[Sigia-l] RE: Seeking Best Practices: order for chaos

[A.J.Bull at iaea.org]

Hi Jon and all, 

Like Joe, I say that you need buy-in from the stakeholder who can drive the change.  I recently supported a project to bring together 200+ information resources (e.g. databases, websites, electronic documents) from across the (non-profit) organization to make them accesible via a portal.  

To compare with your points... 
	"highly diverse audience" - yep...
	"dozen autonomous groups" - check...
	"Each group has their own site" - righty-o...
	"majority of their audience, unaware of the structure" - uh-huh...

The main problem we faced was that few of the information resource custodians in the "dozen autonomous groups" wanted to give up the look-and-feel they'd spent years crafting with end users.  To our advantage as the portal team (and speaking to Joe's point about having business stakeholder buy-in,) an organization-wide visual identity had recently been mandated by senior management making it easier to convince custodians to conform to a universal visual design.  

The one tip I can provide (besides get buy-in from the person/group responsible for information management) speaks to the navigation tool you asked about... 

>> a navigation tool (or wrapper) that can contain multiple
>> sites, allows them to be independent and maintain the global context

Check out OpenText's WCM for Livelink.  I was skeptical at first that a screen-scraper could work on an Enterprise level but I'm impressed that it handles different web technologies as well as it does.  It allows custodians to maintain their websites/online resources in a distributed fashion (which they all appreciate.)  It also enables a centrally-responsible body to manage the resources, including the use of global templates for reinforcing a single look, which I think you're going to need to get help with from senior management to enforce.

Tony

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