archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Noth­ing like being blind­folded and lost in the woods to teach you how things look from the out­side…
Dur­ing an Out­ward Bound ses­sion last week, I was part of a group of IAs and Design­ers tasked with walk­ing a short dis­tance through the woods to a com­mon meet­ing point while blind­folded. We had twenty min­utes to pre­pare and twenty min­utes to fin­ish; the total dis­tance was about 50 yards.
After the clock started, I took my blind­fold off to look around. I saw a dozen peo­ple stag­ger­ing through the woods, with their arms wav­ing around and sticks in their hands, fum­bling through brush and trip­ping over logs. It was really funny. And a bit sad.
It was also a very good les­son in how silly things can look to some­one on the out­side. Shift­ing con­texts to the realm of IA, I’d have been upset if I were pay­ing for high-class con­sult­ing time from ‘experts’, and this is what I thought saw them doing.
Of course, from the inside, what we were doing made per­fect sense: we were simul­ta­ne­ously using dif­fer­ent meth­ods of tak­ing on a prob­lem com­pletely new to all of us. But you wouldn’t know that unless you’d either spent some time in the woods bind­folded before, or you’d watched us exper­i­ment with many, many, options for find­ing a tree (which all seem to feel exactly alike) dur­ing our prepa­ra­tion time.
We made it in the end, but it was as much luck as the result of our ‘opti­mized wayfind­ing strate­gies port­fo­lio’ — which is surely how you’d have to label a bunch of peo­ple wan­der­ing blind­folded in the woods in order to per­suade some­one to pay money for them to do so.

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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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