[Sigia-l] Information Architecture 3.0

[Andrew Boyd]

On 12/3/06, Olly Wright <olly.wright at mediacatalyst.com> wrote:

> At the last Euro-ia summit much was made of the possibility of a
> disconnect occurring between the 'big-ia' practitioners and the more
> 'traditional little-ia' folks. Eric Reiss had a slide showing exactly
> this. The risk that by heading too far away from core-ia, many of us
> could cease to be IAs at all. This would result in a fragmentation of
> the discipline, to the detriment of us all. Whilst I understand the
> fear, my personal opinion is that this is really no risk at all,
> since it is upon the foundation of IA, its practices, approach and
> mindset, that our value as big-ias is predicated. IA is the
> foundation from which we are able to go out into the business world
> at large and speak with relevance, authority and value. Cut that out
> and we become versions of that ever-popular breed: the fluffy
> business consultant. If that ever happens, I think it will be a sign
> that I should switch to carpentry.

Someone should probably speak on behalf of the business consultants...
I don't know what a business consultant is to know whether I should be
interested/offended or not, or if I should even care :) I am a
Consultant - I do meaningful work, they pay me, I do more work for the
firm I work for, they praise me for it. I think I add value based on
the fact that the work I do makes a different. I don't use words like
"..in a going-forward fashion", and rarely label anyone as "not a team
player" except in jest. I perform tasks like a "real" IA, and
sometimes this is skewed towards UCD, sometimes towards business
process analysis, and I've even written functional requirements
(although not often). So if I quack like a duck, and look like a duck,
am I a duck? Or a fluffy business consultant? :)

Perhaps you could define what you see as the main differences between
a real IA and a fluffy business consultant so that I can put some
context around it.

Cheers, Andrew