[Sigia-l] Anyone suggest a better global list?

[James Aylett]

On 31 Dec 2010, at 20:16, Skot Nelson wrote:

> Project management should never have been it's own discipline. It's a skill set, but there are times when a dedicated project manager is appropriate.


This is an interesting assertion that I completely disagree with :-) Further, I think that the opposite opinion has better (and more hopeful) parallels with this discussion of IA.

Various people have talked about the basic skills of IA now being expected in designers. Similarly, the basic skills of project management should always have been expected of everyone except the very inexperienced. However when you move beyond the basic, you get into levels of knowledge of a skill base that require specialists. I think this is what makes a discipline exist; everyone can get a basic grounding in a range of different skill sets, then get deep grounding in a smaller number. You bring together a cross-discipline team based on the shape of your problem. If you're building a tiny system that simply accepts comments but passes them onto another system for processing, you may not need an IA specialist, and similarly if you're working with a small co-located team, without heavy external dependencies, suppliers and so on, you may not need a dedicated project manager. Similarly with any other discipline (some companies need logistics experts, or pilots).

Of course, this doesn't necessarily answer the question as to why this list went quiet. Perhaps it's that by driving the complexity of problems that are referred to actual IAs up, combined with an increase in the number of problems that need /some/ IA but without a suitable increase in the number of professional IAs, people's minds are being swamped with the work they're doing, and there's less time available for distilling that work into ideas and stories that can help others? Many counterbalancing forces, and maybe they aren't quite balanced at the moment.

I'd say there's also something to the argument that at the basic levels, so much stuff has been experimented with, researched and discussed that people don't feel a need to share yet another story about how they did what their professional instinct is telling them to do. It may take a while longer for learnings from the more complex stuff that is being done to emerge. It takes time to reflect on what you've discovered so that you can explain it to others.


Of course, I'm not actually an IA; I always enjoyed this list because it enabled me to learn more from a discipline about skills that I needed some experience with at the bottom end, and an appreciation of higher up so I'd know when I needed to pull in someone with IA specialty. But as a result I may be misrepresenting or misinterpreting what's going on (one of the easiest ways to learn is to make a bold assertion amongst people smarter than you :-). However I think my last suggestion gels with what Peter said:

On 1 Jan 2011, at 11:54, Peter Morville wrote:

> I believe the emergence of cross-platform, multi-channel, (ubiquitous, pervasive, ambient) experiences is opening up a whole new set of challenges for information architects and other mapmakers. In the next 5-10 years, we will need to create a new set of "basic skills" for designers and developers to absorb.

The level of complexity that the IA discipline can tackle should keep on getting higher. Every so often the collective wisdom from the clouds can be distilled into rain for the masses below.

Happy New Year,
James

(with apologies for getting flowery at the end)

-- 
 James Aylett
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