* Profitability of customers
* Employee satisfaction
* Return on capital employed
. . .
Performance Indicators (PIs)
In between key result indicators and true KPIs are numerous performance indicators. These complement the KPIs and are shown with them on the organisation’s, divisions’, departments’ and teams’ scorecards.
PIs could include:
* profitability of the top 10% of customers
* net profit on key product lines
* % increase in sales with top 10% of customers
* # of employees participating in the suggestion scheme
* duration of the cash to cash cycle
The common characteristic of these measures is that they are the result of many actions. They give a clear picture of whether you are travelling in the right direction. They do not, however, tell you what you need to do to improve these results.
. . .
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So, what do you do?
When people ask me what I do for a living, I usually tell them I design Web sites. Let’s face it, most people who ask that question want an answer they can understand, not an indoctrination. That’s why I don’t often use the phrase "information architect" among the uninitiated. It causes too much trouble.
It causes trouble because it’s not always easy to explain the complexities of the work information architects do. They often have to fall back on vaguely defined metaphors such as "information spaces" to describe their area of specialization. These terms, naturally, make no sense to most people. Information spaces bear only the roughest resemblance to the physical spaces people encounter in the work of those "real world" architects.
At the very least, information spaces are different from physical spaces in one crucial regard. In the real world, everything you put into space is going to be visible to visitors by default. The designer of the space has to choose to hide something. With an information space, everything is hidden by default. The only parts of the space visitors can see are those the designer has chosen to reveal.
Information architects are only able to give users a limited amount of information about the options available to them. Sure, a paragraph could be written about each navigation choice available, but stubborn users won’t read it. This puts the information architect between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Users don’t want to have to guess what’s around every corner, but they won’t sit still long enough for someone to tell them either.
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...Once you have organized information about stakeholders in this manner, you easily identify stakeholders on the basis of their power and interest in the project. Broadly speaking, stakeholders can be organized into four groups:
High Influence, High Interest: Some stakeholders might have a lot of influence over the project, and also be very interested in the project. It is vital to understand the viewpoints of such stakeholders specifically what potential objections they might raise. Spend most time on these stakeholders.
Low Influence, High Interest: Other stakeholders might have a lot of interest, but little real influence. Such stakeholders (if they are in favor of your project) can be valuable sources of information: they can get you access to documents relevant to your project, fill you in on the institutional history of past efforts in your project domain, and help you identify what the organizational challenges to the project will be. These are good stakeholders to meet with first, since each interaction is relatively low-risk.
High Influence, Low Interest: Stakeholders with high power, but low interest need to be broadly satisfied. They won’t pay attention to the fine print of your project, since they perceive the project as not affecting them. However, they have influence on whether the project will be a success: for example, they may have a vote during the approval process of a project. The goal of your interactions with this type of stakeholder should be to give them enough information about the project that they will not create obstacles for your project.
Low Influence, Low Interest: You should spend less time with stakeholders who have little influence and little interest in the project. They aren’t interested in what you are doing, and are not in a position to help you do it.
One interesting thing about the suggestions generated by this model is that interest matters more than influence in determining the value of interactions between yourself and stakeholders. High interest, low influence stakeholders give you the ammunition and contextual information needed to make your case with the high influence stakeholders. Low interest, high influence stakeholders, in contrast, simply need merely to be won over or neutralized in a fairly superficial way. Projects will succeed or fail primarily based on the actions of people who care enough to defend or oppose them. .
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The idea is that, no matter what you're doing, there's a user-centered way of doing it.
Users should be considered throughout the website design process. Usability should not be an afterthought. Testing and fixing a website after it has been built is inefficient and unlikely to produce good results. The best approach to take is to incorporate a model of "pervasive usability" into your design and production process.
The benefits of planning usability into your project are:
Increased end-user satisfaction
Increased end-user productivity, success, and completion
Reduced long-term development costs (costs incurred from fixing poorly designed products)
Reduced training and support costs
Return business to improve your competitiveness
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