Change Architecture: Bringing IA to the Business Domain

“Information architects hold the potential to become master Bead Game players who help companies play the right music to succeed. But gaining a seat at the business table requires that we change aspects of our usual perspective.”

In Herman Hesse’s Nobel-prize winning novel, The Glass Bead Game, skilled players tap into a symbolic language that encodes all of human knowledge into a kind of music to be played and shared: [1]

These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/ or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. … on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. [2]

Today, as the world of knowledge increasingly resides encoded in digital form, stored in databases, and accessed through the web, information architects hold the potential to become master Bead Game players who help companies play the right music to succeed. But gaining a seat at the business table requires that we change aspects of our usual perspective.

As IAs, we are not just architecting information; we are using information to architect change. In “traditional” information architecture, the target of work is usually a website or a web-based application. Change architecture steps outside of these bounds. The domain is not limited to a web team; it expands to include today’s dynamic business environment and the way people, processes, and tools interact and interoperate. The target is no longer limited to web browsers; rather, it is the minds of those people charged with understanding the broader business landscape and contributing to better business decisions.

When seen from a change architecture perspective, the IA’s existing toolkit—normally used to discover and capture information, re-categorize content for easier consumption, and visualize ideas for shared understanding and action—naturally supports this expanded business domain. IAs can help companies reap the benefits of positive change by reducing fear of change, creating hope for the future, enhancing adaptivity to change, and architecting applications and processes that enable business success.

Thinking about change architecture raises new questions:

• How can we clearly communicate with clients about the ways information architecture paves the way for positive change?
• What role do digital (or even physical) assets—including site maps, work flows, and visual explanations—play in helping a team and a company share a vision for change?
• How do we help our clients, and their employees or customers, adapt to and embrace change?
• How can we change the perception that IA is just a step in a website production process?

Not just for websites anymore

In fact, a number of information architects are already applying IA methods to business problems beyond the web. A few recent cases in point:

• At Vanguard, the mutual fund firm, information architects Richard Dalton and Rob Weening stepped into the company’s strategic planning process to synthesize and visualize findings from extensive client interviews and make recommendations to internal business decision-makers about solving key pain points. Dalton and Weening faced initial skepticism about the ability of IA to overcome what they call the “web design” stereotype in the strategic planning arena. [3]
• At Dynamic Diagrams, a Rhode Island-based information architecture firm, the company’s “visual explanation” services are often employed by companies with complex business processes or products to help put an internal team on the same page. The Dynamic Diagrams team advocates the use of “isometric” illustrations that bring perspective—in both the literal and figurative sense—to large-scale information and process issues. [4] “When applied correctly,” note several members of the firm in the Interaction Design Journal, “the introduction of depth makes the information easier to grasp by appealing to our intuitive understanding of space.”
• At EZgov, which helps bring government services online, information architect Peter Boersma and other internal team members convinced decision makers to incorporate user-centered practices into the company’s software development process. Their persuasion tools include workflows and process maps overlaid by visual design. [5]

Commenting on his experience, Boersma notes that visuals, when converted into life-size objects such as posters, can help convert an abstract realm into something tangible that the team can talk about: “Visual explanations, when designed well, are the proverbial pictures that are worth more than 1000 words; they make lengthy explanations unnecessary. But, more importantly, they allow for discussion by pointing at things and indicating relationships by drawing lines in the air, when the visual is projected or hung on the wall.” [6]

The physical form, scale, and transmission of visual explanations can become extremely important as the medium for “spreading the news.” Dalton and Weening created one large-scale information map, and then hundreds of smaller “placemat” versions that were distributed to business units. [7] Depending on a particular IA’s skill set, these visual assets may be developed directly by him or her, or they may be developed in close collaboration with a visual designer.

Anecdotal evidence points to an evolution of IA as a unique approach to business consulting that combines analysis with tangible digital assets and actions. While business consulting comes in many flavors, information architects bring a particular set of top-down and bottom-up tools and capabilities to the table. IA practitioners may not necessarily think of themselves as change architects or persons engaged in change architecture, but there is a common thread of working to make changes in the process and/or perceptions of a collaborative team.

Learning more about change

As IAs, we know a lot about working with information. However, we need to learn more about attitudes toward change. Areas of knowledge that could be incorporated into change architecture include business strategy, business process intelligence, and cultural psychology. Change architecture could also benefit from the lessons of change management, a business consulting approach with roots that pre-date the emergence of the web.

One of the key models in change management comes from Kurt Lewin, one of the founders of modern social psychology. Lewin suggested a three-phase approach of change, which has been distilled into the following framework: Unfreeze, Transition, and Refreeze. Here’s a quick look at each phase:

Unfreeze: People tend to create a comfort zone where habits, patterns, and processes repeat in a somewhat static, fixed way. This gives them a sense of familiarity, control, and purpose. As Charles Handy writes in an essay, Unimagined Future: “Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture which may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.” [8] There is an instinctive and understandable resistance to change. Old patterns have a powerful ability to propagate across a culture, achieving a kind of cultural lock-in and monopolizing the way people think about possibilities. Before someone becomes change-ready, they often need to be “unfrozen” from their static environment.

Transition: Transitioning marks the journey across the chasm of change. People and organizations reconfigure themselves from an old formation to a new one (“re-form”), through many different and often difficult realignment steps and stages. The first step is often the hardest, and leaders need tools to help people to avoid “change shock”, feel hopeful about change, and acclimate to the new possibilities.

The writings of creativity expert Edward de Bono are an excellent source of transitioning tools. He draws the following analogy in his book, Parallel Thinking: “Your existing cooking-pots may allow you to cook all the meals you have always cooked, but if one day you want to cook dim sum, then you may need to get a proper steamer system.” [9]

The practice of IA provides transitioning tools that can help people limber up their thinking and explore new structures, new terminology, and new approaches. For example, card-sorting sessions, interactive prototypes, and visual explanations safely simulate change in advance and let people “try it on for size” before the full change arrives.

Refreeze: Aims to bring a renewed sense of confidence and comfort to the person or organization’s changed environment. Refreezing also helps bolster the changes, so the organization avoids falling back into the earlier frozen patterns. (Alas, refreezing is perhaps not the best word choice. In today’s constantly changing environment, one shouldn’t strive to achieve another frozen state, but rather an integration of stability and dynamism.)

Big change, small change, and loose change

Lewin’s change model brings to mind major top-down changes. But what about the smaller-scale everyday decisions that drive the tempo and tenor of business? In their article, “Who Has The D? How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance” in the January 2006 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Bain & Company consultants Paul Rogers and Marda Blenko offer a compelling framework for clearing decision bottlenecks. [10]

They call it “RAPID,” for the sake of a catchy acronym (even though the terms are ordered differently), and define five key roles in the decision-making process: those who recommend a course of action based on discovery and analysis, those who offer input on the recommendation, those who review and agree to the recommendation, those who ultimately decide on the recommendation, and those who perform the decided action.

Although the Rogers and Blenko article focuses on role-definition, not information architecture, it has a number of implications for our field. For one, information architects are often asked to perform a recommendation role. The often-hazy path leading from recommendation to decision and action has historically been a source of great professional frustration to many IAs, who may chalk up shortcomings in that terrain to “politics.” From a change architecture perspective, the conflict inherent in this decision-making process may be seen instead as an opportunity. While people often disagree over the possible outcomes and pace of change, we need to understand that conflict is an attribute—not a side effect—of the decision-making process. In addition, business decisions increasingly play out across a distributed team that never actually converges face-to-face. Decisions hang in the ether and, in the words of Rogers and Blenko, “get stuck inside the organization like loose change.”

If we IAs become attuned to this situation, we’ll come to understand that the assets we create for fostering understanding are well-suited to helping clear these decision-making bottlenecks and improving the decision “throughput” across the company. Teams that are divided by office, country, continent, and culture can be placed on the same page. IAs are in a position to not only inform the situation, but also proactively propose a workflow to define the path leading from a recommendation to “performing” that recommendation. With these approaches, an information architect can become a kind of Black Belt in architecting and navigating big, small, and even loose change within an organization.

Is change architecture worth changing for?

Using the paradigm of change architecture, IAs can become more aware of the idea that when we step onto the business stage of a project, we will first need to unfreeze aspects of the situation and the environment, and ultimately make the path from recommendation to action visible to the participants.

Change architecture could even be applied to the trade of information architecture itself. When I began as an information architect 10 years ago, such matters were outside my field of vision; I thought of my role only in terms of providing information and documentation. Today, I recognize that practicing information architecture in an organization—either as an employee or as a consultant—requires intervention, persuasion, and leadership.

For many IAs, even the idea that the first phase of a new project engagement requires unfreezing to create a change-ready state would itself represent a major change. But information architecture may be a domain that is ready for a sea change. The signs are there: the internal soul-searching that has taken place on IA mailing lists and conferences, the seeming confusion about the overlap or gap between IA and design, and the struggle to find a shared language. Could it be we are unfreezing, heading toward transition?