21 Oct 2007 2250H

Corporate politics still impacts information architecture

I said this a year ago, but I didn’t really realize what the implications were until I interacted with more clients, big ones, small ones, and our own operations. And the fact of the matter really is even now in post-dotcom boom-crash, post-Dougie Coupland, Web 2.0+ Land that people within all kinds of organizations tackling web projects still are siloed, they don’t talk to each other, they don’t work with each other, and they likely would never have had the opportunity to do so were it not for a web project where technologists, business people, creatives, and all manner of folks are thrown together and told to put something coherent together that works great and looks fabulous and gets the needs of the business and the users done. Our company does it because we work together — generally. We’re sat down in groups and over conference tables in our Herman Miller chairs and forced to work with each other and sometimes it takes more education than not but generally we do it better than others do. That’s why we’re growing and that’s why we get hired to do the work we do for the rates we charge. =)

Now the interesting thing is that when queried about it, these clients report they are somewhat surprised to find out that it’s difficult to get the disparate pieces to work together, so that’s when the stakeholders become imperious and begin to dictate things directly, because time and resources are finite and it’s just easier to tell people directly what you want instead of trying to ascertain all the sticky gooiness involved in trying to get parts of your business to work together. This inevitably leads to failure, but the most interesting thing is that it’s not just a single failure. It’s actually a series of failures. Failures to take leadership on all parts of the business: the technologists owning the requirements and technology, the creatives owning the branding and visual communications, the business owning the strategy and the metrics for success but knowing just enough to delegate the real work to the technologists and creatives and so on, the user experience people owning the user requirements and advocacy, so on. And it’s a failure to work together to share things: knowledge/power, as Foucault would say, resources, time, efforts.

And now this is where I start to depart from Mark Hurst’s famous 2003 statement that “changing the organization is the most difficult and most important part of user experience work,” which I quoted back in April. Now, I think, that’s where the challenge comes from, yes, but I no longer think that’s our job.

That’s that company’s job. We can tell them, this is how you all need to be to make this happen but if they don’t have a culture to support that kind of change, much less identify that a change needs to take place or to seek help for it, then it’s really not much use at all.

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