[Sigia-l] To Title or Not to Title (Was: Becoming and IA)

[T. Karsjens]

My personal labels over the last 8 years have never actually included the
words "information" or "architect".

"Consultant" with added descriptors of "Senior", "Principal", or even
"Founding" have been the little tag line under my name on my business cards
for this period of time.

Before that, it was "webmaster".

I tend to agree with Ziya.  Titles are meaningless.  If I am selling a
project to a client that knows what an Information Architect is, then yay!
I have a spot to fill my name in under in the proposal.  If not?  My name is
still on the proposal, as either just "Consultant" or "Business Analyst" or
"Whatever the client wants to call me, short of nasty foul names, which will
be more than okay as time progresses..."

I have met a lot of "Information Architects" in the Twin Cities which know
about as much about information architecture as I know about bio-chemistry,
which is not a whole heck of a lot.  

A funny little story which makes titles inconsequential:  I was on a project
as a "Consultant".  The manager of the project was replaced halfway through
the development lifecycle.  The new manager thought that the interface was
too large for just one person and she replaced me with a team of 5
"Information Architects".  Three months later, she was way over budget, and
the team of 5 "Information Architects" had yet to deliver ANYTHING.  I was
hired back and completed the remainder of the project in a TENTH of what the
team of 5 had quoted her.

So, in the end, your title matters not, but what does matter is whether or
not you can do the work competently.

Timothy Karsjens

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf
Of Listera
Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2005 11:31 PM
To: SIGIA-L
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] So, how did you become a
[InformationArchitect|UsabilityEngineer|Interface Designer|etc.]?

Ted Han:

> titles can be meaningful or useful

Or just the opposite!

Example: I've recently spent many, many hours (did I say I wasted many, many
hours?:-) trying to explain to upper management of a very conservative
company why their IT was utterly incapable of doing consumer-level
application strategy/design. Why? Because they gave me their chief
"Architect" (that would be a 'title' :-) and he proceeded to tell me how to
design a complex app. He was an architect alright, but a *data* architect
(and this company has terabytes of data). At first the management just
couldn't understand why their "architect" couldn't design the app. They
finally did. But that label sure wasted a lot of unnecessary time.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba 


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