PeopleSoft.com Case Study Enterprise Information Architecture March 16, 2002

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PeopleSoft.com Case StudyEnterprise Information
ArchitectureMarch 16, 2002

• Chiara Fox, PeopleSoftPeter Merholz, Adaptive
  Path

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What Well Talk About

• I. Project Overview
• II. The Role of the IA In the Enterprise
• III. Merging Top-Down and Bottom-Up IA
• IV. Content Analysis Methodologies

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I. Project Overview The Problem

• Three separate web properties with different
  architectures
• PeopleSoft.com, Customer Connection, and Alliance
  Connection
• No unified user experience and quality varies
• Resources are duplicated (sometimes triplicated)
• Hard for users to find things cross-site due to
  differences in IA
• Difficult to share content that is the same
  across sites
• Each site has separate technical backend
• Sites published with FutureTense, Lotus Notes,
  and other relational databases
• Three sites, three search engines, no structured
  content
• Two Internet Systems teams to support the
  different platforms
• Need to plan for implementation of PeopleSoft
  Portal

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Project Overview The Team

• Consultants Adaptive Path and Lot21
• Indi Young, Janice Fraser, Peter Merholz, Marcus
  Haid
• In-house Web development team
• Chiara Fox, Information Architect
• Camille Sobalvarro, Manager Design Information
  Architecture
• 11 web producers
• 10 member migration posse
• 2 thesaurus developer/IA/indexer consultants
• 3 designers 2 design consultants
• 4 usability and metrics specialists
• 15 technical developers 3 CMS consultants

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Project Overview The Process
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Project Overview Implementation Tracks

• Visual design and site style guide
• Content migration, including ROT removal
• Installation and preparation of Interwovens
  TeamSite (templates, workflow, scripting)
• Metadata development (schema, vocabularies,
  indexing)
• Training (on using system, creating and using
  templates, architecture, indexing)
• Refining IA at a highly detailed level as content
  was migrated

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II. The Role of the IA in the Enterprise

• Hub of the entire process
• Liaison between many teams
• Migrator training
• One title, many roles

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Role of the IA Hub of Process

• Only team member with detailed knowledge of all
  content on all sites
• Had vision of how sites should function when
  complete
• Understood every aspect of the architecture,
  wireframes, blueprint, and other specifications

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Role of the IA Liaison Between Many Teams

• Consultants
• Information architecture, CMS implementation,
  graphic design
• Internet Systems
• In-house designers
• Other departments within PeopleSoft, such as
  product marketing

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Role of the IA Migrator Training

• Understand new architecture
• How content fits into wireframes
• Use of CMS templates
• Ask Dr. IA newsletter

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Role of the IA One Title, Many Roles

• Project manager
• XML coder
• Vocabulary editor
• Content migrator
• Copyeditor
• Directory creator
• CMS system architecture designer

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III. Merging Top-Down and Bottom-Up IA

• Two primary approaches to developing the new
  information architecture
• Top-Down
• Driven by user research
• Develop mental models of audience types
• Derive main site organization from this
  understanding of approaches to the task
• Bottom-Up
• Foundation for designing architecture
• Building product module pages
• Metadata development
• Site and product indexes

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Top-Down IA User Interviews

• 19 subjects
• 6 potential customers, 7 current customers, 6
  alliance partners
• Four slices C-level, Director, Manager,
  Implementer
• Hour-long task analysis interviews, probing how
  the person was involved in the process of
  purchasing enterprise-level software

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Create a mental model for an audience
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For each set of tasks, map the content thatcould
be used to support it
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Which still resembles
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Bottom-Up IA Forms the Foundation

• Closely linked with the content analysis
• Focused on
• Understanding and describing the content
• Finding the patterns and groupings
• Matching content with user needs
• Results are leveraged in different ways

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Bottom-Up IA Building Product Module Pages

• Went through the site and pulled together all
  information related to products
• Support
• Upgrades
• Marketing
• Used sticky notes to gather the items into
  logical groups
• Logical groups became the tabs on the module pages

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Bottom-up IA Metadata Development

• 12 attribute schema developed based upon patterns
  found and functionality we wanted
• 10 controlled vocabularies developed of varying
  complexity
• Individual thesauri were developed for the
  products, services, and subject attributes
• Semi-automatic indexing tool used to tag content,
  as well as manual tagging

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FINANCIALS Financial Analytics   FINANCIAL
MANAGEMENT Financial Analytics Analytic
Forecasting Financial Analytic Forecasting
Financial Forecasting Asset Liability
Management Liability Management Asset
Management Managing Assets Balanced
Scorecard Billing Bills Budgeting
Budgets CFO Portal Portal for CFO Chief
Financial Officer Portal Portal for Chief
Financial Officer Contracts
Contracting Deduction Management
Deductions Managing Deduction eBill
Payment e-Bill Payment Bill Payment Expense
s Financial Insight Financial
Analytics General Ledger G/L Payables
Accounts Payable A/P Projects
Purchasing Receivables Accounts
Receivable A/R   MARKETPAY
MarketPlace   TREASURY MANAGEMENT Deal
Management Managing Deals Management of
Deals Risk Management Risk Managing Risk
Management of Risk
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Bottom-up IA Site Index Product Index

• Alternative to the primary navigation for getting
  to content
• Indexed just like a back of the book index
• Product index based upon the product vocabulary
• Australian Indexers Society award for Web Indexes

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IV. Content Analysis Methodologies

• Many methodologies of content analysis were
  employed
• Content inventory
• Unified content map
• Product matrix
• Classification scheme analysis

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Content Analysis Content Inventory

• Clicked through thousands of pages across the
  three properties (8,000 lines in the Excel
  spreadsheet)
• Automated attempts insufficientmanual attention
  required
• Tagged each piece of content with metadata,
  preparing it for both IA and CMS migration
• Content types
• Where it lives
• Link Ids
• Etc.

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Content Analysis Unified Content Map

• Graphical representation of content on the sites
• Shows redundancies and gaps in content between
  the sites

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• PeopleSoft.com
• Customer Connection

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Content Analysis Product Matrix

• Began as a way to understand how products fit
  together
• Illustrates the atom gt molecule gt crystal model
• Forms the basis of the product hierarchy
• Now used in other departments to understand how
  products are structured

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Content Analysis Classification Scheme Analysis

• Done early in project
• Compare terms used across the different sites
• Great for building a case for the project by
  showing inconsistencies
• Used to discover alternate terms for vocabularies

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Thank You

• Chiara Fox
• Information Architect, PeopleSoft
• chiara_fox_at_peoplesoft.com
• http//www.chiarafox.com

• Peter Merholz
• Partner, Adaptive Path
• peterme_at_adaptivepath.com
• http//www.peterme.com