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2003 IA Summit - Trip Reports
Stacy
Surla shares her thoughts on the IA Summit. Comment to ssurla@aspensys.com.
Making Connections with Techies
Chris Farnum, ProQuest
with Simon Wistow (Yahoo!), Kristen Truong (Covisint), Margaret Hanley (BBC),
Jodi Bollaert (Compuware), and Dennis Schleicher (J. Walter Thompson)
I find it difficult to talk about IA with everyone - not just
with the Development folks in my company. Nonetheless, we've
managed to make a lot of progress with the non-techie contingents
over the past few years (bosses, clients, content creators).
Concepts like user experience and the separation of information
architecture from visual design are becoming real and useful
for these people, who, I suppose, are closer to users than to
developers or architects. The challenge of communicating with
the "techies," however, looks like the final frontier from where
I stand. Therefore, the Connections panel discussion was something
I'd looked forward to, and turned out to be one of my favorite
sessions of the Summit. I wish we could have had three or four
more on the same subject (perhaps with a role-playing workshop
in there somewhere).
The IA participants on the panel were Chris Farnum, Kristen
Truong, Margaret Hanley, Jodi Bollaert, and Dennis Schleicher.
The IA-friendly techie was Simon Wistow. The session was structured
as a set of brief presentations from each of the panelists,
followed by dialogue or rebuttal from the techie. In the event,
everyone pretty much agreed with everyone else. Taken together,
their points form a bunch of tips and to-do lists. The PowerPoint
Presentation is helpful, too. Other resources mentioned
are listed at the bottom of this summary.
Realities
- Tensions do exist
- Issues include role separation, overlap, and competition
- Methodologies, processes, and deliverables are similar, and yet so different
- Misconceptions help us cope, but not much else
Key Tips
- Bring techies in on the process at the right time - i.e.
when what we're doing directly involves what they have to
build
- Bring techies in on the right deliverables - e.g. on functional requirements, but perhaps not on everything
- Work to people's strengths - some folks are better at
certain things than others
- Be concerned with not messing in others' sandboxes. (Some
panelists agreed, some disagreed on this, but the point
is, perhaps, to be aware of whether techies perceive you
as overstepping your boundaries.)
- Realize there are things about their jobs that we IAs ought to be acquainted with. And there are things about our jobs that perhaps need explaining.
Things IAs Need to Understand about Techies' Jobs
- Data models
- Tiered architectures
- Exception handling processes (e.g. edge cases, or "what happens if?")
- Quality assurance process/bug handling (understand their bug handling process)
Things IAs Need to Explain to Techies about Our Jobs
- Our methodologies
- That we're not designing database systems, systems architecture, object handlers
- IAs can help techies focus on the challenges they enjoy
- IAs will help projects avoid the business/technology disconnect
Different, But the Same
Simon Wistow had the following things to say, which summarize
the session nicely.
- We work on the same things
- Organizing data
- Making things easy to find
- Mapping relationships
- Interface design
- We use similar tools
- Use cases
- Content models
- Ontologies
- However, we work on opposite sides of the coin
- Info vs Data
- IAs worry about where the information is going
- Techies worry about where it is coming from
In summary, yes, there is a cross-cultural communication issue.
To bridge the gap, we can do a few things.
- Realize that we do share common ground
- Recognize there are differences between IAs and techies
- Educate ourselves about some important technology areas
- Educate the techies, too, in areas they can be receptive to
- Realize we're all just blokes, and take each other out for a pint
RESOURCES
- Online tutorials
- Books
- Humor
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