About the Project

Factor recently began a relationship with a new client with an Alignment Accelerator workshop. The client is a prominent maker of business and finance software and is seeking to increase employee productivity through better access to self-help resources across multiple business units. We worked with a group of more than 20 stakeholders, who served in a wide range of roles and represented six different business units, to educate them in the basics of information architecture and the role of taxonomies, and help them to understand and evaluate their content ecosystem.

Challenge

The client’s central IT group had been tasked with helping a number of internal customers, including IT, human resources, finance, global business services, purchasing, and procurement, improve access to self-help resources with the goal of increased employee productivity.

The client was facing significant and increasing pressure from their senior leadership to use GenAI solutions, and AI applications were expected to play an important role in this initiative. The client is motivated to “get AI right” and ensure that these applications help, not hinder, employees. To this end, they believe that the overall content creation and management maturity of the service organization needs to be improved and have begun to build a business case around the necessity of developing a strategic approach to information and content structure and organization to support AI use cases.

Factor’s Approach

Factor’s Alignment Accelerator offering is a workshop consisting of a mix of educational activities, discussions, and collaboration aimed at helping a client perform a focused self-assessment and unite on a strategic vision and plans grounded in information architecture principles.

We believed that the Alignment Accelerator was an ideal solution to help the client understand the current state of the content managed by their service organizations, realistically assess the gaps potentially limiting the effectiveness of AI applications, and begin to build a roadmap for scalable and sustainable development and management of structured content and the supporting taxonomies and metadata.

Solution

We led the client through a three-day remote workshop with these specific objectives:

• Education: Factor provided an introduction to, and definitions of, core information architecture concepts and principles, especially around taxonomy and metadata. This established 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: We gathered insights and perspectives from the stakeholders to establish a baseline of known constraints and identify areas that warranted deeper exploration in order to inform the creation of a roadmap.
• Alignment: We sought to clarify the client’s business goals and in particular to establish the scope and requirements of the content management and taxonomy initiative along with identifying and prioritizing immediate next steps.

These objectives supported the overall goal of helping the client identify and align on objectives and success criteria for their service organization’s content and taxonomy strategy and lead to a set of recommendations and a roadmap to help the client address both local and organization-wide centralization, governance, and content strategy challenges.

What We Learned

The collaborative approach of the Alignment Accelerator workshop facilitated by Factor resulted in good agreement among the stakeholders on the state of support organization content ecosystem. Key findings from the workshop include:

• The content lifecycle is immature, and this is widespread across the internal service organizations. Team resourcing is an important root cause.
• A related issue is that content management in general and metadata in particular is often not taken seriously. One important effect of this is that outdated content can’t be easily identified or removed.
• Overall, there is an acute lack of centralization, governance, and system integration.

End Result

The Alignment Accelerator proved to be an effective path for the client to come to general agreement on content and taxonomy strategy gaps and maturity level. They developed a better awareness and understanding of the service organization content ecosystem, the issues that reduce its current usability and value, and an agreement on next steps, which are underway in collaboration with Factor.