A posting for a job that does not exist: How we might define information architects in today's “integrated” advertising agency

Abstract

Dan Klyn is an information architect and e-commerce strategist. He can be reached by email at dan.klyn<at>gmail.com or through his website www.danklyn.com A friend of mine who works at a storied and successful advertising and PR firm that's undertaking a reconfiguration to become an "integrated agency" asked me about job descriptions for information architects. He was looking for a way to advocate for a position called "information architect" in this firm and was asking for a job description that would make sense to the VPs and C-levels. I didn't come up with anything good after Googling for two minutes so I decided to craft my own:The role of the information architect is to help discover and articulate the "why" of the project and to work directly with the client and horizontally across vertically oriented disciplines within the agency to ensure consistency and continuity of meaning in the processes, products and metrics the team uses, creates and uses to measure its outcomes.In the early stages of the project, the information architect assists in the formulation of strategy and uses simple pictures and sometimes complex linguistic structures to assist the team and the client in explaining and understanding the nature of the client's business and the nature of the experiences that consumers will have with the client's brand, products and collateral.In the middle stages of the project, the information architect assists the project team in identifying the "what" and then subsequently the "how" of the project and in prioritizing, selecting and arraying specific tactics in ways that protect the continuity, consistency and purposefulness of the resulting user experiences.During the implementation stage of the project, the information architect listens to and collaborates with the people who build, test and deploy the solution in order to capitalize on the unique insights that emerge during implementation, maximizing opportunities to enhance the solution as it is being built.Once a solution is deployed, the information architect assists in the measurement of performance and of users' experience and in the collection of diverse insights to continuously improve the performance and maintainability of the solution.Upon re-reading the fictional job description I'd just written, I quickly realized that I'd done it wrong. I'd forgotten the cardinal rule of user-centered design. Instead of writing copy that would make sense to and persuade the executives at the agency, I wrote the copy as if I were the one who needed to be convinced.