The document discusses the skills and knowledge needed for strategic information architecture (IA) careers. It defines strategic IA as designing high-value content and information experiences across entire organizations, products, or portfolios to meet business goals. This requires skills in user research, modeling, information design, analytics, business, leadership, and soft skills. Tactical IA focuses more narrowly on individual products or teams. The document provides examples of strategic IA tasks and derailment factors that limit effectiveness, such as being driven by rules or siloed thinking rather than strategic vision.

1. Page 1
Strategic IA Careers: Skills and Knowledge for Success
Information architecture:
Designing
high-value content
delivered in an
effective information experience
that enables client success
High-value content:
• Speaks directly to client/buyer/user business goals
• Includes only the tasks necessary to achieve those goals
• Aids the client in making decisions or applying concepts in their own situations
• Is technically rich in the sense that it includes validated real-world samples, examples, best practices,
and lessons learned
High-value content does not:
• Focus on manipulating elements of a user interface (those things that everyone knows
by now, such as "Type your name in the name field")
• Describe tasks that can't be mapped to a meaningful goal or objective
• Describe what to do without explaining how to do it
• Describe how to do it without explaining why to do it
Information experience:
Professional Development Progression Andrea Ames—STC Summit 2013

2. Page 2
Tactical vs. Strategic IA
Tactical information architecture:
Concrete
Typical tasks include:
• Update a navigation tree according to design
guidelines and standards
• Apply models and guidelines to develop
information architecture for a product release
or self-contained information deliverable
• Solve architectural issues with guidance from
a strategic information architect (IA) or
information strategist
Strategic information architecture:
Abstract
Typical tasks include:
• Architect a product’s total information
experience (not just technical docs)
• Develop a cross-product or portfolio
information experience
• Prioritize requirements
• Apply models in new and novel ways to get
validated improvements in the end-to-end
information experience
• Provide input for model or guideline
improvement
• Create and validate new models and
guidelines
Strategic IAs are:
• Focused on client perceptions
• Of the total information experience
• Of the value of content for achieving their goals
• Focused on business priorities
• For the total information experience
• For the value of content to business strategy
• Focused on the total information experience
• Multiple information deliverables
• Multiple authors
• Formal and informal content
• Official and collaborative or social content
Strategic IAs are not:
• Focused on one kind of information deliverable
• Focused on information products from one kind of information development team (such as just the
technical product documentation team)
• Focused primarily on things like topic modeling, navigation hierarchies, and labeling schemes

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Scope: Tactical and strategic IAs in the organization:
Strategic IAs:
• Across the entire company, a group, a division, a portfolio, or a single product
• Across Tech docs, Support, Marketing, Engineering, etc.
Strategic information architecture skills
Skills with humans:
User research
• Conduct user and task analysis
• Develop personas
• Develop scenarios, use cases, and user stories
User advocacy
• Develop a deep understanding of users, their tasks,
goals, and requirements
• Become their champion without becoming one of them;
maintain objectivity
• Negotiate for user wants and needs during planning and development processes
Human factors
• Understand and design in support of human cognitive processes in information interactions
• Validate models and designs with intended users using
a variety of methods

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Skill with modeling:
• Ability to analyze and express complex information relationships through modeling
• Ability to model the user task flow
• Ability to model information topics
• Fluency with information architecture models and their application, such as:
• Use models (for product- and information-
use scenarios)
• Content models (for the building blocks
of consistent content)
• Access models (for navigation patterns,
wayfinding, and progressively disclosing information)
Skill with information and design:
Disciplined creativity
• Ability to synthesize competing requirements to create innovative solutions
• Ability to create in an ideal world, then collaborate and negotiate back to reality (that is, take
incremental steps toward the ideal, given resource, time, and other constraints)
Organizing information
• Make the complex clear
• Understand, expose, and deliver information relationships
through navigation, linking, and other retrieval methods
Information experience design
• Information design skills such as minimalism, progressive disclosure, chunking, information
presentation, and delivery
• Interaction design
• Commitment to consistency and rigorous attention to detail
• Ability to simplify and reduce words while maintaining essential meaning
Analytic skills:
• Systems thinking (see backup)
• Synthesize competing requirements to create innovative solutions
• Analyze complex relationships
and strategic ideas
• Find the patterns inherent in data
• Critical thinking
• Problem solving
• Root cause analysis
• Take an abstract, complex or ambiguous challenge and come up with a concrete, real-world
solution proposal
Business skills:
• Communication and presentation skills
• Negotiation and diplomacy
• Political savvy and ability to network
• Skill in understanding and making decisions based on business strategy
• Able to build a business case and justify architecture, designs, and approaches with customer and
business impact statements

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Leadership skills:
Vision
• Passion
• Strategic and systems thinking
• Enthusiasm for and evangelism of the strategy
• Ability to influence and drive direction of a large team
• Willing to make a decision (and be held accountable, if necessary)
Commitment to delivery
• Able to commit and deliver
• Delegating, and delivering through others when appropriate
Investment in others and the health of the team
• Able to take input from the team easily
• Able to build team capacity (for example, commitment to mentoring, intentional efforts toward
filling the pipeline and growing IAs, educating the team, and so on)
• Consistent but not rigid; able to consistently reinforce a message to help the team grow
Other soft skills:
• Self-motivation (diagnosing a problem and then relentlessly pursuing a meaningful resolution that
makes a difference)
• Emotional intelligence and professional maturity
• Intelligent fearlessness (being willing to step forward but smart about when and how)
• Integrity
• Respect (for example, for others'
ideas and time)
• Good listening skills
• Ability to give credit to others and share the spotlight
• Flexible, able to change, and able to accept what cannot be changed
• Comfort working with abstract or ambiguous projects or ideas
Derailment factors: Characteristics that limit strategic IA effectiveness
• Views IA as a promotion strategy (for
example, “I just want to get to Senior
Writer”) as opposed to a career path with a
specific skill set and aptitudes
• Power mongers
• Dictatorial for own political agenda
• Passive; waits for assignments from others
• Timid; fears speaking up, taking risks, or
gracefully challenging an idea
• Driven by “don’t fix it if it’s not broken”
• Tends toward excessive autonomy or
isolation
• Lacks willingness to connect, collaborate
• Lacks tact
• Unable to tolerate ambiguity
• Views role in a silo; can’t envision their
work relative to other content creators
around the company, or to the work of
others on the extended team
• Unable or uncomfortable thinking in the
abstract (that is, concrete thinkers)
• Needs rules, a recipe, a cookbook, or “the
right answer”
• Too attached to guidelines; unable to
question or advocate for legitimate change
• Never follows guidelines or considers
constraints
• Tends to get lost in the details (all trees,
wrong forest)
• Can’t see beyond the boundaries of their
own “book” (all trees, no forest)