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.