Our services are customized for every project. Some examples follow:
Identification of Business Objectives
At the beginning of every engagement, we identify a project team – project sponsors, stakeholders, content owners, and opinion leaders – that plays an ongoing role in shaping the outcome of a project. The team helps us to identify, as early as possible, potential bottlenecks, impact issues, risk areas and more. They also define the organization's overall goals as well as the goals and expectations of individual departments. They help us to identify where and how to carry out a change management program.
User Research
We recognize that a system will succeed or fail based on user comfort and acceptance. Our initial research discovers exactly what your users need and the language that they use to express their needs. We find out as much as possible about the tasks that they perform, the information that they use, how they look for information and the information-seeking obstacles that they encounter.
Our techniques include in-depth interviews, surveys, task analyses and business process mapping. We also use web analytics, search logs, and the output from card sorting exercises. Since audience characteristics and needs vary, we develop scenarios and personas to verify our findings. Most important, we go back to users again and again to make sure we've gotten it right.
Content and Application Auditing
We audit your content In order to evaluate what's on-hand and to identify content patterns and properties. We compare your content with the needs of your users and your business objectives in order to find evidence of content gaps or areas of mismatch.
We work closely with the technical resources responsible for the content management systems and other legacy applications in order to understand the capabilities of each system and to get their input on where new tools might be required.
Content Architecture Design
We analyze what we have learned from stakeholders, users, card sort output, information artifacts, and the content itself. We determine a set of attributes (or metadata) that is common to most types of content, common to how most users think about retrieving content and appropriate for your content management system or search engine.
We recommend the metadata elements that will optimize information organization and improve search results. We also define the terminology choices (or controlled vocabularies) that are associated with each metadata element and the rules associated with applying each of the elements.
Taxonomy Development
We design and develop content organization structures, such as taxonomies and thesauri that meet the specific needs of your business, your users and your content. We consider how the structures will be used. A taxonomy developed for user browsing may be very different from one that is constructed for search engine support or for locating organizational experts.
We work with you to develop a flexible governance and maintenance plan.
Technology Evaluation
We help you evaluate software products and tools and develop use cases and scenarios for this purpose. We then devise a set of functional requirements that can be used to compare products. We work with your technical team to insure that the implementation and integration of selected software packages support the needs for which they were acquired.
Identification of a "Quick Win" Project
We recognize the challenges associated with organizing enterprise content and work with you to identify one critical business process where a quick win will build momentum for an enterprise-wide content management initiative and where the user-centric methodology that we have described can be used with great effect.
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