What To Do If You Don’t Have An IA On Your Staff
I presented What To Do If You Don’t Have An IA On Your Staff for The Content Wrangler in June 2024, hosted by Scott Abel. The webinar about an hour and covers what teams can actually do about information architecture when they don't have — and may never have — a dedicated IA on staff.
The core of what I cover hinges on distinction that matters a lot in practice: management IA and delivery IA are not the same thing, and they don't require the same skills or the same person. Management IA is about organizing your source content — identifying content types, defining structures, establishing the metadata that makes content manageable across platforms. Delivery IA is about the experience on the other end — how content gets assembled, personalized, and surfaced to the user at the point of access. Both have to happen. Most small teams conflate them or neglect one entirely.
The rest of the session is practical. For each side of that distinction, I walk through a set of actions your team can take right now: identifying who on your current staff is best positioned to own each kind of IA work, where to invest their training, and what to define first. You don't need a full-time information architect to do this work well. You need someone who understands structure and someone who owns the delivery experience, and you need them to be working from a clear framework.
This comes up constantly with the clients I work with — especially teams that have already adopted DITA or are in the process of doing so. The tooling is in place, but the IA work that should have preceded it either didn't happen or happened informally. Watch or listen to the full session by following the link below.
If your team is considering a DITA implementation — or realizing that your existing implementation isn't performing the way it should — the management vs. delivery IA distinction is critical. I can help you uncover where your team stands and whether there's a clear path forward.
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