Feature: Lou Rosenfeld uses Enterprise to employ the Best of Librarianship

Lou Rosenfeld has become a popular man in Britain. His two visits to give seminars last year saw turn-out rise dramatically, something he attributes to the number of organisations that have suddenly been bitten by the information architecture (IA) bug.

I ask him for a definition of the term that has recently spawned a new institute (the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture) and inspired a number of new forums (such as ASIS&T Summits and IA-UK), because if this man can't give it, I don't know who can. He and his former business partner Peter Morville (they founded and ran Argus Associates together through the nineties) wrote the book that created the field in 1998 and finally gave some context to the nebulous idea of site 'navigation'.

It turns out that Lou hates definitions: 'I hate the definition we've been using because it's a definition and, by definition, somewhat limiting,' he says warmly, and then more grudgingly: 'The art and science of structuring, labelling and organising information so that it's easier to find and easier to manage.’

He goes on to stress that it is both an art and a science – not one or other, but a balance. He says that it has both syntactic and semantic elements to it; in that it is structuring and organising vs labelling. And he shows how there are two audiences for it: people managing and people finding stuff. Like Morville, he is keen to point out that it is finding, not searching or browsing or helping people ask. 'If we separate these too much we lose something - they are an integrated whole yet we don't design that way in many cases,' he says.

Returning to the challenges of managing data, he singles out two problems common to many IA situations: a failure to keep up with information explosion, as in 'Where can I put stuff?'; and the other side of the coin, stuff that is good at present but won't be within six months. 'We now use a term a client gave us: rot – redundant, outdated and trivial – and if you leave content alone it turns to rot. It’s a great acronym.'

The demand for his ideas shows the increasing extent of recognition of these problems and the value to be derived from seeing them as part of a whole. In Britain, RIBA has refused to allow practitioners in this field to call themselves 'information architects' unless they also hold an architecture qualification. However, the name, he feels, is the least significant part: 'Call it knowledge engineering, information therapy – you have to market yourself in the ways that make most sense.'

And Lou is now very much concerned with the marketing of the concepts involved. Having launched the concept of 'Enterprise IA', he is in the business of helping managements understand the issues and how to design business processes best to take them on board. For a while his conversation might be that of any business analyst or MBA. If IA is about understanding content and users, EIA brings in the added dimension of context. This avoids the tendency, so familiar to consultants and service departments alike, of producing great work only to watch it being filed in a drawer never to see the light of day. 'Content, users, context: without that three-legged chair, you are not really doing anything. But people aren't necessarily expert at talking to senior management. You can't really have one person doing all aspects of this work well.'

Lou identifies his as a conduit role, sending messages both ways between practitioners and management to improve communication, not to mention his other interests in linking different organisations and bodies in the user experience field together to promote common understanding and avoid duplication of effort.

'The interesting places to work are those liminal areas. Personally I am still very involved in IA, but even what I do has become more about strategic positioning. User experience within enterprise settings – the business aspects, and what is the message to management, and how you get teams funded and all the politics and cultural aspects of that.'

As IA becomes more recognisable, he is not so much defining tasks, as explaining them. 'In the last 2 ½ years, managers are saying that they get this IA stuff (which may or may not be true) but that they just don’t know how to implement it... Now we don't have a solution yet: we haven't plugged into just what the market needs, but we're starting to; I'm having a lot more success in my consultancy. And what I do changes the culture of the whole work community.'

He gives an example: he is working with a client who has invested in all the things that you don't usually start with – a taxonomy, a detailed thesaurus, a great search facility. 'However, they had their blinders on about how they were going to launch this thing; how they were going to get all the different bits to participate, what staff they would need, where they were going to live and who was going to own them inside the enterprise.

'Funny, because one of the ways to force the issue has been to do some actual design work and to take the great things they have been developing independently and start to show how they are going to work together – a conceptual IA, like building a pearl round a grain of sand. After almost a year - and it's the first time they've seen some designs – they are now finally starting to ask some questions themselves, like "Gee we need staff to maintain this".'

Lou has been advocating that they build a central team, with an advisory board from other teams to help ease their path, but that they behave entrepreneurially to become a self-funding entity, a service provider within the organisation.

Typically, in this way, he combines the organisational detail with the broader commercial view. So, now I am intrigued. I've heard what he has to say about information architecture and a fair amount about the tribulations associated with getting it taken up in a company. What brought him to this unusual mix of entrepreneurship and close analysis of structure?

Well, he believes it grew from the point when he wanted to start a business and then realised that for this particular type of company, he would need greater understanding of categorisation. So, half measures aside, he went off to train as a librarian, though with no great intention of working in the field. 'It's not the most self-promoting group,' he says ruefully as he reviews the cut in library funding that is currently taking place across the States.

'But there's librarianship and then there's libraries and what's important is librarianship and what me and [erstwhile] partner Peter Morville were trying to do was port librarianship principles into different settings.

'Our view was "don't worry about the setting, don't worry about the medium, it's the knowledge that makes the difference". Old librarians are stuck in a "I work in a library" mindframe and it's self defeating.'

Lou confesses that when he left college he had two chips on his own shoulder: 'One chip was to prove that these principles had value outside libraries; the other was to show people in the field that there was more to librarianship than the building and the books.' Regardless of how these goals were fired up, what's important is that he seems to have succeeded in his chosen mission. People are becoming convinced.

Lou Rosenfeld will be in the UK next month with Steve Krug. See UN story: Rosenfeld and Krug come to London for the details.

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