Presented at World IA Day Toronto, February 22nd, 2020 https://www.worldiaday.org/events/toronto/2020 When you've got tens of millions of pages, stored in dozens of CMSs, managed by hundreds of organizations with no single oversight board, and you know the experience is broken... How do you fix it? Where do you even begin? How do you reconcile the conflicting goals of multiple business units, of multiple kinds, with multiple disciplines and departments supporting different stages of the customer journey? How can they all act as a single company in service to the customer's needs, instead of a patchwork of competing org charts? I'm happy to share my ludicrously ambitious work in progress - a topic-oriented information architecture based on data, managed with metadata, and scaled with AI to reorganize ibm.com around customer interests.

1. Enterprise
information architecture
a case study in progress
Michael Priestley
@ditaguy
Feb 22, 2020

2. What’s the problem?
ibm.com 6 million 146 thousand
cloud.ibm.com 90 thousand 5 thousand
developer.ibm.com 700 thousand 27 thousand
research.ibm.com 6 thousand 1.5 thousand
Ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter 4.6 million 7 thousand
Pages about “machine learning”total

3. If I only had one product (and no post-sales content)
Topics
Products
Solutions
“I need to understand”
The problem space
The solution space
“I know what I need and why”
“What is machine learning?”
“How can it help my business?”
“Does this product have the
capabilities I need?”

4. We need to let the customer navigate
Stop competing for attention, start collaborating to support decision making
Topics
Products
Solutions
“I need to understand”
The problem space
The solution space
“I know what I need and why”

5. Initial stakeholders (internal)
Content organizations Tooling and standards
Product and Services marketing CMS templating
Product catalog Taxonomies/ontologies
Cloud Journey analytics
Developer SEO/keyword analytics
Partner Reporting tools
Training Search strategy
Documentation Globalization
Support Navigation/menu standards

6. • A coherent and comprehensive information architecture
across IBM that applies standards for linking, navigation,
page location and metadata to improve customer experience
and revenue
• This cannot be achieved within business units because of
perverse incentives for siloing and competition over
integration and collaboration
• It can be measured from outside business units, and
reported through an IA score that rewards consolidation of
pages and conformance with guidelines
• It can also be implemented in centralized planning/authoring
systems
• And be applied at scale through personalization and
automated linking
Goal
Challenge
Approach
What are we trying to do?

7. Solutions
Products
Brand/
Org
…Etc.
Article
ReportPerson
Event
Case
study
Learn/
Topic
Services
Organize around
objects of
interest Pillar pages
of direct and persistent interest
Related pages
of indirect or transitory interest

8. Cluster around the
pillar page for each interest
Learn
page
Navigate
Journey
Related
Perspectives
Parent topics and subtopics
Next stage, topic, or action
Related articles, events, reports…
Perspectives on the
current interest, based
on page category
https://blog.hubspot.com/news-trends/topic-clusters-seo

9. Connect pillars to navigation paths
Learn Solution Product
Connect pages to
support journey
Solutions ProductsLearn
Dev Dev Training DocsTraining
Event Course
Events

10. Drive navigation and linking from metadata
Learn Solution Product
Solutions ProductsLearn
Dev Dev Training DocsTraining
Event Course
Events
Topic+
Learn
pillar
Topic +
Event
perspective
Topic + Event type +
Training goal Topic + Course type

11. Where do we start?
1. Pillar pages and perspectives first –
the metadata ”homes” for each
unique combination of subjects and
contexts
2. Then attach related pages to them –
autoclassify by subject, autolink by
classification
Learn
Dev
Events Articles Reports
Training

12. Summary
Topic
oriented
Formal
definition
Automatable
Scalable
Customer first Explicit rules Enterprise ready
Biggest challenges are political
Maintaining buy in and mandate are ongoing tasks