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."

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."

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

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)

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

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/

I highly recommend http://www.humanmetrics.com.

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.

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.

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.