[Sigia-l] RE: Apple and Pears

[Dan Saffer]

<snip>Perhaps than it is the employers that have muddied the waters of
IAs, demanding a position they called Information Architect, but which
was not rooted in LIS. We are defined by the market that demands us -
perhaps, another reason why we should be attempting to explain ourselves
better to the business world.</snip>

At the risk of angering the LIS crowd, I'm going to venture to say that,
even though they often go hand-in-hand, the bulk of "IA" jobs now and in
the near future are going to be of the "site map+interactivity" type,
and not the taxonomy/classification type. 

Creating thesuari, controlled vocabularies, etc. are specialized,
typically short-term work: once you've created them and implemented
them, the client maintains them. I doubt that many companies outside of
search engine developers like iPhrase, Google, etc. or large,
multi-faceted companies like Microsoft and Yahoo would pay to have a
year-round, full-time creator of, say, synonym rings. Pushing ourselves
to narrowly define ourselves as such to the business world (whatever
that is) means pushing ourselves out of jobs.

God bless employers for muddying the waters, I say. We're much better
off with a loose definition of our role, even if it requires a bit more
effort to winnow out the specialists in the various sub-disciplines.

Dan

dan saffer
sr. interaction designer, ameritrade
http://www.odannyboy.com

"there's a lot of things 
 if I could I'd rearrange." -U2