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A Fortune 500 materials science corporation operating across four regions with eighteen business divisions. Each division had built its own digital presence over time. Its own site structure, its own navigation logic, its own content model. Reasonable decisions, made locally, that accumulated into a global problem.
A buyer trying to understand the full breadth of what this company offered had to navigate a fragmented landscape where the same organisation presented itself differently depending on which door they walked through.
Inside the company, the picture was just as scattered. Governance had gaps. Content ownership was unclear. There was no shared language for how the business was organised digitally. And a newer strategic initiative, positioned as an umbrella across several established divisions, introduced a further layer of complexity. The architecture needed to accommodate both what the company already was and what it was actively becoming.
Information architecture at enterprise scale is organisational design expressed as structure. It requires getting close enough to every part of the business to understand how it thinks about itself, while maintaining enough distance to see where those self-descriptions contradict, overlap, or leave gaps.
We ran three rounds of structured stakeholder engagement across eighteen business units and regional teams. The first round mapped how each unit understood its own domain. The second tested a proposed architecture against those realities. The third validated the final model and secured alignment for adoption.
What emerged was a complete enterprise information architecture built from the ground up. Two complementary experience types: one organised around industries, one around solutions. A scalable URL and domain strategy. A governance and ownership model with clear decision rights. And an enterprise taxonomy covering industries, segments, offerings, and audiences across every division and region.
We built a working platform prototype to make the architecture tangible. Stakeholders could see how their division would live within the broader structure, how buyers would navigate across offerings, how regional variation would work within shared guardrails. Alongside the prototype, we produced tailored validation documents for each business unit. Eighteen different versions of the same conversation, each speaking to the specific concerns and structures of that part of the organisation.
Where strategic ambiguity surfaced, and it surfaced often in a company this complex, we provided structured analysis that helped leadership make decisions without waiting for perfect clarity. Some of those decisions were about what the architecture should do. Others were about what the company itself wanted to be.
The architecture is now the baseline for the company's entire digital presence. Business divisions have confirmed adoption. Regional teams have clear guardrails for localisation that prevent the fragmentation from returning. The URL and domain strategy means future acquisitions and new business units can be integrated without reworking what already exists.
What makes this hold is the governance layer. Architecture without ownership decays. Every domain has a defined owner, every taxonomy element has a review cadence, every structural decision has a traceable rationale. The platform can absorb consolidation and diversification over time because the logic underneath it was designed for both.
