Information architectures: the information resources entity (IRE) modelling approach

Most approaches being put forward today for constructing an information architecture for a large organisation, such as a Fortune 1000 company, are essentially top‐down approaches. That is, organisations are first admonished to come up with a list of critical success factors. Then they're told that every business or enterprise, no matter what kind, has certain standard ‘classes of information’, into which all of the organisation's information systems, data, records and files can be shoehorned. ‘Prepare a matrix,’ we are told, ‘and then correlate your information classes with the critical success factor list.’