I had a very similar political/IA problem a few years ago redesigning an intranet portal for a very large company (120K employees, 42 countries, 18 languages, and extremely distributed content development, including 9000 custom "widgets" we had no control over).
To cut to the chase (it was an 18 month project, more or less), we got reps from each BU to agree on the depth and scope of the top of the taxonomy, and commitment to adopt that throughout their navigation. Everything below the first 3 levels was their own domain, and it worked very well considering once you got past the 1st 3 layers of navigation, you were in "your own BU space" anyway and most of the content down there had to be very specific to what you were looking for. Some groups had very loose, shallow taxonomies (e.g. HR), but our R&D dept, for instance, had at least 10 more levels below the top 3, and about 9 different vectors across which they sliced. The UI was a little easier, because we already had a common global stylesheet and color theme everyone had agreed to adopt. On the other hand, we tended not to strictly enforce design standards in highly-specific apps, and opted instead to call attention to any content that appeared to "general employees". That meant about 80% of the publicly navigable UI looked and behaved the same, while the BUs had a large number of apps to feel comfortable in and design for specific expert groups (fewer complaints, and cheaper for them to outsource, that is =]). As for your questions: Incentives? For the UI, we used a ton of industry accessibility reports and user feedback illustrating how the standard styles and fonts we chose were more usable and accessible. For the taxonomy, the big incentive was that if we could optimize everyone's ability to get down to the deepest levels of the company as fast as possible. Our central group maintained the motto: Our job is to get people to your content without having to think about it. That helped everyone see that we weren't trying to reorganize their BUs, but were just trying to help everyone work better. Managing expectations? After convening our BU reps, they did much of the work for us, but we had a pretty good roadmap following our initial design and a dozen or so "road shows" to get everyone comfortable with what we were, and weren't, planning to do. Determining boundaries? The rule of thumb we used was: If a taxonomy change generally makes the "global news", it probably belongs in the global taxonomy. Or better yet, if a changed required very domain-specific experts to work through a global bureaucracy to change one of their apps or add a menu item, it was probably too specific to be in the global taxonomy. What didn't work? - Trying to map out what the entire taxonomy might look like, including every BU and global item in a single layer. No one understood it and it was obsolute 2 hours before we finished - waste of time. We wound up showing the top 3 layers and a few sample sites to illustrate how it might appear. - Using dummy 'lorem ipsum' text in our mockups. If I had a dime for every time someone asked us for "the english mockups", I'd be rich. - Trying to delegate maintenance of the global taxonomy to specific groups, or trying to create a group to manage it. Wound up leveraging existing governance teams who had very little time to review/approve suggested changes. This also helped clarify how much throttling the global taxonomy could take, and winnowed out a few misplaced items early on after the redesign. If you have any specific questions feel free to contact me offline. I couldn't resist posting here since your situation sounded exactly like where I was a few years back. Best of luck, I hope you have some good contacts throughout the business =] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=31556 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
