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.

It’s my plea­sure to announce the recent appear­ance of Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture in two very dif­fer­ent and most unex­pected places.
The first is in lead­ing pol­icy jour­nal For­eign Affairs, where the term is men­tioned in a let­ter to the Edi­tor by David Hoff­man, Pres­i­dent of Internews in the July / August 2003 issue. Why is it impor­tant that IA appear in a pol­icy jour­nal? For­eign Affairs is legit­i­mately one of the most influ­en­tial pub­li­ca­tions in the world, in that it con­sti­tutes a (nom­i­nally — decide for your­self as always) non-partisan and pub­lic forum for cur­rent and for­mer world lead­ers, lead­ing polit­i­cal the­o­rists, and active mem­bers of major gov­ern­ment and non-government orga­ni­za­tions to dis­cuss, debate, and decide national and inter­na­tional pol­icy. Fro exam­ple, while many peo­ple both in Amer­ica and abroad were taken by sur­prise when Pres­i­dent Bush announced his administration’s doc­trine of pre-emptive strikes against poten­tially threat­en­ing coun­tries, read­ers of For­eign Affairs would have seen Con­doleeza Rice out­line her vision of the new Amer­i­can world order in some detail dur­ing the cam­paign — before Bush was elected, and she assumed the role of National Secu­rity Advi­sor. Hoffman’s use of the term infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture (pg. 210) is broadly inclu­sive — he says, “Iraq now faces many chal­lenges, among them to rebuild a cred­i­ble infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and to train a new gen­er­a­tion of jour­nal­ists who can report fairly, objec­tively, and inde­pen­dently on that soci­ety.” — and the nature of his orga­ni­za­tion as in Internet-based free media project means it is less remark­able that he would employ the term than some­one out­side the Inter­net com­mu­nity like Made­line Albright, but it is nonethe­less sig­nif­i­cant that IA is now seen as crit­i­cal in a polit­i­cal con­text. Too often we focus on the busi­ness, aca­d­e­mic, or even aes­thetic con­texts of IA. Yet if Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture is to be as gen­uinely rel­e­vant a field as I sus­pect a major­ity of we who are its prac­ti­tion­ers believe it capa­ble of being in the very near future, then we must adov­cate for it’s vis­i­bil­ity and effi­cacy on the polit­i­cal level.

The sec­ond note­wor­thy appear­ance is in my home town of Can­ton, Ohio, in the form of a list­ing on Monster.com seek­ing can­di­dates for a full time job open­ing inside a local adver­tis­ing agency. Can­ton is a medium-sized (pop­u­la­tion 90k) pre­dom­i­nantly blue-collar for­mer heavy man­u­fac­tur­ing cen­ter known for two things; the Pro­fes­sional Foot­ball Hall of Fame, and a remark­ably low cost of liv­ing (for exam­ple, a full 62% lower than New­ton, MA, where I’m rent­ing at the moment, accord­ing to the salary cal­cu­la­tor avail­able on Monster.com). The for­mer means that for the one week each year pre­ced­ing the induc­tion of new mem­bers into the Hall of Fame, Can­ton becomes the cap­i­tal of the pro­fes­sional foot­ball uni­verse. The lat­ter means that the sub­urbs north of Can­ton have become a rapidly grown­ing bed­room com­mu­nity for upper mid­dle class com­muters work­ing in the Akron and even Cleve­land metro areas. By indus­try base, demo­graph­ics, geog­ra­phy, and cul­ture, Can­ton is quite lit­er­ally the last place that I ever expected see a post­ing for an Infor­ma­tion Architect’s posi­tion. And yet there it is: the agency in ques­tion (Innis Mag­giore) hap­pens to be one of the fastest grow­ing adver­tis­ing firms in Ohio, and a large pro­por­tion of those involved in the cre­ation and man­age­ment of infor­ma­tion spaces now rec­og­nize the indis­pens­able nature of IA.

I called Innis Mag­giore to ask them about the open­ing, but haven’t been able to speak with them yet to find out how they iden­ti­fied the need, how many appli­cants they’ve had, and what level of qual­ity the appli­cants demon­strate. I’ll post any­thing I learn further.

Boxes and Arrows just published my article Analyzing Card Sort Results With a Spreadsheet Template. Thanks to everyone who made it possible to share this tool. I hope it helps your next project!

If you need the template file, it’s available here – card_sort_template_ba.xls.