Information Architects wanted

An ongoing theme for debate that I'm finding these days is the need of Information Architects within large corporations. If you follow some of the analysts of the IT industry, you will see this mentioned more and more.

What is an Information Architect? If you ask 3 different people, you can find 4 answers. But here's a simple way of looking at it: It is a person that knows how to organize information inside a company so it makes sense and is usable by all users.

This may sound trivial, but as anyone with some experience dealing with IT in large organizations can tell you, it's not. Anyone who has tried to implement a corporate intranet or portal has struggled with the basic difficulties of the problem: the same information has different meanings to different people in the organization. Some people like to see all information organized by customer name; some others by product line; then there is the discussion about the level of detail you use. There is always a trade off between ease of use and completeness.

Seriously looking at the information architecture of your company can be scary: if people are not talking the same language, chances are your systems are not either. The job of the information architect is to make sure that they do. Not an easy task.

I do believe that we need to think more closely about the way companies organize their information. I think this is a crucial part of the sustainable responsiveness and adaptability of corporations. I think however that the debate about information architects is far from easy and poses some fundamental questions to every organization:
- centralized or decentralized rights to structure and organize information?
- manual or automated processes for adding meta data?
- structured and unstructured data reconciliation or separate worlds?

As I've mentioned before I believe the best way to approach this issue is driven by a business purpose. And customer service is a very good candidate: start thinking about ways to improve customer service and you very quickly come to the conclusion that managing information about your customers in a more efficient way can have huge impacts on customer satisfaction. For example it can avoid that experience we all know, of being asked the same question by different people while they pass you to one another on the phone trying to solve your problem.

I can't see how an information architect can design a way to better use information without realy thinking on a business use. However I do see organizations doing e-Government and e-Banking that have made great progress in making all their information talk in an integrated way. And one sees in these cases a progressive merge of Business Intelligence and CRM with Enterprise Content Management and search. Something that makes a lot of sense.