What does an Information Architect (IA) do?

I’ve been teaching a colleague about wireframes and the other work I’m doing as an Information Architect (IA) on my engagement here at Woden. She’s always comes back to the same question:

What’s the difference between an IA and a good Business Analyst?

The Wikipedia describes IA as “the practice of structuring information”, whether its data, information or knowledge. IAs employ user-centred design methodologies to determine what information is being used and where, and try to determine the best methods of structuring information for users. My colleague often reminds me that this is what a good BA does, but I’ve only ever known BAs to be interested in the business and the business aims and less interested in users and their needs/wants.

The BAs here, working with me on this project, are fixated on internal processes, workflow, database design and data fields. When I asked them for a calendar of events so that I could see the process as a whole (so I could map an external point of view to them), they just looked at me with blank eyes and claimed that everyone knew things in terms of the main committee meetings, plus 6 weeks for this event, minus 8 weeks for that event. This was the internal departmental view of the world where this committee was the centre piece of a great wheel of events. How about the external perspective? When did they need to get their papers in order for the agenda? The BAs would tell you committee meeting minus 8 weeks - not very handy for people working primarily outside this process.

This ignorance of the user as the focus, though, doesn’t mean that all BAs ignore their users.

Are IAs just BAs for the web? Maybe. Would this make an IA a specialised BA? I’m not so certain.

To answer my colleague’s question, I googled definitions for BAs and IAs, what they actually deliver, and how they deliver it. Here’s what I found:

Core to a BAs work is:

a primary focus on the business (even though a good BA will focus on the intersection between the business and users)

a responsibility for analysing the business needs of their clients and stakeholders to help identify business problems and propose solutions

producing business requirements

producing functional requirements

producing requirements that cannot be met by a specific function, e.g. performance, scalability, security and usability requirements, that would be included in a system requirements document

Core to an IAs work is:

a focus on the intersection between the business, users, and systems

analsys of the business needs of users (just like BAs)

analsys of the wants of users and their interaction preferences, and the way that these impact on usability of a system (web or otherwise)

analsys of usability and accessibility

creating taxonomies for information

producing interface design requirements and low-level design concepts (wire frames) of what these will look like and how users will interact with them (interaction design specifications/requirements)

producing system, business and user requirements (just like BAs), in a similar way that an architect will produce plans for a house for building, specifically for information systems (e.g. websites, knowledge management systems, information management systems.)

I guess that means that they both do the same sort of work with a subtle shift in emphasis on where the effort is concentrated:

• IAs concentrate on information needs as the centre of their work
• BAs concentrate on the business needs as the centre of their work

As a result, a BA could do all the work of an IA [1], but would probably turn to an IA (or a Taxonomist) to produce a taxonomy or other method for categorising information for a system. A BA might map information flow, but would turn to an IA to produce the indicative wire frames of the interface to enter those details. A BA would probably also turn to an IA to conduct usability workshops to assess performance and success of the interface design (and there are a lot of methods to apply in different circumstances), and assess whether or not the interface was disability/accessibility friendly. If the BA had experience in psycological testing methodologies he could probably do the interface- and user-testing himself.

An IA could do all the work of a BA, but would rely on a BA’s products to determine the business needs, drivers for information and supporting information systems, as well as data and information process models to help provide clarity for his wireframe designs.

If I were an organisation looking for a full-time analyst, I’d probably look to employ a BA with some web/information experience and hope that they could do a good job making me a website when the need arose, rather than employ just an IA, with the assumption that a BA could apply his skills in a more generalist way to the business when it didn’t involve information or the web. If I were an organisation looking for a consultant or specialist to help out with an information project, however, I might hire an IA to produce a website plan because of the specialist nature of his work.

Will this answer my coleague’s question? I’m not sure.

I know, though, that it has cleared up a few things in my own mind about what I do for a living. So, next time my Mum or Dad ask me to remind them what it is that I do for a living, I think I’ll be able to better answer their questions.

M

[1]. IMHO, a BA with experience working on web/information projects, who knows the capability inherent in the technology, who can perform information categorisation tasks, assess user behaviour in usability or accessibility workshops, and can produce artifacts like wire frames, could do all of the tasks required of an IA.