Organizing Principles by jb: Organizing Principles by jb

Linnaeus was born.

Who is Linnaeus, you ask? 

He's the man that introduced classification of nature. Basically, the father of taxonomy.

Here's some pictures:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/35619038@N00/sets/72157600120973519

Happy Birthday!

Our fearless Customer Experience Leader, Martin Hardee is leaving us. He is headed on to another adventure and those in his future should feel lucky he's coming to work with them. 

Go say nice things about him. 

I attended the IA Summit 2007 in Las Vegas this year. I recently blogged about being Summit bound and the pre conference session on Managing Experience I attended. I have been meaning to post a summary of the conference but as things tend to get busy after attending a conference, six weeks have somehow magically slipped through my fingers. It's time to sum it up. :)

The IA Summit is definitely enhanced by attending the pre-conference sessions. You get more of a chance to meet colleagues and also to dig in deep on a topic as the seminars are either full or half day session. This year I attended 2 sessions. The first day was the Managing Experience session that I previously blogged about. Day two was a session presented by Peter Morville of Polar Bear fame about IA 3.0. He started the session out by saying that the session title was a bit tongue in cheek, however, it also had a level of meaning as web 2.0 has implications on and for information architecture.

The group had discussions about what we thought web 2.0 was and we examined some challenging quotes from people in the community. All in all the day turned out to be a provocative session that started all kinds of ideas churning in my head. In particular a challenge was issued by Mr. Morville that the 'innies' (meaning Information Architects that work inside organizations as opposed to being consultants) should write a book. All the perspectives are from the outside looking in and clearly there are many people working inside and could benefit from such a resource. (more on this topic later)

The conference started on Saturday. The conference has been over a weekend ever since it began. This year was no different. The theme for the year was enriching IA.

From the Summit web site:

Three trends:

* Rich information: More and more information becomes available to users and systems alike and these days most of the information comes with meta data, built-in links to other information, and API's or micro-formats that allow for mash ups. How rich is your information?
* Rich interaction: The web is moving towards a more interactive environment, and desktop apps are adapting web metaphors. How does this affect the way you design applications?
* Rich relationships: We are all already linked through information and social computing is increasing the possibilities to exchange information. Is your information a social lubricant or is it an obstacle for building relationships?

It began with Joshua Prince-Ramus. A principal architect at REX that discussed much project work from his firm and showed that it was not through the willful imposition of architecture that solutions were derived from. It was more about creative and useful projects coming out of his firm and structures needed to be the way they were and designed as such because of 'dumb reasons'. I really like the practical nature he discussed in the work that his firm did. I also thought it very healthy to hear the working environment he created at his firm was one of equality and encouragement and of teamwork and collaboration. In fact, those attributes are essential. I personally believe this is the only way to get to solutions at work in our complex world so I like hearing stories about it being done in other domains than the digital space.

I learned much from the principal architect and I appreciated hearing stories about working creatively to solve problems. Even though I am a digital architect and not a licensed physical architect, I found the speech very relatable.

He also said something I really connected to, 'create the process to determine the best solution'. Problem solving people. That is what this is all about and it is the message I took away from our keynote speaker.

Session after session I listened, I learned, I discussed. These conferences are very good and help people doing the same kind of work connect to one another. Sure, we've got mailing lists and such but nothing is like being together in person.

It was definitely the year of texting and Twitter. Everyone was twittering away.

The venue was fascinating (as Las Vegas always is). I've never been there for a conference, only on vacation. It was pretty interesting to see that the experience design in Vegas is so tuned to the gambling experience that the conference rooms had terrible sight lines and not so comfortable chairs. People complained but I thought it was brilliant. Las Vegas is in every way about encouraging you to listen to its siren call. I pretty much avoided it because I thought the content was interesting, but I can see why people at conferences that don't have interesting content and have these uncomfortable/hard to see the speaker in rooms, it would encourage many people to forget about the conference and participate in the activity Vegas needs people to participate in.

It was also a very polarizing location. People definitely had an opinion about Vegas, good or bad.

My boss, Martin, was at the conference for a couple of pre-conference sessions. He brought cards along to promote designcomics.org. He shared some ideas with me that I wanted to summarize from the session he attended.

• How important how people are tagging you is.....
• Cold start communities issues (people are inherently selfish, something needs to be useful----give me something back)
• Most powerful social networking tends to relate to objects (flickr, youtube)
• One of the most powerful social networking site is amazon---a product page has up to 16 social networking components (e.g. product finding, product ratings, product rankings, product tags)

Some hi-lights from the conference:

The technique trading cards provided by nForm. These were brilliant and really got people talking. You had to trade cards to get a full set. Those that completed an entire set were up for fabulous prizes.

The amazing creative interpretations of wire frames by Chiara Fox. She knitted and she mobiled and she made art from wire frames. She showed off her feat at the Summit Saturday evening 'expo'.

Vegas, baby. (C'mon)

I was staying at the Tropicana hotel and the exhibit for Bodies was there. I had wanted to see it in MN (where I live) but it left before I made it. In Vegas, it was right down the hall. I had to go.

The Adaptive Path gathering at Quark's bar.

Insightful content

The mentoring booth

The IA Institute rubber duckies

and of course the continued community building the event fosters.

If you are interested in finding out more about the conference many of the resources are shared.

You can find many presentations from the conference on slideshare.

Podcasts for the Summit.

All the flickr photos you can handle can be seen under the iasummit07 or iasummit2007 tags.

As Summit 2007 came to a close the 5 Minute Madness was full of inspirational and emotional moments and it was a good ending.

Richard Vanguard, organizer for next year, stood up and gave us all a bit of a pep talk for Miami in 2008. The conference is moving out into April. It is usually late March. I think this will be a good change and I look forward to next spring.

I am going to try and take on the challenge of Peter Morville for the 'innies' to write a book. I think as a collective group we could come up with something really useful for others. Let me know if you are interested in being involved in that project.

People are becoming more and more aware of podcasting and the listening audience is growing. Some of the highlights:

Awareness is way up. People know what podcasts are.
Listening adoption is also up but not nearly as much as awareness.
The audience is split 49% female, 51% male
The audience of listeners is bigger in the 55 and older age range than 18-24.

If you are interested in more info, follow the link.

Thanks to blogger lsckrocki, who sent me this link.

Woohoo! 3 years of blogging at Sun as of Friday, April 27th. Blogs have been at Sun longer than I have (although not by much) and they have become a really important cornerstone in our online properties.

In honor of this I'm going to highlight some favorite experiences with blogging and some posts:

One of the things I've found really fun about a group context for blogging is the 'tag, you're it' behavior. I've been tagged twice by Linda about five things and then the name five songs you love that your significant other hates which was also a very fun topic.

Blogger marymary always entertains and continues to be an inspiration.

Blogging with Linda and Lou on our C2 blog about conversations.

Keeping up with comics and other interesting Customer Experience insights of my blogging boss, Martin.

and a couple of posts from our blogging CEO:
A post that was mostly an internal email with an introduction about not believing in walled gardens.
Continued conversation with the chairman of the SEC.

It is truly an honor to be part of this. I feel lucky to be a Sun blogger and will continue to feed the blogs.sun.com sphere along with many of my colleagues and I will do my part to encourage others to join in as well.

Village Voice takes diagramming to a new level.

Thanks to Andrew Hinton for finding that one.

I gave a presentation today to MN Women in Communications about Blogging, Podcasts and RSS. That was the topic the organization wanted covered and since I present with Linda and Lou about blogging internally at Sun, this seemed like a great opportunity to get out there and evangelize blogs outside the company.

It was really a fun presentation. I was lucky enough to have the perfect audience size so it could be a conversation (in case you were wondering, it was about 40 people sitting around tables). This is really important. When Linda, Lou and I present our internal talk, we always try to encourage conversation. (that's why our group blog is called Conversations Squared or C2) Sometimes the group is too big which is a bummer because it works best when it's more interactive.

The audience was great and they really participated in the conversation and that made it even better for everyone.

The audience was also more of an audience that was really considering blogs and podcasting for usage in their business. Only one member of the audience was currently blogging, so I found it to be a really fun opportunity as I'm passionate about this topic and the people there really seemed engaged.

I've embedded the Slides into the post below ala SlideShare. (Sidenote: Slideshare is a really neat site, essentially YouTube for presentations and more, that was created by one of the people from the information archtitecture community.)

I like talking about this and bringing people in that are not currently involved is even more exciting. I hope I inspired at least one person to use blogging for business because it's a great opportunity and I believe it is the future. As they say in Cluetrain, 'conversations are happening, might as well be in them....'

I went to a pre-conference session today at the IA Summit. Margaret Hanley presented a day long workshop about UX Management. Although I am not a people manager at this time, I have been in the past and I do manage several relationships with vendors so it's really more of a virtual team and I don't spend the time with these vendors to develop their careers. However, the session was useful to me and it is definitely a sub community of the IA community that I want to participate in. My belief is that no matter who helps you get work done, they are equally important as they are helping to extend the reach and the impact of the work that you can do.

The community of people that need to manage UX is definitely growing. This is the second time this has come up in the last several months. It was the crux of the recent Adaptive Path conference I attended. I think this is probably inevitable due to the fact that there is more work and more people doing the work which means we need structure not only in the experiences we design but in the teams that come together to make those experiences.

So after a lovely night out at Samba (where they bring you food served on swords) in the Mirage casino with Martin, Lisa, and Dan, I finally got back to my hotel room and I found this in my inbox:

"It is important to communicate the business strategy and to engineer the oversight of information in a way that aligns the business strategy with the information architecture."

The above quote is from an article entitled Aligning Information Objectives with Business Strategy The article landing in my inbox on today of all days seemed really appropriate.

I'm off to the IA Summit. This year it's in Las Vegas so it's a short trip. The past two have been in Canada and really great learning experiences for me. I've been to Las Vegas quite a few times but never to go there and learn. I hope I don't get too distracted. ;)

It promises to be a marathon of brain expanding and aha moments when you discover the differences and similarities in our approaches and our work. It's also such a great community of people thinking and sharing. We know in the IA community we need more of us. There are plenty of complex information problems out here to solve and they keep growing.

I hope to report on the things I'm learning as I go. This blog can serve as a place to come back to and see if I tried out any of the new things I learned about last year.

As for IA Summit 2006, I saw Kevin Cheng talk about his techniques and approaches using comics in design and discovery work. I brought that back to my team and my boss, Martin Hardee, created comics for the community. The Design Comics site will give you an idea of what kind of inspiration our little 'ol IA Summit can have.

Great big thank you from the community, Martin.

Las Vegas in the morning. My brain is ready to soak up the inspiration.

Blogger lskrocki got me again! :)

The topic is music:
Name five songs (or artists) that you love but annoy your significant other.

This is not an easy task for me. When I found my husband, it was partially because we loved the same kind of music. Music is really important to me and I didn't want to spend my life listening to things I didn't like. That being said, there are a few exceptions.

Abba-Dancing Queen -oh yeah!

Heart-Magic Man

The Cure (although over the years, my significant other has grown to love them just as much as me.)

Mazzy Star-too slow for him + some bad memories from an old girlfriend

Ween-he just thinks they are annoying and I think they are really talented and creative

Your turn bloggers Andrew, Greg, Paul and Aaron.

You can now rate Solaris on sun.com! This is a very exciting day for our customers as they now have a very real mechanism to share direct feedback on sun.com about Solaris.

So if you have feedback on Solaris, please tell us what you think.

I spoke at an event last week with a consultant we worked with on creating the new Sun.com home page. One of the great things about getting out there and speaking is meeting people. I met an individual that knows Sun very well and actually competes with Sun selling used Sun servers. After the event, he sent me a link to his blog post and it just tickled me for several reasons.

The main reason was that in a former life, I worked pretty closely with the Art Car scene when I worked at Intermedia Arts. I got first hand experience with the Art Car artists and the parade. I even met Harrod Blank of Camera Van fame.

Now, working at Sun, we've got the Data Center on wheels. It's coming to MN soon and I'm really excited to go visit. If you live in MN, you can go visit too.

So the convergence happened when Corey sent me this link to his blog post: Sun’s DataCenterMobile, the Wienermobile and other type hits.

And it hit me, Sun has its own 'art car' traveling around the country. I'm still working with those 'crazy art car artists'. ;)

Adaptive Path is a user experience consultancy in San Fransisco. They put on a conference about Managing Experience through Creative Leadership and today was day one. As stated by co-president, Jesse James Garret, they (AP) had a hunch there was a community around this topic (Managing Experience) that didn't really get a chance to gather that often. Based on the energy in the room, the conversations and the questions, I'd say that hunch was right on.

I am here with several colleagues and my manager. After the conference we are planning to meet and discuss what we can take away from our two days here to improve how we move forward to manage the web experience.

Jesse started the day with a great context setting speech. The clear message was that the product is the experience and people emotionally attach to that.

Lou Carbone, the keynote speaker of the day, spoke of a new world order. We need to take a different approach to business. We need to account for emotion. People respond to our products and our services as if they are other people. We need to consider how our products and services make people feel. This is not the way things have been done in the past.

Everyone in the room had a different set of challenges, but it's clear that an understanding is beginning to emerge. We need to structure things in our organizations to account for the people that use the product. We need to think about how they feel. How a customer feels is key to their loyalty to the company. Loyal customers keep companies in business.

It's important to keep driving this forward and key for this community to continue to cook up strategies and tactics that help us keep the customer's feelings in the product development cycle. It's a great challenge.

Sometimes I use an online tool called Gliffy for sketching up an idea really quickly. One thing I like about this tool is the monthly newsletter from the company that makes Gliffy. This month they shared some 'Gliffy in the Real World' examples. I think it's pretty interesting to see what people will do with tools. Here are the Gliffy in the real world examples.

Example One
Example One
Example Two
Example Three
Example Four
Example Five
Example Six
Example Seven

The Times Online just redesigned their website and they interviewed the Information Architect behind the redesign.