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SySys' Ten Information Architecture Milestones
  1. Define IA process expectations and detail
    Your Company may choose to spend an extensive amount of time and money with the IA process to ensure that the resulting solutions meet your expectations.  The process may also be shortened due to time restrictions but is not recommended because the end result may not be a thorough enough solution to meet your goals.

    This steps in this part of the process are as follows:
    1. Discussion about the full IA process and what the process yields
    2. Determination on the time that will be committed to the IA process
    3. Estimate the IA process cost
    4. Sign off and execute the IA process
  2. Marketing Goals Discovery Interviews
    SySys conducts interviews with key players as a group and individually in order to define concrete goals for marketing efforts and arrive at a centralized data storage solution to maximize efficiencies with storing and sharing data among all marketing materials.  This process includes past, present and future goals in order to ensure that the resulting solution may scale to meet future goals.

    Discovery interviews will define many aspects of marketing efforts including:
    • Your organization’s mission
    • Long term vision
    • Intended and potential audiences
    • Avenues to market exposure
    Discovery interviews will define specific marketing goals including some of the following:
    1. Website(s)
    2. Print material
    3. Fulfillment requirements
    4. Data Storage, Automation & Information Sharing
    5. Campaigns
    6. Analyzing marketing effectiveness
  3. Goals Approval Process
    The Marketing Goals Discovery Interviews will yield goals from many players within your organization. Key players must decide on the most important of these ideas and narrow down a concrete subset before designing of the user experience begins.
  4. Compliance Review
    At this point in the process, major goals and ideas may present legal hurdles and should be evaluated by your compliance department. Your legal team may offer suggestions or direction for specific areas of your marketing goals. This evaluation will ensure that valuable time and money is not wasted by further defining solutions to goals that may include legal hurdles.
  5. User Experience Definition
    1. Defining your audiences
    2. Determining each of your audiences goals
    3. Test audience usage scenarios
    4. Analyze your direct and future competitors
    5. Determine marketing avenues needed for audiences (websites, print materials, tools, software etc.)
  6. Identifying Functional Components and Content
    With a clear picture of what you need to accomplish, who you are accomplishing it for you can now decide what your marketing solutions will contain. The content and functional components that will comprise the solution can now be defined and technologies can be chosen to meet those needs.
    1. Marketing efforts map
      1. Site maps
      2. Print documents & fulfillment plan
      3. Campaign strategy
      4. Software and other tools
    2. Content update workflow diagrams
      1. Content Management (CMS) tools
      2. Data Management tools
    3. Data Solution
      1. Source definitions and format requirements
      2. Storage and sharing requirements
      3. Information flow diagrams
      4. Import solution documentation
  7. Functional Compliance Review
    Your compliance team may now evaluate in more detail the general requirements for the legal needs of your marketing efforts.
  8. Key Player Review and Approval
    A final solution is now well documented and clear and now needs some higher level review to finalize the plan. This step consists of several meetings to ensure that the plan meets the indented goals.
  9. Choosing Resources to Execute the Final Solution
    Depending upon the complexity of the solution one or more vendors and internal resources will be chosen and assigned to execute the solution’s deliverables. Guidelines on how all groups involved will work together to create a cohesive solution will be created and finalized in this step of the process.

  10. The Design Process
    The design phase of the IA process concludes the information architecture process and yields concrete deliverables that can be executed by the chosen technical vendors. The requirements are built around the unified design using the chosen technologies to create the final solution.

    This process includes the following:

    1. Corporate design guidelines (Color Pallet, font, UI element requirements)
    2. Branding requirements
    3. Elemental Mockup Rounds
      1. Print specific mockups
      2. Web specific mockups
      3. Campaign and other marketing materials design
    4. Design direction refinement
    5. Final key player review
    6. Compliance review (ensure that the designs do not violate regulatory rules)
    7. Non Functional prototyping
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