From IA to Director: Moving to the Dark Side
Information architecture is hard for many people to understand—including most executives. For me, that meant getting “re’orged” out of my favorite job I’ve ever had–IA. I’ve tried to move back into similar roles more than once, but none of them were the same. So, after years of trying to recreate the glory days, I realized I needed to knuckle down, learn about business, and justify IA work to the people holding the purse strings. In other words, I needed to start thinking like an executive. This session will describe my shift from IA to Director in the context of one high-impact project. I will describe how I convinced upper management that the project needed to be done and how I helped drive the cultural changes required to make the project stick. I’ll even talk a little bit about the actual information architecture.
