The Data, Information, Knowledge, & Wisdom hierarchy has shifted. Systems that store and transform data automatically apply simple or semantic metadata to the records they process.

What most consider data is really information in an early stage of refinement. Raw data off the sensor is something that a human will rarely see.

Information architects have the opportunity to extend their purview of information into what most would consider data.

• Information Warehouse not Data Warehouse
• Master Information Services not Master Data Services

The notes above are parts of an idea that has been bashing around in my brain for a while now. Data is Information. Information needs IAs.

Where am I coming from?

I recently worked for the Microsoft SQL UX team; there I was exposed to many things that I had ignored throughout my career because I thought “I’m not a database guy”. Even now I’m not even a novice DBA but at SQL I was exposed to the problems that individuals and organizations have with managing and manipulating ‘massive’ amounts of data (I have massive in quotes because my personal definition of massive has changed dramatically). The challenges that I was asked to deal with was how people dealt with these problems… because I’m a designer. When I stopped thinking about data as a blob and starting thinking about it as information that people need in context then I realized that many of the issues that ‘information workers’ have with data are information architecture challenges.

Many of the people that I’ve met who have been responsible for massive data sets approach it from the supply side: Is it secure; is it highly available; is it optimized; is it clean; …etc. The people who need the data to do their job demand answers to their questions and don’t know, or need to know, the ER diagrams of your database. These people need to find pieces of data, understand how they relate and use it to answer their questions.

After my exposure to the difficulties people have manipulating data because they don’t understand its context, I became fascinated with how we could make this easier on people and provide more value to organizations. After all, my job isn’t to create better information systems my job is to make better information workers.

Who inspires me?

A few months ago I found a podcast where Jon Udell speaks with the Chief Scientist of IBM Entity Analytics, Jeff Jonas, who discusses a set of themes woven through his work, explored on his blog, and captured in a series of evocative phrases: perpetual analytics, non-obvious relationship awareness, sequence neutrality, “data finds data”, and anonymous resolution. I’ve listened to this 50 minute talk about a half a dozen times now and each time I find a new notion that totally blows me away.

When the “data can find the data,” there exists an opportunity for the insight to find the user.

Content, Context, Users + Intent

For even more on this check out Jeff’s blog post or download chapter seven by Jeff Jonas and Lisa Sokol from Beautiful Data (O’Reilly)

What is the opportunity?

After leaving SQL I was trying to figure out a way to talk about the ideas I had on how information architects could help with the challenges. Early in 2010 Gene Leganza published Topic Overview: Information Architecture for Forrester Research, Inc. In this overview he talks about the 15 hot technology trends that Forrester has identified as fueling the next period of technology innovation and growth and how 5 of them could benefit from better information architecture practices.

I agree with the 5 that he has chosen but I also feel that having someone who practices IA on the team could help improve the user experience of:

• Business rules processing moves to the mainstream
• Collaboration platforms become people-centric
• Apps and business processes go mobile
• BPM will be Web-2.0-enabled

I (mostly) like the article and I can recognize that its primary audience is Enterprise Architects. Keeping this in mind the paper provides great potential to re-imagine what enterprise information architecture could be. Information architects are needed because when exploiting and organizing information questions are more important than answers and, in my experience, designers tend to ask better questions then engineers.

I hope that the Information architecture community embraces this opportunity, I will explore this more in the future but I’m notoriously slow to post. I wish I could have been discussing this with people at the IAsummit, maybe next year.

I have been working on a mindMap that illustrates the kinds of activities, research and technologies that me and my co-workers do in our everyday practice. While I realize that this is somewhat specific to our company and the work that we do I thought it would be interesting to get feedback on it. I hope to refine this as we develop the practice.

So if you have anything that you’d like to share, please comment on Flickr.

Get the Quicktime version here.

Jeff Parks puts out a great Podcast called the IA podcast and last week he was at Mesh. So he did a session with a bunch of great people on UX & Community and I wasn’t in it. WHATS UP WITH THAT. Bryce is in it but not me. Well you should go check it out anyway.

[tags]userexperience, ux, jeffparks, torcamp, mesh07, barcamptoronto, thechickentest[/tags]

Matthew Milan & Sam Ladner

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 28 megs )

A mashup of scenario development and social learning, backcasting is a strategy framework that allows practitioners to successfully conceptualize, scope and structure multiple future states. It also provides a framework for successfully negotiating obstacles and threats to achieving those states. Originally used in the environmental planning field, backcasting has been hacked and refined for use in web strategy discovery activities.

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier – James Robertson
• Systems Thinking, Rich Mapping and Conceptual Models – Matt MIllan & Gene Smith
• Project Touchstones how to bridge competing viewpoints and build vision consensus and innovation – Jess McMullin
• Using Search Analytics To Diagnose What’s Ailing Your Information Architecture – Lou Rosenfeld & Rich Wiggins
• Real information Architecture – New Mighty Deeds – Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph
• Information Architecture and Ethical Design – Olly Wright

Matt Milan and Gene Smith introduce Rich Mapping and Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) to information architects. SSM is a holistic problem solving framework that can be used to design and model interactions between organizations, people, environments, products and services.

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 22 megs )

The expected outcome for session attendees will be an understanding of the key tenets of Soft Systems Methodology, how these concepts can be applied “off the shelf” to information architecture problems, and how soft systems thinking could be used to drive the development of new IA tools and practices.

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Backcasting: or how I learned to stop predicting and help my clients – Sam Ladner & Matthew Milan
• Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier – James Robertson
• Project Touchstones how to bridge competing viewpoints and build vision consensus and innovation – Jess McMullin
• Using Search Analytics To Diagnose What’s Ailing Your Information Architecture – Lou Rosenfeld & Rich Wiggins
• Real information Architecture – New Mighty Deeds – Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph
• Information Architecture and Ethical Design – Olly Wright

[tags]IASummit, IASummit2007, InformationArchitectureSummit, GeneSmith, MattMillan, SoftSystems[/tags]

Jess’s talk from this years Information Architecture Summit. LukeW took some good notes.

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 23 megs )

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Backcasting: or how I learned to stop predicting and help my clients – Sam Ladner & Matthew Milan
• Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier – James Robertson
• Systems Thinking, Rich Mapping and Conceptual Models – Matt Milan & Gene Smith
• Using Search Analytics To Diagnose What’s Ailing Your Information Architecture – Lou Rosenfeld & Rich Wiggins
• Real information Architecture – New Mighty Deeds – Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph
• Information Architecture and Ethical Design – Olly Wright

This session will explore principles for creating effective project touchstones with a mix of grounding theory based in framing and boundary objects, pragmatic real-world examples, and how-to guidance. By focusing on creating touchstones early in a project, IAs can build buy-in, avoid wasted effort, increase their influence with their teams, and make a more meaningful difference with their work.

[tags]IASummit, IASummit2007, InformationArchitectureSummit, JessMcMullin[/tags]

This presentation kicked of the IA Summit this year for me. It is a big topic to get into any real detail in 45 minutes and I’m looking forward to the book.

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 23 megs )

We’re witnessing a rapid recognition of the value of search analytics among people from a variety of backgrounds, and we hope that our presentation helps crystallize the discussion within the IA community.

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Backcasting: or how I learned to stop predicting and help my clients – Sam Ladner & Matthew Milan
• Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier – James Robertson
• Systems Thinking, Rich Mapping and Conceptual Models – Matt Milan & Gene Smith
• Project Touchstones how to bridge competing viewpoints and build vision consensus and innovation – Jess McMullin
• Real information Architecture – New Mighty Deeds – Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph
• Information Architecture and Ethical Design – Olly Wright

[tags]IASummit, IASummit2007, InformationArchitectureSummit, SearchAnalytics, SearchOptimization, Search, RichWiggins, LouRosenfeld[/tags]

This was a panel discussion Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph given at the 2007 Information Architecture Summit. In a nutshell this discussion we talked about the role of data on the web and how the web is changing the nature of data. It was very entertaining and informative and I’ll add a link to the slides as soon as I can find one. This talk reminded me of another great presentation which is Drew McLellan’s “Can Your Website be Your API?” [ PDF ] and there is a audio recording of that session as well.

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 30 megs )

For more information read the abbreviated session description below.

Real information Architecture – New Mighty Deeds
Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph

In this panel, we would like to explore this idea of a web of data further and it’s implications for information architects creating the next generation of web sites.

In particular we are bring together:

• Mags Hanley who will moderate the panel and provide an interactive introduction to the subject (think human lego)
• Tom Coates talking about the components of the web of data; the specifics of building a site or service with data reuse taking the wider ecosystem into account, what that ecosystem is likely to be like and why on earth IAs want to engage with it in the first place
• Matt Biddulph on how this web of data is being used in APIs, and RDF and how they relates to traditional IA deliverables; and what this means to IAs working with developers
• Lisa Chan who will talk about her recommendations for IAs interested in developing their skills in this areas

The aim of the panel is to open the eyes of the IA community to how we can set the data free; how this will affect our clients and organisations, and the skills we develop ourselves.

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Backcasting: or how I learned to stop predicting and help my clients – Sam Ladner & Matthew Milan
• Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier – James Robertson
• Systems Thinking, Rich Mapping and Conceptual Models – Matt Milan & Gene Smith
• Project Touchstones how to bridge competing viewpoints and build vision consensus and innovation – Jess McMullin
• Using Search Analytics To Diagnose What’s Ailing Your Information Architecture – Lou Rosenfeld & Rich Wiggins
• Information Architecture and Ethical Design – Olly Wright

[tags]IASummit, IASummit2007, InformationArchitectureSummit, data, microformats, MargaretHanley, LisaChan, TomCoates, MattBiddulph[/tags]

I came into this presentation honestly because the other one i wanted to attend was too full for my comfort. What a stroke of luck. I thought I needed to feed my brain but this was one of those sessions that feeds your soul. You take those when you get them. Olly Wright did a great job and this was one of the highlights of the conference for me so far. I don’t know I can accurately convey what the presentation was but you can read an abstract below. Hopefully I’ll add a link to the slides soon when I get one.

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 21 megs )

Information Architecture and Ethical Design
Olly Wright

This presentation will look at how as information architects we can approach our work in this cultural context. How we might take an informed, ethical stand. It will cover some of the prominent contemporary theories of ethical design, culture / media studies, and behavioural psychology, and look at their applicability to information architecture. It will explore areas such as brand authenticity, privacy, social networking, push versus pull marketing, and ubiquitous computing. And it will provide concrete examples and methods for how these can be used in practice. The aim is to bring abstract ethical theory down to the level of the concrete and applicable, and perhaps inspire some to add ‘Help make the World a better place’ to every list of requirements.

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Backcasting: or how I learned to stop predicting and help my clients – Sam Ladner & Matthew Milan
• Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier – James Robertson
• Systems Thinking, Rich Mapping and Conceptual Models – Matt Milan & Gene Smith
• Project Touchstones how to bridge competing viewpoints and build vision consensus and innovation – Jess McMullin
• Using Search Analytics To Diagnose What’s Ailing Your Information Architecture – Lou Rosenfeld & Rich Wiggins
• Real information Architecture – New Mighty Deeds – Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph
• Information Architecture and Ethical Design – Olly Wright

[tags]IASummit, IASummit2007, InformationArchitectureSummit, EthicalDesign, OllyWright, Banksy[/tags]

Some of this stuff is a little awkward in hindsight but I still think there is some interesting stuff in there.

The report is a PDF that is in a ZIP archive.

The clip above is editted the full podcast has many more interviews and posters. You can find the full podcast on podcast.net and in iTunes. Oh and if you want the poster, here you go.

[tags]IA Summit 2006, iasummit2006[/tags]

Check out my filckr photos

Check out everyones flickr photos

[tags]IA Summit 2006, iasummit2006, informationArchitecture, design+business, Web2.0[/tags]