[Sigia-l] IA innie positioning

[kate.simpson at freshfields.com]

Seems long but please bear with me...

Bit of Background
I work in-house at a large multinational law firm and have only been here 4 months, but am beginning to experience some of the issues that most of the IA books bang on about: trying to teach people what IA is, so that they then know when they might need to bring some IA skills to the table (more visibility needed). I'm involved in a couple of huge projects that are really of an LIS flavour of IA at the moment (multilingual thesaurus design and taxonomy creation), although there are other flavours that I could enjoy later (not sure about my choice of metaphor there), as well as other smaller projects that I'm aware of going on around the firm that I'm either struggling to get involved with or don't have the time to concentrate on...

The IA role/team sits kinda within the central Knowledge Management (KM) department, who run a lot of the KM projects within the firm; but outside of IT (usability team is within IT though...), and slightly to the side of LIS.

It's not that the firm doesn't understand IA as a general concept - they've been doing KM for 15 years and are excellent at capturing knowledge and information - they realise that having captured all this information, they really don't have any suitable structures for accessing that know-how/info and that IA can help. I think it's more that some haven't heard of the 'new recruit' and others are not so sure how IA actually applies to their projects.

Question (ish)
Has anyone created an "IA Toolkit" for best practice within an organisation to help others understand and to a limited extent "do" IA at the coalface?

I was thinking that perhaps I could position myself (as the sole IA at the mo but with possibilities for creating a team) as an advisory service and teaching those in the KM department and LIS to do some of the IA themselves? Or perhaps I should position the skills of IA within the firm as something that only the team should do, because of its specialist nature etc?

I'm torn. On the one hand I can see the benefits of the former where more IA can be done because there'll be more time for me (and team) to be slightly involved in more projects, rather than heavily involved in only a few. But on the other, perhaps being heavily involved in the few (such as putting together an enterprise IA - some of which Lou R and James M highlight in their roadmaps but am finding all sorts of other things that they don't mention - but that's a separate story) will help IA trickle down to the smaller projects. Oh I dunno.

Summary (?!)
OK, I seem to be thinking aloud here which is probably not very helpful in clarifying what it is I'm asking the list. I guess the questions are:
- How is in-house IA positioned in other orgs?
- Do you have "Quick Guides" explaining what IA is that you give out? And how do those Guides position the roles and focus within the org?
- How do you get brought into projects - through IT/Project Management involvement? From the teams themselves (if it's a local project)?

Can anyone provide some ideas or experience that they'd be willing to share?

Thanks
Kate


Kate Simpson
Information Architect
Knowledge Management
kate.simpson at freshfields.com

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