[Sigia-l] Enterprise IA 95% un-sexy?

[Stewart Dean]

Hi Billie,

At the start of my career I was working on some of the most sexiest sites 
around. I created the worldwide site for Braveheart and many other film 
titles, I even got to go to the odd premiere party. But, after a while, you 
end up making pizzas - same base with different flavoured toppings on the 
top.  This was around 1996 and web sites where slowly growing.

To cut a long story short I ended up working large and larger sites for blue 
chip clients, starting off as producer doing illustration, coding etc and 
working with slowly increasing teams. Most of the sites where client facing 
and, again, after a while they started to get a bit like a pizza factory. I 
would say 90% of all public facing company sites are a recombination of 
common elements.

My latest project, on the other hand, is a behind the scene web based 
application using Web 2.0 elements to enable the rapid updating of 
information. I recently had to reteach myself HTML (or XHTML to be precise) 
as it's all moved on and I've come to realise that all my interacitve 
university studies are kicking back in.

My feeling the real sexy work is in the applicaiton work and intranets sound 
like an ideal place to grow these apps. Also from an IA view a knowledge 
mangement system is far more involving than organising a product section.

Some get exicited about glossy pubic facing sites and microsites (somethign 
not mentioned much here) - but I personaly find 'useful' sites much more 
interesting to work on, even if the audience is small. Maybe I'm the 
accountant that run away from the circus, but that's what I appear to enjoy 
doing .

Stewart Dean


>From: "Billie Mandel" <Billie.Mandel at openwave.com>
>To: <sigia-l at asis.org>
>Subject: [Sigia-l] Enterprise IA 95% un-sexy? Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 
>10:24:17 -0800
>
>
>Wow - you folks are an amazing anthropological study.  Fascinating.
>Here's my attempt at engaging all these brilliant minds on a different,
>hopefully more substantive topic:
>
>It seems to me like many IAs think that enterprise work (intranets,
>enterprise software) is not as fun or "sexy" as working on
>consumer-facing sites/products. Do you agree?  If so, why?  I'm curious
>to hear your thoughts.
>
>(Context: I'm an EIA kind of gal, am currently working on the
>supplemental materials for my poster session at the IA Summit, and
>advising my friend who has launched into Enterprise IA by taking my old
>job.)
>
>Cheers,
>- Billie
>
>**********
>Billie Mandel
>Information Architect
>Openwave Systems Inc.
>billie.mandel at openwave.com
>
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