I know I haven't posted to this blog in a looooong time. I just use this site for trying out new UIs and widgets.

Economist.com: Peter Drucker Speaks When Peter Drucker speaks in "The Next Society." People tend to listen. Ck out this article on how this management guru thinks things will be coming soon.

"Life is a marathon and not a horse race..." Not everyone running in a marathon worry to beat others, they run to beat their personal time...Time to market is the mantra in business and it is a shame because alot of great ideas exists, but if they let time dictate how it launches, then they miss out on producing the great "thing". Sometimes I feel bad for all these great ideas that fade into the background because it didn't get executed properly. What happens, somebody sneaks up behind you and takes the bigger market share... Recommended Reading: Guy Kawaksaki on how to be an entrepeuner from a speech at Netpreneur http://www.netpreneur.org/angels/transcript.html Christina Wodtke reflects on today's blog as well on the topic at http://www.eleganthack.com/blog/archives/00000241.html.

Store Catalogs I was flipping through a Restoration Hardware catalog today. I came to a section of some book ends that were really cute(pg 5 Holiday 2001)...I guess they were the two ends of a suspension bridge. I was pretty surprised when I saw the titles of the books in the photo: Edward Tufte's two famous books, Visual Explanations and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, a Macromedia Dreamweaver 3 Documentation Manual, and a couple others things such as Naked by Sclaris and Photography from 1839 to today...I thought it was amusing because I'm guessing who ever was involved with that photo shoot must have grabbed this from their personal library since I don't know too many people who would have an interesting set of books except for those in the IA/UX/HCI community. I know you're thinking, "Gosh she's strange for bringing it up"...but I think you'd be surprised if you saw books in a product catalog as part of a display of which you have some of the books in your own collection.

MBAs and IA as Revisited "Meet the New Information Architect" byPaula Thornton This article is a great synthesize of a discussion that I was running over and over again with Paula.

Do user's really know what they want? This is an interesting question that I've been tackling the last couple of weeks since discovering some articles by Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School. I guess there's something instinctual of what he has mentioned about disruptive innovation, listening to your customers, and what Guy Kawasaki has mentioned a few times...you need to be ahead of the curve...an example of a company who did listen to their customers but it didn't take them anywere: Digital Equipment. There's probably a whole lot more. Should we be really listening to what the user wants for information? I'll have to retreat and figure this out.

HBR September 2001 I'm still trying to catch up on my readings. Came across "The Weird Rules of Creativity" in HBS Sept 2001 issue. Robert Sutton offers some interesting advice that to many would be contrary to practice...he definitely promotes diversity. I guess the article could be a nice companion to Gordon MacKenzie's Orbiting the Giant Hairball.

Taking a Content Inventory (Web Techniques, Oct 2001) Janice Crotty Fraser of Adaptive Path offers a great technique in getting started with a content inventory. Thanks Christina for sharing this the other night.

How would you fit these things into models that exists in the IA/UX community already? Content Management System and metadata: what role do they play in user experience(1. the implementation of a technology 2. content granularity) Search : how does this straddles information architecture and interaction design, and if search is directly related to the content and the thesaurus, how do their development play in user experience in general? Your thoughts are welcome. I'll post more about this later.

CHI 2002 Yay! A workshop proposal that I was working on with a few other folks(Keith Instone, Peter Boersma, George Olsen) was accepted for CHI 2002. I'm so excited!

Still Reflections Starting my paper on my self-assessment behavior & motivations in business and here's a summary of what I've discovered... ENFP : Extravert, Intuitive, Feeling, Perceiving Flexible - Cohering : a mix or rainbow of the assertive, analytic, nurturing the Artist : bold, daring, exciting, vlatile, intuitive, enterpreneurial, inspiring, imaginative, unpredictable, funny (i'm not too sure about this one but I definitely know I'm not a crafsman(woman) or technocrat. I hope this helps someone out there know how to interact with me more effectively...he he he.

Use Case Scenarios and Metadata I'm trying to find the overlaps between user research, metadata development, and usability. Anyone out there has info, feel free to forward to me. Thanks.

Collaborative Tools Just checked out this tool called Privia. Pretty interesting document management, collaborative communication tool. If you're in need of one, this was pretty interesting. Privia

Peter Talks Classification Yeah! I'm not the only one thinking about metadata and classification at the moment :) Check out Peter Merholz talk about information science type stuff...and he even mentions Ranganathan. I'll have to look into an honorary librarian badge for him and manual on "Shushing 101."

Three Cultures of Management: the key to Organizational Learning Full citation: Edgar H. Schein, Sloan Management Review, MIT, Fall 1996. I was thinking about Venn diagrams again today. I stumbled on this article in my O&M course. Although the article is focused on organizational learning, I felt there are a few things I know I learned from the article that can be directly applied to the IA/UX community. It's kind of dated but I think the IA community can read more into the application of understanding these three cultures of management: the culture of engineering, the culture of CEOs, and the culture of operators 1) engineers could be mapped to the IA/UX: wanting to create a change for the operator(user) 2) executive cultures map to all the managers/supervisors/executives in an organization(the budget and product devevlopment process) 3) operators map to the users of a system or product(product users or a website vistor) Bottomline...why can't we all just get along? Currently we can't because we don't know each other's language for "stuff." I think someone in the past on the SIGIA list or one of the IA Summits described that IAs should learn the language of marketing folks and business. This was conveyed in a digram more recently at Lou's Bloug with Jess McMullen on "IA Areas of Practice" and the emphsis on having a "minor" in areas of users(user research, contextual inquiry), content(metadata, taxonomy, writing), or context(business, ROI). If you're an "innie" what culture that your organization prescribe to? If you're an "outie" how can you relate to each culture from the different settings you've been exposed to? Refer to the IA/UX Sept 2002 Cocktail Hour for deails on "innies" and "outies."

HCI & business APPLYING THE BEHAVIORAL, COGNITIVE, AND SOCIAL SCIENCES TO PRODUCTS by Donald Norman

Searching Behavior & Taxonomies Lots of great stuff happening on the SIGIA listserv on searching behavior and taxonomies. archive I'm hoping with this interest in search and taxonomies I could probably share more of my experiences with content granularity, metadata, taxonomies and search. The future looks good in these areas. :o)

Taxonomies and Businesses I'm starting to find more articles surrounding the new efforts in developing taxonomies and thesauri for competitive advantage. It seems that knowledge management and enterprise portals with its focus on technologies will be failing many corporations. So in this information/knowledge economy, will taxonomies & thesauri solve a corporation's needs? I haven't read this report, but the executive summary does validate alot of my current work and where I see the field of Information Architecture headed. I got this off the SIGIA-Listserv. Thanks for sharing Stacy. Here's TFPL's own report about their taxonomies research: http://www.tfpl.com/areas_of_expertise/taxonomies/_report_/taxonomy_report.html

Rediscovering Dilbert I've been rereading The Dilbert Principle and I can't believe that I see some of the exact stories in the book happening in various settings that I am in or was in. I totally recommend anyone remotely interested in management to take a second look at the book and the comic strip. Official Dilbert Website: http://www.dilbert.com/

Discovering Your Own Interaction/Personality Style I highly recommend http://www.humanmetrics.com.

MBAs and Meyer Briggs Test I decided to take a class on organization and management through a local university's extension program. I was really fascinated on learning this framework for understanding management styles. The MB test we took was administered and analyzed. We were also engaged in discussion of other frameworks for understanding organization behavior/management. In addition we reviewed each other's personality in relation to team building exercises. The instructor's point of view on management education was pretty interesting and he quoted an interesting article on the meaning of education, "Learning is experience understood in tranquility." - Handy, Charles, "A Proper Education." CHANGE (September/October 1998) p 13-19. I highly recommend a perusal of this paper. This perspective definitely reinforces my thoughts that getting an MBA degree is to foster an environment for active networking and intense textbook/case study learning. While taking a course here and there, I am exposed to active problem solving on every day problems everyone is having at that time. Perhaps this perspective will change if I decide to try again for business school.

Where MBAs and IA mix... So I didn't get into business school this fall. I don't feel down on it when you know there were over 5000 application and only 300 spaces. People I probably competed with were probably my age and had already crashed and burned millions of dollars for a startup. What was I thinking about when I started the application process? I guess I thought I could position myself strategically in an organization that would be more sympathetic to the user experience design and development process. I envisioned better products developed by user research and not just market research. I saw the future of better designed services and products. I thought by getting myself into a b-school I could do more by directing corporations into more user-oriented development. Was I dreaming? I don't think so. I'm not alone thinking about that. But business strategy is still an important componant to being an IA. IAs can really be anywhere in the org chart. It's a matter of who hears them.

Future of IA according to M'Lisa Lots of activity this past week on the SIG IA listserv. I wanted to post to the list more of my thoughts on the future of IA, but what I'm discovering is that I have no stable idea what I want to get out of IA. In the past, I was excited about interaction/ information design and user experience design, but now I see myself more excited about the back end of information systems. Somewhere between information retrieval, metadata, taxonomies, and of course cognitive mapping of content to site architecture. I don't know where it's taking me, but I'm definitely enjoying every step of the way.

Paula Thornton and I have been debating the future role of IA via email for the last couple of months. It's been an interesting thread wrapping around business, strategy, visibility, organization placement. Here's just a recent post: I think you are totally thinking what I'm just dabbling in...it's about executive approval. We can continue to churn away in our discussion about the future of IA and i posted on Christina's blog about how organizations need to shift itself to be more effective in utilizing IAs and this is not limited to user experience design for web or products...it's beyond that.... I don't know where I'm going with this...but HBR and other literature already bring together emphatic design, organization psychology...but there's still a gap happening since these thigs are so fixated on customer relationship and product development...but nothing on coprorate intra-relationships and structures... The more I go toward IA on the backend versus the online customer experience design I'm starting to realize that what I really want to do is higher level than this...something that takes me into corporate culture, organiztion behavior, sturcture to feed into good IA for product and services. Peter Merholz stated that he thinks CRM system force companies to change their practices to the CRM system...but I think in most cases the pain of the companies implementing CRM is because they had no streamlined/efficient practices so they saw the need for these tools to streamline their internal organization. LIkewise in order to really get effective IA work...companies needs to re-evaluate their existing structures and have IAs placed in the most efficient/effective aspect of the structure. We can't be an afterthought anymore.

Semantic Web Recently Lou Rosenfeld posted to the SIG IA about the Future of IA. One aspect was a discussion on metadata. Some folks on the list have hashed out navigation, structure, meaning, but for me it keeps coming back to how my interests have morphed from IA & user experience from the design standpoint to more of the data architecture, metadata, taxonomy, thesauri development. I thought the Semantic Web was a good place to start on this topic of where I think IA is going, but you don't have to take my word for it...

So today is the first day of thinking online rather offline in my journal. I hope this becomes a nice resource center for those interested in information architecture, experience design, metadata, information retrieval, and whatever crosses my mind that day. Enjoy!