Peter Morville on Jesse James Garrett — the IA role, discipline and community

I recently read Andrew Boyd’s comment storm and the way he went from blog to blog to blog, following the white rabbit, from post to post. Today it was my turn to follow the white rabbit.

I saw Brad Hinton had visited my blog, and had written about me and Peter Morville, who had commented on an essay by Jesse James Garrett — which is where I ended up. Here, Jesse talks about the nature of information architecture, as both role and discipline. To this, Peter adds that it it now time to add a third dimension: community.

The Three Circles of Information Architecture 3.0
Source: http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000149.php

What I find most interesting with Peter’s addition is that the IA community is gathering strength without problems associated I’ve been seeing with self-identification associated with disciplines like Business Analysis.

AABA and IIBA are going through special certification and accreditation regimes in order to bring some level of standardisation to a market that they see is clouded with ambiguity — this activity just makes me nervous. Garrett, in his essay IA/Recon agrees:

“Definitions based upon the role tend to creep naturally toward broadness. Because the responsibilities that correspond to the role vary so greatly from organization to organization, the definition of the role (and thus the discipline) grows larger and larger.

Any talk of defining the role [though] inevitably threatens someone’s sense of identity — if the role ends up being defined in a way that differs from my job description, does that mean I’m not an IA anymore? Or worse, that I’m a pretender?

The opposing approach is to define the role based on the discipline… These definitions tend to creep naturally toward [a] narrowness [of focus]. But when this definition (intended for the discipline) is applied to the role, it creates for some the fear of being ‘boxed in’, trapped in a role so narrowly defined that many of the elements essential to the success of any given architecture are outside the control or influence of the architect.

I know that IAs will still have problems with identification — I’ve seen battles between the IAs and BAs. So what’s the solution?

Garrett suggests that, if we are very lucky, “responsibility for information architecture will be assigned to people like [the] ‘Web designer’ or ‘content editor’ or ‘project manager’. For all of them, the user experience is just one of a number of issues they must address. And the work they do will constitute the vast majority of the IA on the Web, because most projects just can’t afford a specialised full-time IA on their team.”

So, ultimately, the definition, role, responsibility, and the future of Information Architecture, is not in our hands — it’s in theirs. All we can do as IAs is to promote what we do through our communities and beyond and ensure that IA-work is kept on-the-map.

M