[Sigia-l] IA Practice Maturation

[Peter Morville]

Actually, as a resident of the Midwest, I can comfortably say that IA hasn't
taken hold here nearly as well as it has on the East and West coasts.  Most
of my consulting business, at Argus and after Argus, has been on the
coasts...mostly centered around San Francisco and NYC.

As a separate but related issue, it's quite fascinating to see the immense
variation in IA understanding and acceptance even within a single company or
a small geographic area.  I've worked at the enterprise-level within Fortune
500 companies in the Bay Area who are years behind the curve.  And I've seen
small departments and companies in the middle of nowhere who really get it.

The differences can be quite stunning...it sometimes feels like you're going
backwards in time...


Peter Morville
President, Semantic Studios
www.semanticstudios.com

----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Merholz <peterme at peterme.com>
To: <sigia-l at asis.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2002 4:08 PM
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] IA Practice Maturation


> But I was surprised and impressed by the breadth and depth of experience
of
> my seminar attendees.  Sure, this was only about 80 people, but I'll be
very
> careful not to assume a lag among any audience from now on.  The London
> group sure wouldn't have let me get away with it!

In our discussion, folks mentioned that the English-speaking parts of
Europe, and Northern Europe (Scandinavia), had IA practices very similar to
ours. It was other parts of Europe (Southern and Central) that folks felt to
be "behind".

> BTW, East Coast and West Coast IA:  what about Midwest IA?  Quite a bit
has
> emanated from little old Ann Arbor, Michigan. :-)  Lots from Chicago and
> other places too.  If we're going to limit ourselves to the US, I have a
> hard time seeing how we can leave out everything between the coasts.

Lou, we pretty much ignored the entire Midwest, because, as we realized in
discussion, nothing of value has come out of there.

Actually, that's not the case. But, we were talking from experience, and had
no Midwest IA types present. Whereas many of us had practiced on the coasts.
We did have one recent Atlanta transplant, who confirmed the prevailing
notion that IA is pretty much being practiced the same all around.

The point of our discussion was not "what's emanated", but what is "current
practice". This isn't some pissing match about "where has good IA come
from?" Which makes me find it difficult to respond to your comment, since it
runs orthogonal to the point of the discussion we held.

--peter


Content Management Symposium, Chicago O'Hare Marriott, June 28 - 30.
See http://www.asis.org/CM
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