Information Architecture and Data Strategy for Expert and Community-Generated Product Support Content

About the Project

Factor recently partnered with a well-known Fortune 500 business and finance software provider on an enhanced Alignment Accelerator focused on information architecture for customer support and customer self-help content. This was a new workstream with a client with which Factor has worked on several previous projects.

Factor’s relationship with the client began with an Alignment Accelerator workshop that was followed by focused assessments in support of strategy and planning. We helped the client assess the current state of content and taxonomy strategy in internal self-service help and productivity resources used by employees. The result was alignment on a path forward that addressed content and taxonomy gaps and supported the development of enhanced capabilities of the employee self-help platforms, focused on information discovery and a personalized employee experience.

This series of successful engagements led to a referral to a group responsible for managing customer-facing product support and self-help content. This was a rich and complex content ecosystem that included both the client’s own expert-generated content and content from consumers in communities and user groups sponsored and managed by the client. This group had never engaged in formal Information Architecture (IA) work and sought an evaluation by an outside expert to understand the current state of their content ecosystem and to build stakeholder support for establishing the foundations and the long-term strategy necessary to meet and exceed industry standards for content quality and performance.

Challenge

The client was tasked with delivering an improved user experience for their online self-help information with the goal of creating a trusted relationship with customers and becoming the go-to destination for consumer education in their industry.  Meeting this challenge required achieving alignment among multiple stakeholders, agreement on the problems they faced, and the path to delivering a better user experience.

Our original goal was to create a roadmap to improve content discovery including navigation, search, and browse experiences. We expected this to require content tagging workflows and consistent platform configurations, all while building alignment between the core stakeholders and developing a business case establishing the importance of this work.

During the course of the workshop, the client recognized the solution to their challenges had enterprise-wide implications, resulting in a shift of the ultimate goal: to build a business case for executive-level support and accountability on an enterprise-level content strategy and information architecture.

Factor’s Approach

Factor typically begins new client engagements with an Alignment Accelerator workshop, which helps us to understand their goals, maturity level, existing capabilities, and the unique challenges and obstacles they face. In this case, the scope and duration of the project were larger than usual so the approach was customized to meet the client’s specific needs.

We began with a discovery process, including a series of stakeholder interviews and assessments of the client’s content, systems, and processes. The interviews and assessments allowed us to come into the workshops with a much more extensive set of findings than is typical with Alignment Accelerators. The findings were then validated and expanded during the workshop sessions.

The workshop participants were a combination of stakeholders who had been interviewed during the discovery phase and others involved in day-to-day content management activities, including taxonomy management, content tagging, content management system and other technology platform administration, and content lifecycle management. Each person held some piece of the content solution but overall alignment and a common vocabulary connecting the current capabilities into a holistic strategy was missing. By educating the stakeholder group in standardized information architecture ideas, approaches, and terminology Factor was able to help them find common ground and guide them to solutions existing within the IA discipline.

Solution

This Alignment Accelerator was of broader scope than usual and also experienced a pivot on the ultimate deliverables. Factor’s approach to Alignment Accelerators is flexible, supporting both customization to meet client needs and in-flight adjustments on the outputs. We aimed to provide an introduction and education about information architecture, which is always an important goal of the Alignment Accelerators, along with assessment and discovery, building alignment, and finding consensus.

  • Education: In this case, the client had no formal exposure to information architecture, so the educational component was especially important. We provided an introduction to, and definitions of, core information architecture concepts and principles to establish a shared vocabulary for enterprise content and taxonomy strategy, an understanding of what effective content, taxonomy, and metadata management requires, and an overview of Factor’s approach and methodology.
  • Discovery: An unexpected outcome from the discussions about information architecture principles and their application to the client’s content ecosystem was the client’s realization that they were not facing an isolated set of challenges for the current group of stakeholders to tackle on their own. Instead, the client needed a wider effort to establish a sustainable information architecture and content strategy as a foundational enterprise-level capability, not just a stop-gap solution for an isolated IA project.
  • Alignment: Building a high-level business case for information architecture and content strategy required additional and extensive collaboration with our key stakeholders. Factor had only an outsider’s view of the workflows, organizational theories, mission and vision, and even terminology that were key parts of the client organization’s strategic planning process. Our client helped us to understand all of these, and by working closely with them, we crafted a concise, targeted executive-level presentation, helping the client to secure accountability and drive the initiation of an enterprise-level information architecture solution.

What We Learned

Key learnings from the discovery, assessments, and workshops included:

  • Basic content strategy capabilities were in place but they were highly siloed. In fact, many stakeholders were unaware of the existence of key capabilities within the content ecosystem.
  • The company had deployed an enterprise-level taxonomy management platform with some impressive, but limited, applications. It was used inconsistently, and extensive alignment, consolidation, and integration of taxonomies, metadata, and platforms were needed to realize the full value of this important asset.
  • Many analytics are tracked and a large amount of associated data exists but it was underutilized. Metrics are poorly defined and disconnected from business processes and decisions. There was no way to confidently answer basic questions, like if the right content was being created and if it was used effectively.
  • The client’s eagerness to learn about information architecture and mindset led to a shift in our initial goals but also to a potentially much more extensive engagement, helping the client to address foundational, enterprise-scale challenges. This is a great example of why collaboration, flexibility, and, above all, actively listening to partners are such important values. As a partner in a collaboration, always check to be sure you’re not getting stuck in your own assumptions.

End Result

The close and collaborative nature of working with our primary client stakeholder made this project especially rewarding. They were new to information architecture, eager to learn, and never hesitated to ask for additional context and background to better understand the concepts and solutions that were being discussed. It was a great illustration of “don’t skip steps.”

This engagement highlighted the flexibility of Factor’s Alignment Accelerator workshop, supplementing it with an additional discovery and analysis phase prior to the workshop and collaborative development of an executive-level business case afterward. The result was good agreement among the stakeholders on the current state of their product support content ecosystem and strong validation of the business value of information architecture and content strategy.

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