Tuesday, June 22, 2010

City Planning

Actually the job as an information architect in IT is a bit of a funny one, since in information architecture it is very rare you actually design something for construction (I assume technical architects and solutions architects are closer to the construction of stuff). Information architecture is closer to a strategy & planning job. I like making the analogy to the job of a city planner; information architecture is all about knowing where we have the main traffic jams in information flows, where we are building new processing plants and creating the understanding how all these elements relate to each other. To stretch the analogy, information architecture is closest to planning urban renewal!

When we talk urban renewal, then I immediately can tell you that many of the existing methods in architecture (e.g TOGAF, Archimede, ...) are to much geared towards greenfield sites or systems that do not cover large & complex enterprises. They assume we create from scratch complete designs covering all aspects of the architecture stack, whilst in most cases we just adding bits and pieces on top of strata of diverse IT systems, that are like layers of a historic town. Information architecture is therefore more like working in an archaeological excavation, than doing planning from a blank sheet of paper. Unfortunately this is the reality in most businesses today. We have usually quite a few decades of legacy and the job of the information architect is to carefully plan structures that do not damage what we have, whilst providing improved capabilities for the future. More on my City Planning challenge in my later posts ...

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