archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Talking over the prospects for current and former Internet and dot com professionals over lunch one day during the summer of 2002, I learned from an MBA student that in business schools the joke about B2B was that it now meant “back to banking” and B2C stood for “back to consulting” – cynical, but no doubt true.

Accordingly, I’m excited to be going B2C at a boutique consulting firm based in Cambridge, called netNumina. After a few years in product companies large and small, I’m looking forward to a consulting environment again. This is a refrain I hear from other friends from who’ve moved into industries and roles outside consulting. Once a consultant, always a consultant?

Regardless, large biopharmaceutical and financial services companies are the lion’s share of netNumina’s clients, so I’m doubly excited about and looking forward to the chance to work within large and very complicated information spaces.
Employment prospects are a bit better now in most Internet related fields – despite offshoring – and it seems that demand for Information Architecture is solid, based on my experience with this most recent round of freelance contracts and job searching.

This is a sign of improving health and understanding in the market for IT and knowledge workers.

Why so, when other roles and titles continue to fall by the wayside? Because Information Architecture is one of the few disciplines that expressly aims at moderating the unpleasant effects of the ocean of unstructured data and the endless number of haphazard information environments now enveloping daily life. The biopharma industry in particular is experiencing organizational pain as a result of accumulating so much data, in so many disparate reservoirs, with little or no ontological structure.

But before I start, I’m taking a few weeks to travel – Amsterdam, Barcelona, Iceland.