Handout for 2013 STC Summit professional development progression.

1. Page 1
Strategic IA Careers: Skills and Knowledge for Success
Information architecture:
Designing
high-value content
delivered in an
effective information experience
that enables client success
High-value content:
• Speaks directly to client/buyer/user business goals
• Includes only the tasks necessary to achieve those goals
• Aids the client in making decisions or applying concepts in their own situations
• Is technically rich in the sense that it includes validated real-world samples, examples, best practices,
and lessons learned
High-value content does not:
• Focus on manipulating elements of a user interface (those things that everyone knows
by now, such as "Type your name in the name field")
• Describe tasks that can't be mapped to a meaningful goal or objective
• Describe what to do without explaining how to do it
• Describe how to do it without explaining why to do it
Information experience:
Professional Development Progression Andrea Ames—STC Summit 2013

2. Page 2
Tactical vs. Strategic IA
Tactical information architecture:
Concrete
Typical tasks include:
• Update a navigation tree according to design
guidelines and standards
• Apply models and guidelines to develop
information architecture for a product release
or self-contained information deliverable
• Solve architectural issues with guidance from
a strategic information architect (IA) or
information strategist
Strategic information architecture:
Abstract
Typical tasks include:
• Architect a product’s total information
experience (not just technical docs)
• Develop a cross-product or portfolio
information experience
• Prioritize requirements
• Apply models in new and novel ways to get
validated improvements in the end-to-end
information experience
• Provide input for model or guideline
improvement
• Create and validate new models and
guidelines
Strategic IAs are:
• Focused on client perceptions
• Of the total information experience
• Of the value of content for achieving their goals
• Focused on business priorities
• For the total information experience
• For the value of content to business strategy
• Focused on the total information experience
• Multiple information deliverables
• Multiple authors
• Formal and informal content
• Official and collaborative or social content
Strategic IAs are not:
• Focused on one kind of information deliverable
• Focused on information products from one kind of information development team (such as just the
technical product documentation team)
• Focused primarily on things like topic modeling, navigation hierarchies, and labeling schemes

3. Page 3
Scope: Tactical and strategic IAs in the organization:
Strategic IAs:
• Across the entire company, a group, a division, a portfolio, or a single product
• Across Tech docs, Support, Marketing, Engineering, etc.
Strategic information architecture skills
Skills with humans:
User research
• Conduct user and task analysis
• Develop personas
• Develop scenarios, use cases, and user stories
User advocacy
• Develop a deep understanding of users, their tasks,
goals, and requirements
• Become their champion without becoming one of them;
maintain objectivity
• Negotiate for user wants and needs during planning and development processes
Human factors
• Understand and design in support of human cognitive processes in information interactions
• Validate models and designs with intended users using
a variety of methods

4. Page 4
Skill with modeling:
• Ability to analyze and express complex information relationships through modeling
• Ability to model the user task flow
• Ability to model information topics
• Fluency with information architecture models and their application, such as:
• Use models (for product- and information-
use scenarios)
• Content models (for the building blocks
of consistent content)
• Access models (for navigation patterns,
wayfinding, and progressively disclosing information)
Skill with information and design:
Disciplined creativity
• Ability to synthesize competing requirements to create innovative solutions
• Ability to create in an ideal world, then collaborate and negotiate back to reality (that is, take
incremental steps toward the ideal, given resource, time, and other constraints)
Organizing information
• Make the complex clear
• Understand, expose, and deliver information relationships
through navigation, linking, and other retrieval methods
Information experience design
• Information design skills such as minimalism, progressive disclosure, chunking, information
presentation, and delivery
• Interaction design
• Commitment to consistency and rigorous attention to detail
• Ability to simplify and reduce words while maintaining essential meaning
Analytic skills:
• Systems thinking (see backup)
• Synthesize competing requirements to create innovative solutions
• Analyze complex relationships
and strategic ideas
• Find the patterns inherent in data
• Critical thinking
• Problem solving
• Root cause analysis
• Take an abstract, complex or ambiguous challenge and come up with a concrete, real-world
solution proposal
Business skills:
• Communication and presentation skills
• Negotiation and diplomacy
• Political savvy and ability to network
• Skill in understanding and making decisions based on business strategy
• Able to build a business case and justify architecture, designs, and approaches with customer and
business impact statements

5. Page 5
Leadership skills:
Vision
• Passion
• Strategic and systems thinking
• Enthusiasm for and evangelism of the strategy
• Ability to influence and drive direction of a large team
• Willing to make a decision (and be held accountable, if necessary)
Commitment to delivery
• Able to commit and deliver
• Delegating, and delivering through others when appropriate
Investment in others and the health of the team
• Able to take input from the team easily
• Able to build team capacity (for example, commitment to mentoring, intentional efforts toward
filling the pipeline and growing IAs, educating the team, and so on)
• Consistent but not rigid; able to consistently reinforce a message to help the team grow
Other soft skills:
• Self-motivation (diagnosing a problem and then relentlessly pursuing a meaningful resolution that
makes a difference)
• Emotional intelligence and professional maturity
• Intelligent fearlessness (being willing to step forward but smart about when and how)
• Integrity
• Respect (for example, for others'
ideas and time)
• Good listening skills
• Ability to give credit to others and share the spotlight
• Flexible, able to change, and able to accept what cannot be changed
• Comfort working with abstract or ambiguous projects or ideas
Derailment factors: Characteristics that limit strategic IA effectiveness
• Views IA as a promotion strategy (for
example, “I just want to get to Senior
Writer”) as opposed to a career path with a
specific skill set and aptitudes
• Power mongers
• Dictatorial for own political agenda
• Passive; waits for assignments from others
• Timid; fears speaking up, taking risks, or
gracefully challenging an idea
• Driven by “don’t fix it if it’s not broken”
• Tends toward excessive autonomy or
isolation
• Lacks willingness to connect, collaborate
• Lacks tact
• Unable to tolerate ambiguity
• Views role in a silo; can’t envision their
work relative to other content creators
around the company, or to the work of
others on the extended team
• Unable or uncomfortable thinking in the
abstract (that is, concrete thinkers)
• Needs rules, a recipe, a cookbook, or “the
right answer”
• Too attached to guidelines; unable to
question or advocate for legitimate change
• Never follows guidelines or considers
constraints
• Tends to get lost in the details (all trees,
wrong forest)
• Can’t see beyond the boundaries of their
own “book” (all trees, no forest)