User Experience: More on Managing
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.
