Back in the late 1990s when I was running a Notes/Domino consulting house, I would often draw a multiple level information architecture model for clients on how to think about the Notes applications we were building for them. Some of the applications were focused on individual enablement, others on team or business unit enablement, and others for corporate wide information. A fourth and final layer (although we saw it as an underpinning layer) was the set of “back office” style system databases that provided common services to the suite of applications being built at the three levels. These covered both IBM-supplied applications (eg, Domino Directory) and special applications that my firm built (eg, an application directory that provided a smart way of integrating different applications). Anyway, the point was that we approached Notes architecture, development and deployment as series of scopes addressed to different audiences in the client organization.

With this history, it was fascinating for me come across James Robertson’s Three Levels of Information Management (March 2005) briefing paper some years back. My first exposure to it was at a Brightstar conference in August 2006, and I have heard James talk about it a few times since then, the most recent of which was earlier this week at KMWorld.

One of the things that James talks about is “Managing the levels”, and I have been thinking how to map my 7 Pillars reference model to his three levels model. Here are some of the things that I’m thinking about.

Connecting the Individual and Team Levels
There has to be tight (“seamless”) integration between the team and individual levels. This means that the electronic environment that each user works in must support in-the-workflow integration between individual needs and team needs. The clearest example is team-aware calendaring. At the team-level, the members of the team must be able to see a calendar of meetings and events that are exclusively focused on their work. But at the individual level, each individual has a unique calendar that is a combination of their personal calendar and the collation of all of their team calendars. In order for calendaring in collaborative team spaces to work, the system must also support aggregation at the individual level.

For more on this, see Pillar 4 in the 7 Pillars model and for those using Outlook and SharePoint, see my SharePoint 7 Pillars analysis (tip: the free summary document has the complete pillar 4 analysis).

A second example is the area of task management. At an individual level, a user has a list of tasks that they are creating and managing. For each of the teams they are involved with, there are tasks that they will be working on, and perhaps even at the corporate level, there are tasks related to HR processes that they are working on. Somehow the system used for all of these levels needs to support integration between the various levels, so that each individual user can see the totality of the tasks they have to do, across all of the levels, in one single consolidated list. This is the essence of Pillar 6 in the 7 Pillars model.

Connecting Team and Corporate Level Information to the Individual Level
The concept of “What’s changed that may impact me?” is a key question that drives a lot of our information-related activities. We read the newspaper to see “what’s changed?” We watch the TV news, read blogs, follow Twitter, etc. for this same purpose. And it’s my contention that this same fundamental idea needs to apply in our Intranet environments. There is a whole discussion that can be held about search and findability, but I see this as different. The main system interface that someone uses on a day-to-day basis should be the place where they receive alerts and notifications about “what’s changed”. And I think that the technology exists to some degree to make this work pretty well in the Intranet environment, covering all three layers.

Here’s an example. I log into my computer in the morning, and open my personalized home page on the Intranet. In one part I see the meetings and events I am involved in today (a collation of my calendars), and the tasks that I am working on. It is likely that I will have some semblence of prior awareness of these meetings and tasks, either because I created them previously, or I have seen them previously. But the other main part of my screen should be the alerts about things that have changed that have meaning for me. Email is an immediate example (new conversation items or further items in existing conversations). New articles in my area of interest (perhaps brought to me by RSS or email). New postings in the team-level applications I’m involved in. Alerts about the people that I work with. And new announcements or policies that have been published to the corporate level.

In other words, in one place I get to see a snapshot overview of how my world has changed since I was last here. Specifically for SharePoint, James has concerns about My Site, but my sense is that this is the area where My Site can shine and give users something very helpful. And for other platforms, there are similar capabilities … but the key is that each individual *must* have the ability to tailor and filter the information that displays on their personalized home page.

Redrawing the Three Levels
So if I had an ounce of graphic design ability, I would redraw the three levels to look something like this:

You will note that I have also added a fourth layer, and that’s a reference to the wider Web.

Comments?
What are you doing at your place of work about these ideas?

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