Thursday, March 19, 2009
IA Summit 09
Just finished the keynote and first session of the IA Summit. I Will post more as time permits (I hope). Added the the Twitter #ias09 feed for the duration of the Summit.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Information Archeology
I just finished a half day seminar on Information Archeology and gained a whole new insight on User Research.
Lorelei Brown and Hallie Wilfert lead the seminar and it was a very good survey of techniques for gaining user data through web analytics and research. It was a fresh and convincing approach to gaining user data for design.
While I knew what the seminar was going to be about before going into it (from the IA Summit website), I have always had a different meaning for archeology as to when it comes to Business Architectures. Namely, archeology was the act of studying, and understanding systems, applications of practices that came before. Usually archeology is performed when what came before was either poorly designed or had no consideration of architecture. In enterprise architecture circles, you often hear:
Normally this phrase is used as a club over the head of a client who wants to
implement something without deliberate though or planning. I don't think that anyone has ever considered formalizing a practice or methodology for this use of archeology. I think I like the use of Brown and Wilfert's practice. It is a more positive application and it may be the next discipline in the IT/IM pantheon.
Lorelei Brown and Hallie Wilfert lead the seminar and it was a very good survey of techniques for gaining user data through web analytics and research. It was a fresh and convincing approach to gaining user data for design.
While I knew what the seminar was going to be about before going into it (from the IA Summit website), I have always had a different meaning for archeology as to when it comes to Business Architectures. Namely, archeology was the act of studying, and understanding systems, applications of practices that came before. Usually archeology is performed when what came before was either poorly designed or had no consideration of architecture. In enterprise architecture circles, you often hear:
"An ounce of architecture is better than a pound of archeology."
Normally this phrase is used as a club over the head of a client who wants to
implement something without deliberate though or planning. I don't think that anyone has ever considered formalizing a practice or methodology for this use of archeology. I think I like the use of Brown and Wilfert's practice. It is a more positive application and it may be the next discipline in the IT/IM pantheon.
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