[Sigia-l] The value of an IA

[Christopher Fahey]

> > ... over the last three years or so, I have found that the desire for
> > specialized roles has drastically declined.
> 
> Chris doesn't think so. :-)

Indeed. In fact, Tim's other comment caught my eye:


> I used to be called an Information Architect.  Now, part of my job 
> responsibilities include requirements management, building UI 
> specs, and testing.  I make more and I am called a "Product Manager".

Congratulations, that's great! But I think you are describing a personal
transformation, not an industry trend. This listserv is chock full of
anecdotes by senior-level IA/UX veterans who have evolved and grown
professionally, who have moved from production roles into more
management-level positions, and who no longer imagine why anyone would want
to be a production-level or specialized IA. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive
about this, but I don't think we're going to get a lot of good
business-saavy and design-saavy IA/UX leaders in the future unless we always
have a large and thriving pool of specialized information architects
cranking out wireframes and sitemaps and learning what it takes to get
things done -- and what causes things to fail -- in the trenches. 

To me, there is a analogy that applies here. When people get older and more
financially comfortable, they start to lose appreciation for the financial
discomforts felt by poorer people, or even by themselves when they were
younger. They forget what it was like to have a job where you have to clock
out just to eat lunch, what it was like to not have a decent car, what it
was like to have a landlord, or what it was like to buy generic food in the
supermarket. 

It's awesome to advocate and support the professional growth of Information
Architects. There is a post-IA career growth path emerging in the industry,
with people growing out of the job title "Information Architect" and
becoming more powerful players in their companies and in the industry. They
are growing into "Product Managers", "Business Process Consultants",
"Holistic Designers". Some even start their own companies, becoming
"Entrepreneurs".

In fact, in the next 5-10 years, I predict that someone whose job used to be
called "Information Architect" will have worked their way up to President or
CEO of some major media or software company, especially if the media &
software industries continue the trend of valuing design and usability as
critical product success factors. 

This is all great. But just because you personally may have undergone such a
transformation, and just because you now see the kind of work you did 5
years ago as beneath you, doesn't mean that specialized, non-management work
isn't always essential to the industry.

What I fear is that people will read these SIG-IA threads and think that
process flow diagrams and wireframes are no longer useful in product
development, that learning how to use Visio or Omnigraffle is a useless
skill, or that hiring information architects at all is backward-thinking.
All of these impressions are manifestly wrong, yet so many SIG-IA threads
make it sound like the very field of "information architecture" itself is
fading away, transforming into more visionary and rarified product
management endeavors. I say: Let's support and respect professional growth
at *all* levels, from management to production levels, and not conflate
personal growth with industry trends. 

-Cf

Christopher Fahey
____________________________
Behavior
http://www.behaviordesign.com