Lumberjack IA?
“I’m a lumberjack and I’m OK. I work all night and I sleep all day”
…At least that’s how I’ve felt over the last 10 months of this project I’ve been working on. I’m not cutting down wood, but it seems like I work all night on some of the tricky parts of this project (and would actually rather be sleeping … all day even).
What am I up to? I’ve been primarily doing conceptual design in an agile environment — trying to work out how people think about the work they do and then trying to come up with better ways they could work assisted with a nice new IT system.
Last year’s IA Institute survey notes that a lot of IAs are doing this sort of work — out of 315 respondents, 63 reported being engaged with this activity 21% of the time. Labelled Strategic IA, it involves the creation of business models, high-level categorisation rather than just the creation of metadata. What else are they doing?
- tactical IA — metadata and taxonomies
- usability testing
- user research
- project management
Furthermore, IAs report doing usability testing as much as they are doing administration and travel.
Interestingly enough, the IAs surveyed are typically NOT engaged in:
- content generation
- content management
- database design
- graphic design
- IT integration
- general business consulting
So what are you doing as an IA? And if you’re not an IA, are you doing some of this stuff anyway?
M
