Written by David Tebbutt in March 2004

Information architecture lies at the heart of the information professional's work. Always has. The orator Simonides (556-468 BC) used to remember information by associating it with various artefacts lying around the house. When making a speech in public, he'd mentally revisit the house, picking up the scraps of information as he needed them. Perhaps he was the first information architect.

Now, we seem to be awash with people who label themselves Information Architects. Be careful. The name does not have a universal meaning. Some concentrate on the surface - the point at which information meets the public. Others are buried in the depths of the information world and never come near a user.

Some of the 'users' are not real, they are search engine robots. And if the semantic web takes off, our targets will be software agents which collaborate to deliver the right content to users.

Regardless of our audience, the advantage of having properly tagged and categorised information is immense. People will get the precise information they need much more quickly. The days of wading through irrelevant search engine hits will be over.

The information architect works somewhere along a continuum embracing user interface design at one end and the skills of the professional librarian at the other. Many get away with simply grabbing information and presenting it in an attractive way, but the long term consequence of this approach is an underlying informational inefficiency which leads to ever-increasing maintenance and development costs.

The alternative is to invest up front in an underpinning information architecture so that the correct information can be found easily and all subsequent additions and improvements can be accommodated more readily and at lower cost.

The problem, as ever, is short-term thinking. Only enlightened organisations would invest heavily in an information architecture, even knowing that long term costs would be reduced.

Someone with a proper grasp of the importance of information needs to express the costs of inaction in terms that the directors understand. You, for example. Talk in terms such as gaining customers, slashing support costs and increasing enquiries. Find case studies and numbers to support your assertions. You may even want to pitch for a 'lead architect' role with a remit to identify the organisation's current and future information needs.

You need to be clear about the organisation's goals, the needs of its user communities, the present user experiences and the information at its disposal. You might need to employ different kinds of 'information architect' to cover the ground effectively.

Some might be expert in the user interface. They are most interested in the psychology of the user and how material should be presented. They know that this makes a massive difference to a user's relationship with your organisation.

It seems completely mad, though, to build an elegant front end atop a disorganised backend. Information would be easier to find and surface if it were arranged into a predictable hierarchy and made accessible using standard vocabularies. It would be better still if it took into account the dialects and cultural differences of the end users. Information architecture skills of a much higher order are required for this work.

And, finally, what about the robotic user? It can approach a problem using different language and different contexts, yet still expect to alight upon the correct information, even if it doesn't contain a single word of the original search terms. Its needs have to be anticipated and met automatically. Information architecture skills of the highest order are needed to make this work.

As an information professional, you are perfectly placed to understand the issues and to judge the precise value of any information architect you recruit to your cause. Your place is firmly at the helm of any information architecture initiatives. Don't for one moment think that the IT department or web designers are up to the task. They're not.