LEUVEN MINDGATE

Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA) workshop


EIA master class at Namahn on 15/16 June

Does a lot of information within your organisation remain locked in departmental silos? Are you enthusiastic about Web 2.0 and intend to introduce wikis, blogs and other collaborative tools into your organisation? Are you in charge of organising information within your company, or do you want to learn how to conduct Information Architecture (IA) projects?

On Monday 15 and Tuesday 16 June 2009, Namahn runs a master class on Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA). During two days, you can gain insight into Namahn's EIA methods and techniques, which grew from conducting a variety of EIA projects over the past few years.

You will learn more about Enterprise 2.0 and the information-processing maturity of your organisation, about taxonomies and faceted navigation, about the life cycle of information and the house-of-information metaphor.

Led by Koen Peters and featuring contributions from Marc Van de Woestijne, Mieke Daniels, Olivier Renard and Michel Vuijlsteke, this highly practical master class challenges the knowledge of a small group of participants (maximum 8) and teaches them how to apply EIA techniques the Namahn way.

In May, we conducted a dry-run of this master class. Participants from corporate and public organisations expressed a 78% satisfaction. We addressed the issues they raised and hope to do even better.

The master class will deal with the following topics in depth:

- Classification of information
- Taxonomies, organising schemes, faceted classification, metadata, search .
- The information life cycle
- A five-step decision model with the following steps: create, review, approve, keep, and share.
- Governance
- The organisational structure required for EIA, the business drivers, the assessment of your organisation's maturity in information production.
- Enterprise 2.0
- The introduction of social software and Web 2.0 to the enterprise.
- EIA and technology
- Document and content management systems, line-of-business applications, portal tools, collaborative software, and how to integrate them.

The course will also focus on a number of practical EIA methods and techniques employed at Namahn, such as:

- Field studies in the context of EIA (stakeholder interviews etc.)
- Content analysis (content inventory/audit)
- Information Process Maturity Model (IPMM) assessments
- Taxonomy building: collaborative mind-mapping workshops and card sorting
- Navigation scheme and mock-up
- Migration path
- Content workflow recommendations
- EIA roadmap
- Usability testing of an information architecture

For most of these topics and techniques, an introduction to theory is followed by examples or exercises.

Participating in the master class will help you:

Understand the field of EIA and know the concepts that are part of EIA
Know when and how to apply these EIA concepts
Have a toolbox for practicing EIA and acquire a methodology for EIA
Be able to recognise when an EIA is good or bad, through examples and exercises

Each participant receives a copy of the information architecture bible, the so-called Polar Bear book by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (3rd edition).

Timing
The class takes place on Monday 15 June and Tuesday 16 June. We start at 9.00 AM and end at 5.00 PM.

Location
The master class takes place in the Namahn library in Brussels. Directions can be found in the How to reach us section of the Namahn site.

Language
The master class is conducted in English.

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