One of the important professional interests, if not actual partnerships, that knowledge management (KM) practitioners need to maintain, is in the realm of information architecture (IA). In that regard, I certainly appreciated the informative blog post from Peter Morville defining the state of information architecture and his thoughts about its future.
Interestingly, Peter identified a tension in definition between IA and interaction design, a semantic tension that some of us recognise in the KM and information management debate.
While KM is essentially about people, people still access, communicate, and contribute information via various digital tools and repositories. It is important that we understand how information architecture can help or hinder KM activities through these different channels. And information architects would do well to hear about KM.
If you’re interested in information architecture and hearing more about it, then there is the Oz-IA 2007 conference in Sydney on the weekend of 22-23 September. I see that Matthew Hodgson will be presenting – a chap who understands both IA and KM – see his blog post on storyboarding as an example. There are a number of presentation titles that look eminently suitable for both an IA and KM audience - definitely worth considering.
And to mark in your diary for next year, there is the IA Summit 2008 to be held in Miami, Florida, next April. The call for proposals ends 31 October 2007.
Filed under: Conference, Content management, Information Management, Information architecture, Knowledge Management, Web
