Adaptive Path Blog

When we first started AP, a lot of clients came to us asking for assistance re-architecting their public-facing websites. And every time we sat down to learn about how their existing architecture came about, they told us the same two things: first, that it hadn’t been developed intentionally but instead “grew organically;” and second, that the structure of the information on their site was tightly tied to the way their company was organized.

Knowing this, our goal was to transform each site from something that reflected corporate hierarchy to something designed to support users’ needs. Then — the harder part — we helped them figure out how to support this new structure, in terms of process, content, and technology, since the new design no longer neatly mapped to the way the company operated. A lot of the more strategic work we do at AP around how to best integrate design teams into larger organizations developed out of a need to figure out how to best support this kind of information transformation. Peter was talking a lot about this way back in 2002.

It’s not surprising that companies exposed their org charts as their sites back then. After all, it’s a structure they were familiar with, and this was before we understood the opportunities afforded by the hyperlink and the real power of bottom-up data organization (not to mention what you can do with user-generated content.) Five years later, the corporate landscape looks very different. Though you can still find the occasional org chart online, it’s more the exception than the rule for successful businesses.

Still, when we decided it was time to revisit the Adaptive Path website, we realized we’d fallen into the same trap. Our site’s set up around our various lines of business — services, events, publications, and products — and the current setup doesn’t scale at all. My new line of business could just as easily sit under “Services” as “Products,” where we put it, and take a look at how we tacked this “Blog” onto the top nav, too.

So we’re retrenching, thinking about what we want our site to be, and how we can move it beyond a traditional consulting website into something bigger, better, something more in line with the kind of company we want to be. At the same time, we’re also rethinking our internal organization, trying to come up with ways to allow for more creativity, more flexibility, more opportunity for people who work at AP to figure out what they want to do and then just go do it.

In exploring both of these things, my coworker Kate and I realized something: the model she’s been developing to describe the concept behind AP.com v4, very bottom-up and matrixed, very much about the intersection of people and ideas and the larger community AP exists within, looks a whole lot like what we’ve been talking about when we discuss the way we want our company to work, too.

Which got us thinking: if websites were first hierarchically organized like the companies that created them, forcing a customer to interact with a company’s view of itself, and then those sites were updated to operate the way customers perceived and wanted to interact with those companies, what comes next? Isn’t it possible that it’s time to take what we’ve learned about what our customers want from our sites, and then apply that learning back to the structure of our own organizations? Is the next stage in this evolution not on the site per se, but instead on the company that supports it, finding ways to make our companies work more like our websites do?

What would that look like?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 7:14 am and is filed under Adaptive Path, Information Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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