AIfIA Leadership Seminar Topics Announced

January 11, 2005 05:10 PM

Advanced IA: Topics for 2005 and Beyond

January 11, 2005 -- As the field of information architecture continues to broaden and flourish, IAs are called on to face an increasingly wide set of challenges. This seminar will connect leaders from a variety of disciplines to showcase directions for the field of Information Architecture, and provide a place for IA practitioners to share their own challenges and advances in the field with their peers.

This seminar will focus on the topics vital to information architecture in 2005, including:

  • Enterprise Information Architecture
  • Security
  • Semantic Web
  • Business Strategy
  • IA and Globalization
  • Scenario Planning

The 1½ day seminar at the start of the ASIS&T IA Summit will enable participants to leave with a solid understanding of each topic. Session leaders will also provide practical, best practices approaches for participants to bring to their own projects.

For those who couldn't attend The Future of IA Retreat in October 2004, this will be an opportunity to participate in a similar informal, highly interactive forum providing an invaluable way to learn from others in the field. For those who did attend The Future of IA Retreat, this seminar will bring new and different speakers and more in-depth topics to consider as you plan for your future in information architecture. There will be numerous opportunities to learn about what others are doing as well as chances to contribute your own experience.

This seminar is intended for those already familiar with and experienced in IA. Attendance will be limited to 45 participants; early registration is suggested, as all previous seminars have sold out.

For more information, please check the AIfIA website at http://www.aifia.org/news/ where updated session descriptions will be posted. To register, go to the IA Summit website.

Speakers and Topics

Christina Wodtke and Scott Hirsch
Managing Up: The Business Strategy of Information Architecture
IA offers many strategic opportunities for businesses to leverage their information assets and promote efficiency, innovation, and new product development. Many IAs intuitively know their potential value to the enterprise, but lack the language and business savvy to manage up the hierarchy and influence organizational change. Christina and Scott will share how using the psychology of influence and the language of executives can help you get recognized by the decision makers in your company.

Louis Rosenfeld
The Enterprise IA Roadmap
Many of today’s information architects find themselves working in impossibly large, distributed, messy, and highly politicized organizations. Traditional "textbook" information architecture doesn't prepare us to survive and thrive in such environments. We need to reconsider the methods, designs, and skills that comprise our work, and branch into new areas, including planning governance and funding for IA initiatives, and learning how to play politics. Lou Rosenfeld will lead a discussion of enterprise IA (EIA) that covers:

  • The challenges of the enterprise
  • How IA is different in the enterprise setting
  • A Roadmap that guides enterprises toward a logical EIA design path
  • How enterprise IA teams might be developed and configured

Lee S. Strickland, J.D.
Homeland Security and Information Architecture
In recent months, the President, the 9/11 Commission and the Congress have addressed the alleged systemic failure of intelligence and have focused substantially on organizational solutions. In fact, this is a diversion from the real issues that include a fundamental misunderstanding of intelligence and, most significantly, a dysfunctional information space in which to conduct effective analysis of the terrorism threat. Lee Strickland will identify the problems in detail and discuss specific remediation efforts that could substantially improve our homeland security posture. He will advocate the importance of a tight integration between technology, the creation of an effective information architecture, and the academic discipline of analysis. He will conclude that reorganization, without addressing the root causes of failure, will be unavailing.

Paul Ford
Practical Application of the Semantic Web
Paul Ford will show how he created the Harper's magazine website using a Semantic Web framework. This framework allows for simple content management, rich hypertext linking, and provides unique ways to re-use content. Paul will also demo some prototypes for the next version of the site, which uses a simple web services framework and more robust querying and storage.

Livia Labate, Peter Van Dijck, Jorge Arango
The State of Global IA
These speakers will focus on internationalization and localization of information architectures, focusing on issues faced by practitioners on a daily basis. The speakers will begin the discussion on Global IA models within the of experience design. During this presentation, they will cover the state of the Global IA practice so far, exploring different approaches to problems with the attendees, initiating a discussion and eliciting feedback. Topics covered include: Issues for IA practitioners, strategic and business issues, the structure of locales, an early model for structuring relations between multilingual content, research findings on the structure of gateways, approaches to translating taxonomies, the untranslatability of categories, (how we do it anyway), and the future of global IA.

Jess McMullin
Hands-On Scenario Planning: Looking to the Future to Shape Decisions Today
Scenario planning creates possible futures based on current trends. These scenarios guide strategic conversations and help make decisions in an uncertain world. For IAs, scenario planning increases our strategic insight and impact by helping us see the big picture and relate it to our day-to-day practice. This session will outline a step-by-step approach and provide hands-on experience with a scenario planning exercise.