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“An artist, a guru, a coach, and a spy” is how David C. Baker and Michael Janiszewski describe enterprise architects in their article 7 Essential Elements of EA.
The full quote is, “An enterprise architect requires a unique blend of skills. At various times he or she needs to employ the characteristics of an artist, a guru, a coach, and a spy.” Besides being pithy because it sounds like the intro to one of those ‘____ walk into a bar’ jokes, this rings true for enterprise information architects. However, humorousness aside, this isn’t terribly useful. And overall, the article is a fine breakdown of what’s required to put enterprise architecture into practice, but it only offers the pioneer’s perspective on where enterprise-level architects come from.
Their take, “Enterprise architects grow from within the technical architecture ranks, learning how to be artists, gurus, coaches, and spies as they work their way from being technical specialists, through application or infrastructure architects, eventually to enterprise architects.”
This is an honest if after-the-fact apprasial of a self-directed career growth trajectory that is no stranger to veteran IAs. It’s not adequate as a way to expand the understood scope of information architecture roles to address the enterprise perspective. I feel comfortable saying Information Architecture is accepted as relevant and useful in many areas of business activity, from user research and experience design to product development and strategy, after a few lean years following the dot com crash. But I’m not comfortable saying we have appropriate representation or even access to the enterprise level. It’s here that the business and information perspectives come together in an architectural sense, and also here where we should strive to make sure we’re valued and sought out.
We need to discover, create and define the paths that lead Information Architects to enterprise level positions.to action>
The alternative is being left behind.

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Focused dialog between senior practitioners who come together to share experiences, insights, practices, knowledge, and thinking in a face to face forum is one of the critical mechanisms for the healthy evolution and growth of any professional field. Despite the proliferation of venues for advancing the collective knowledge of Information Architects (more than three or four years ago, certainly), the Information Architecture community lacks a forum that mixes teaching, discussion, and exploration of previous experiences amongst a small and focused group of accomplished Information Architects who are together in the same room.
I’m thinking of something like the Master Classes common in music, painting, and some of the other fine arts. An Information Architecture master class would occupy some of the space between the short-form conference session of an hour’s duration, the half-day or one-day workshop on a broad topic (like building a CMS), and the general UX get-togethers of networking, showcasing, or other varieties that we have now.
The benefits and value of a forum like this over a scattershot conference agenda or a one-way workshop presentation structure are substantial when judged against limited training opportunities and budgets. A gathering of senior practitioners with a defined focus, moving beyond the summary or introductory aspects of a topic, offering substantial examples of relevant knowledge and experience, and providing time to cover a subject in depth with discussion would surely attract interest, participation, and likely even payment.
Now for the call to action: It’s time to bring about Master Classes for Information Architecture. Who’s game to work on this?

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Some star­tling num­bers about call cen­ter employ­ment, from the newslet­ter Knowledge@Wharton:
“an esti­mated 3% of the U.S. work­force [is] employed in call cen­ters“
That’s a greater share of the total than for all farm pay­rolls and agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion across the U.S.
“Call cen­ters… typ­i­cally expe­ri­ence a 30% annual turnover in employ­ees.“
Not as high as some meat pro­cess­ing facil­i­ties, but get­ting there…
“In some cases the mean dura­tion of employ­ment is 17 days.“
Which I believe at one point was the expected life­time of a freshly deployed infantry­man for the Soviet Army on the East­ern Front dur­ing WWII…

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It was a friend who was considering a career change to IA that kicked off this theme originally. I didn’t mention that in the last posting, which on re-reading might have made some of the questions and recommendations in the first entry sound a bit more like friendly advice, which was what I’d hoped. Apologies to all for lack of context. I’ve since heard that she’s read the Polar Bear book(s), actively done IA work on a well-known product company’s web site, and has the backing of management to invest in further development, possibly by even hiring a mentor.
Here’s my reply, and some recommendations on how to go further:
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It sounds like you’re doing all the right things. And if your manager is willing to back you with some dollars, then you’re way ahead of the game already You could look to hire a mentor – and I might be able to help with finding one – but I’d recommned using some of the time and money to look into education or training. And, ideally, a mentor would help you out for reasons other than simple payment. There should / will be a program available from the AIFIA soon to match mentors and candidates together. You might be able to use this.
AIFIA is the non-profit IA organzation started a while back to help support the community, further the discipline, etc – check the site at aifia.org for more info. It’s a cheap membership ($50 ?), and it will give you access to a good set of resources and professinal contacts that can help with more specifics on what and how to get started. Other organizations to look into include ASIST, ACM, and the UPA; none of these focus on IA exclusivly as AIFIA does, but all have strong communities and resources available.
There are a ton of education and training options, from full-on M.A. and Ph.D. programs, to half-day seminars. What areas related to IA interest you most? Where do you want to take your career? Do you think you’d like to approach IA from a strongly visual perspective, which might be rooted in laying out interfaces and defining page templates and standard control sets for user interactions? Or maybe usability is more interesting to you?
Some things to consider adding to your skills portfolio and using as a basis for pursuing IA further include usability, user research, interaction design, library sciences techniques like taxonomies and thesauri, business analysis, use cases and UML, task analysis, information design, systems architecture, knowledge management, community design and social architecture, most anything related to CMS, navigation design, etc.
All of these are relevant – it’s the way you put a set of them together that will define the approach you use for IA, and the work that you’re best suited for. I’d say try to follow up on one or two of these, put the techniques into practce, and then see how it goes. The decision to go to school obviously depends on your time and opportunities.
Eventually, you’ll want to emphasize and publicize the shift in what you’re doing; maybe with a title change, or a branded freelance offering, or a formal education reference like an MSLIS on your resume. If you can’t make the shift officially inside your current workplace, then it might be time to make a move into a new context that definitively shifts your role.
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Information Architecture is getting a bit of a buzz these days – as someone just noted on one of the discussion lists – so I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that a few friends in related fields have asked how to get started as an IA.

The real question is – do you *want* to?

Beyond this, you’ll be getting into deeper water that could become downright chilly. Ever read a thesaurus just for fun? Is your first answer to every question “It depends on -” ? Do you instinctively read through and itemize in order of priority all the categories on the menu in a restaurant before you look at the descriptions of any of the dishes?

Before you nod your head to the above and slap a sticker on your bumper, I’d recommend buying / borrowing / stealing “Information Architecture for the WWW“, and reading the intro and the first chapter. There are other good titles dealing with some of IA’s many facets out now, but a quick read through the front of Rosenfeld and Morville will give you a feel for the perspective and outlook that IA uses without too much of a time investment. If you don’t like the feeling at that point, then I’d say that something else is more your forte. Unless of course you have pressing needs, or disturbing masochistic tendencies that lead you to pursue specialized disciplines that you don’t really enjoy.

If it does feel right, then skim the rest of the book and try reading through the case studies at the end. If you’re still interested, then it might be a good way to go. If at any point your eyes glaze over (did someone say “schematize” again?) or you’re genuinely bored, then I’d suggest that either setting this particular quest for personal and professional enlightenment aside, or shifting your goal to learning some of the basic language and possibly acquiring some specific IA skills.

After that, the sky’s the limit. I’m active (well, ‘active’ might be a bit bold, but what’s life without aspirations?) within the AIFIA mentoring initiative, so I’m part of a group of IA’s looking at exactly how to go about matching candidates for mentoring with the right teachers.

If you’re curious about education options, there are courses, certificates, and even some new masters programs coming on line.
Resources for all these questions and more can be had for free at the ia wiki.

Hope this helps…

Thanks to Beatrice Pulliam and Caryn Anderson for the the chance to talk about Information Architecture at a Simmons College panel on careers for LIS graduate students. The event – Information Professionals In and Out of the Box: An ASIS&T Alternative Career Panel – brought four GSLIS graduates and myself back to talk about potential careers related to LIS. I was the only non-graduate and the only IA on the panel. Titles for the other speakers included Manager, Data Services and Quality Product Manager, Metadata Specialist, and Database Manager – all roles that I’ve worked closely with or in some way performed under the heading of Information Architecture.

It was a genuine pleasure to talk to a group of interested students, and also my first window into the early academic codification that’s happening in and around the realm of IA.

After the session, I was introduced to some of the Simmons faculty; Candy Schwartz (also here), who taught the first dedicated course on IA offered at Simmons, and Gerry Benoit the current instructor. Dr. Benoit works in many areas, including Systems Theory – which is one of the subjects I’d like to explore more, since it seems very relevant to some of the core concepts of IA.

Following up, I learned that Caryn is
“…working with a Harvard research fellow and Fulbright scholar on the emerging specialization of Integration & Implementation Sciences which is coordinating research and development in the areas of complexity science, systems thinking, participatory methods, diverse epistemologies, interdisciplinarity and knowledge management for application to complex, large scale problems. One of the key challenges of integrating research from various disciplines is facilitating the various personalities, priorities and languages of the folks involved.”

Aside from sounding very interesting, this is a good summation of my current consulting role, minus the obligation to create too many Powerpoint presentations. I’ll try to find out a bit more, and put out an update on what I learn.

Here’s a recap of the session, complete with some zesty live-action photos.

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.

If you’re looking for an open-minded, effective problem solver with solid experience in the major realms of an integrated User Experience effort – business, technology, design, user research, project management – contact me (joe(at)joelamantia.com). I’m now looking for my next position, and interested in discussing full-time and contract opportunities.
For background: I’ve just finished an eighteen month assignment as on-staff Information Architect for Parametric Technology Corporation (Nasdaq: PMTC) , where I focused on the strategic integration of several large websites and numerous application-based User Experiences under a single, user-driven Information Architecture.
Broadly, my responsibilities during the past two years centered on defining and building Information Architecture and Usability programs within large software companies.
Some of my specific Information Architecture responsibilities at PTC included designing an integrated system of 60 modular interface templates and content-display objects, as well as meta-data, XML DTDs, a complete categorization system, a detailed attribute taxonomy, data fields, and display schematics for a custom-built content management system dynamically serving 50,000 Web pages in nine languages.
While with PTC, I also started a Usabililty Program for the e-Business Group that grew to include an active community of three hundred regular testing volunteers, consistent field research at major industry trade shows and conferences, and the company’s first dedicated Usability facility.
In 2000 and 2001, I founded an Asia-Pacific B2B startup with a team of US and China-based partners. Before this, I spent six years creating innovative interactive design solutions for leading consulting firms (Onward, CSC, Zefer) and boutique interactive agencies (One21). Accordingly, I can contribute as both leader and team member in many business snvironments.
In addition to eight years spent architecting and managing large corporate sites and enterprise applications as a developer and designer, I have considerable experience with project management in high tech and software settings, strong communication and consulting skills, and an entrepreneurial outlook on business analysis.
I’m most interested in opportunites in the User Experience and Information Systems fields, but I’m also eager to work outside the United States and am open to positions in other areas. Some fields I have experience in or find interesting include consulting, publishing, entertainment, travel, government, and telecommunications.
I’m looking for an environment that supports individual initiative, respects talent, rewards accomplishment, and encourages innovation across disciplines and boundaries. I enjoy multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary teams, and I feel most alive when I’m travelling in a new place or new environment. Additional international experience is one of my most important personal and professional goals for the next several years.

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