[Sigia-l] what are best practices (was OT: Library Thing)

[Listera]

Louise Hewitt:

> Of course the best 'best practice' would be to hire an IA consultant
> for every web project, page or service that gets built, but many site
> owners are left struggling with these issues alone.

But the very same owners won't think twice about hiring, say, developers,
no?

> In my experience, they find great consolation in having a 'best practice' to
> follow, safe in the knowledge that someone else has been there before and come
> up with an effective and widely used solution.

Therein lies the corrosive effect of "best practices": "safe," " been there
before," "effective," "widely used solution".

I have no idea what happens behind the closed doors in academia :-) but in
the commercial world, if all your problems and solutions are the same as
everybody else you are most likely to be commoditized out of existence.

This is exactly what packaged software vendors would like you to think! That
they have *the* solution to *your* problems. After the colossal boondoggles
in the dotcom era with gazillion dollar CMS/ERP/BPM/etc "solutions," one
would think the cookie cutter phase was over, but decontextualized problem
solving is still alive.
 
> For the record - I'm not against non-IAs innovating IA solutions, in
> fact I'm all for it. I just think that they shouldn't be forced to if
> they don't have the time/budget/will for it.

Depends on how you perceive Design. You may think Design adds value, I think
it creates it. So I don't ever buy the "we don't have time/budget/will for
design" argument. If you're not designing, you are not creating the best and
the most competitive value that you can. In other words you are
shortchanging yourself.

---- 
Ziya

Best Practices,
For when you've run out of your own ideas and context.