What is Information Architecture? - Part 3

Part 3 - What is an Information Architect?

A. Information Architecture knowledge elements.
B. Information Architecture experience elements.

A. Knowledge elements can be described as technical skills based in process or tool usage.

B. Experience elements can be described as acquired or interpreted elements drawn from specific instances and relate directly to research, problem solving and concept creation.


I'm sorry if this is a bit dry, it’s about to get very interesting.

What is an Information Architect? - Part 2

What is Information Architecture? - Part 2

There are really two questions here.

A. What is an Information Architect?

B. What does an Information Architect do?

A. An Information Architect can be any number of different linked or unlinked things just like any other person. However the elements of knowledge and experience of an Information Architect define what they can do.

B. What an Information Architect does is not unlike an Architect who builds a building.

• An Information Architect creates a concept, defines a structure and progression.


• Information Architects recognise other influences from technologies, incumbent systems and vendors.


• Information Architects carry out location, community, sector, market and business research to find best practice and where there is none they define it.


• Information Architects make a space for their clients and the client’s user audience to interact through information, activity or product transfer.


• Information Architects simplify or reinterpret existing complex systems to ease the flow of interactions on existing systems, or they create new interactions that support audience goals.


• Information Architects help clients to respond to the changing needs of their audience so that the client maintains a responsive relationship.

So to really understand what an Information Architect is, I'm going to have to try and define what makes up knowledge elements and experience elements in Information Architecture.

Information Architecture History

What is Information Architecture? - Part 1

The History of Information Atchitecture

Information Architecture is derived from the need to index and relate complex informational structures and is derived from military logistics where the specific definition and location of stores, munitions, personal and other material were required for successful campaigns.

For hundreds of years Information Architecture has been the domain of the military, scientific, civil government and librarians to support complex indexing systems.

So Information Architecture is several hundred years old, but has not really been recognised by this terminology until recent times. Information architecture is one of the cornerstones of the invention of the internet (carrier technology - network of networks) and latterly the World Wide Web. Vannevar Bush saw the need for a ways to make machinery help people in dealing with information “selection by association, rather than by indexing” alone. His vision of the “Memex” which would augment human intellect by operating as vast data storage fulfilled the vast logistics problems he was facing.

Information Architecture has only in the last 30 years become involved in enterprise systems, intranets and internet systems as their complexity and size has made them less and less understandable and useable. This is also the reason for commercial websites usage of information architects so that customers are able to quickly understand, use and purchase.

Information architecture now covers a multitude of activities and as such is a hybrid. The real problem is that so many people call themselves IA's but mean different things.

Can Web Analytics help my business?

I am not involved with any web analytics company so I can express some helpful information here. I have been working with web analytics data since 1996.

Can Web Analytics help my business?

The answer is Yes and No, I'll explain.

Web analytics programmes are stupid they only tell you what you ask them to. They have evolved from server side analytics and generally produce a standard set of results.

• How many visitors to the website - any hit (opening) to any page


• How many unique visitors - any individual during a given time frame


• How many returning visitors - if cookies (small data collections on user’s computer) used


• How many new visitors - provided they have not deleted their cookies


• Where the visitor is from


• How long the visitor is on a page, the site


• Where they enter the site - unique visitors can be tracked as to where they leave the site

Plus quite a few other things.

So all these things come pretty much as standard and can indicate what is happening on your website. The limitation on web analytics programmes is they can tell you who (Hitwise), what and when (WebTrends, NedStats, etc), but not why.

You could say that 'the journey is as important as the entry and the result'.

So while you can get lots of data it may not tell you any more than who came and if they bought. The real problem comes when you need to get tangible knowledge for changes in your marketing or website design. You really need a person who can interpret the data and offer solutions, even if you still lack the journey details.

So web analytics can help and are better than nothing but they do not tell the whole story and you will need a pretty gifted person to read, understand and create new ideas for your business from them.

One last parting shot;

Web Analytics should not be confused with Advertising Metrics; they are in no way the same thing. They look very similar but their specific purpose underwrites how they collect, distribute and define information from your website.

First a little bit of World Wide Web history

From its instigation the WWW was designed as an informational structure for the pooling and locating of information customisable by each user (Berners-Lee, 1989, p. 01). The underlying concept of the WWW predated Berners-Lee by sixty years through the works of Vannevar Bush. Bush was concerned with finding ways to make machinery help people in dealing with information “selection by association, rather than by indexing” (Bush, 1945, p06) from his experience of the inadequacies of paper based indexing systems since the 1930’s. He proposed a device called the “Memex” which would augment human intellect by operating as a vast data storage device with links and search functions.
Bush was interested in the creation of pathways to data “when the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined” (Bush, 1945, p07).

“Memex” was similar to hypertext, only it was mechanical and designed thirty years before Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson’s work on hypertext. Bush did not publish his ideas until 1945 with the essay “As We May Think” where he considered that “the human mind operates by association” (Bush, 1945, p06) and offered the “Memex” as a method to support that human function for recovering data.

This initial idea was a key influence on Douglas Engelbart in the underlying technology that Ted Nelson would describe as “hypertext” in 1982. Engelbart working at Stanford Research Institute in the 1960’s, acknowledges the influence of Bush in a letter he wrote to him (Engelbart, 1962, p. 01). Engelbart demonstrated the On-Line System (NLS) which manipulated structured documents in the San Francisco Fall Joint Computer Conference in 1968 and then made the same documents available in a collaborative environment located some miles away.

Accurate information handling is a key to good customer service, as it facilitates access to transaction details and ledger, allowing a quick and efficient response to customer needs. The augmentation, user control and accessibility of information were of primary importance in the development of the database system Hypercard (launched in 1987) created by Bill Atkinson who also designed MacPaint. Hypercard capitalised on hypertext using hyperlink technology users where able to create ‘hot spots’ allowing click through connections between user defined data stacks. These stacks could store text, images or music files dependant upon the user’s requirements. This allowed for user associations and supported search linking functions as specified in Bush’s “Memex”.

In the late 1980’s Tim Berners-Lee was attempting to resolve a problem associated with “loss of information about complex evolving systems” (Berners-Lee, 1989, p.01) due to staff turnover at Conseil European pour la Recherché Nucléaire (CERN). CERN operated in a hierarchical management structure but Berners-Lee suggested an informational structure forming across groups. The purpose was to share information, equipment, software and general communications using hypertext documents at different locations on a distributed network (heterogeneous, dissimilar elements or parts environments for computational, contextual, and cooperative design). He established the theory of “Mesh” and in 1990 while creating the code he coined the term World Wide Web (WWW). This WWW context provided a key customer service role by maintaining consistent and accurate information in an accessible environment.

The WWW supports a number of network technologies including intranet, extranet and internet. These three networks in turn are visualised through front end user interfaces like browsers including Microsoft® Internet Explorer, Netscape® Navigator, Mozilla Firefox® etc. Using standardised languages like Hypertext markup language (HTML), Extensible Hypertext markup language (XHTML) have enabled the addition of a standard user front-end tools or browsers for using intranet, extranet and internet data retrieval points. While the languages involved are different customer service is provided with a generic visual medium of search options, hyperlink lists, database driven queries and standardise visual outputs using icons, text and images.

Networks receive information and provide collaborative spaces in two distinct ways, through synchronisation or asynchronous methods. Synchronisation means information does appear at the same time as its input to a network. Asynchronous networking means information does not appear or exist in the same time period as its input. “Marketers will have to place their emphasis on obtaining accurate and timely information about customers and markets and on providing precisely the type and level of service that customer wants” (Barnes, 1993, p. 45). It is imperative in providing customer service that information is received in a timely fashion, finding out the information is old after passing it on, irritates and inclines customers to find alternative service suppliers. Control of information flows within the firm and between the firm and its customers will define, the customer experience and save the customer service department being relegated to a reactionary role, through problem solving. Internet customer services are based around synchronised databases that maintain accuracy, by overwriting old data with current data.

An intranet is a network located within an organisation or company which may have many physical operator locations or nodes but uses one central database or information server. Robert Metcalf's law states that “the "value" or "power" of a network increases in proportion to the square of the number of nodes on the network” (Metcalf, 1973, p. 279). Intranets use both synchronous and asynchronous technologies to control the flow of information. An extranet is an extension of an intranet into a secure virtual private network (VPN) to support B2B functions or a customer B2C interface for purchase and service support. The internet is a network of networks which may include many intranet, extranet or WWW portals.

References

1. Barnes, J.G (1993). New technologies, new markets and changing marketing practices. Irish Marketing Review. Vol. 6; p. 45 [Electronic version]. Retrieved November 17th, 2004.


2. Berners-Lee, Tim (1989, March) Information Management: A Proposal. The original proposal of the WWW, HTMLized. Retrieved November 1st, 2004 from http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
3. Bush, V. (1945). As We May Think. Atlantic Monthly, July[Electronic version]. Retrieved November 1st, 2004 from http://www.csi.uottawa.ca/~dduchier/misc/vbush/awmt.html


4. Engelbart, D. (1962). Letter to Vannevar Bush and Program On Human Effectiveness. Stanford University [Electronic version]. Retrieved November 1st, 2004 from http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Engelbart/Engelbart_LettertoBush.html
5. Metcalf, R.M (1972). Strategies for operating systems in computer networks. Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery Annual Conference, USA Vol1 p. 278-281.