Just came across an interesting piece on KMWorld about how important setting up a logical and consistent information architecture is to your organization’s success with SharePoint. There are some great points in this article — and I agree wholeheartedly with the authors’ recommendations.

Having seen a few content management implementations myself (not to mention having talked to many people who have been involved in CM implementations), one of the biggest mistakes that organizations seem to make is not actually talking to anyone who is going to be using the system.

Knowledge management and IT folks sometimes think they understand a system better than the users possibly could; and in most cases, they’re right. But understanding the way a system works and understanding how the content should be organized are two different things.

While letting users (or even admins in most cases) loose on organizing content is usually a recipe for disaster, there needs to be some input from the people who actually have to use the content that’s held within a system.

There also needs to be some kind of planning around how you’re going to make your information architecture exenstible when the content outlives the usefulness of the IA — you don’t want to have to rebuild your architecture from scratch every time you have a huge influx of new content (in this case, I think it’s never useful to plan just for your existing content — you need to plan for the estimated amount of content that will come up within the lifecycle of your content management system).

And finally, whatever your estimate is for how much content you’ll likely end up with, make sure to double it.