Wildly Appropriate: Austin Govella On Selling IA

Austin Govella On Selling IA - Amazing!

Nov 21, 10:47 AM

I'm going to violate the principles of private listserv blah-blah and copy-out verbatim some snips from a response that Austin Govella from Thinking And Making made on the IA Institute email list today in response to a thread on "selling IA".

The real difficulty comes from assuming IA has a direct value contribution to an organization, that there's something -- no matter how intangible -- that IA owns, and the value of that commodity, only owned by IA, can only be captures by hiring some information architects. But, deep down, we all know that's a bunch of crap.

For starters, owning a part of the product or the experience is an out-dated idea from the industrialized world. Sole ownership of any part of a product or experience is no longer possible: we live in a collaborative world..

<snip>

Information architecture, like business analysis and enterprise architecture, is a discipline of framing and alignment that ensures an organization's parts work together.

<snip>

Alignment disciplines, like information architecture, identify these gaps and help bridge them. IA creates structures that make it easier for diverse disciplines to stay on the same path. IA creates tools that help groups understand and validate the path their on, so they know where they're going, and it helps organizations validate their current direction against where they want to go.

IA has no value of its own. IA has the ability to help organizations recover the value they lose in the gaps between where the organization wants to go, and where it's headed.

<snip>

Part of closing this gap means we stop trying to own part of a project. We stop governing small tactical decisions that are more the purview of more focused disciplines. It also means we start understanding the larger picture, how the different groups work together. How they don't work together. It means we should reframe our work towards creating tools that help organization's identify, bridge, and avoid gaps and maintain overall alignment.

This is the work we already do. It's really more a matter of perspective.

What do you think? Did I hear an "amen"? Or a Bronx cheer...