Nurturing professional growth within IA and UX design organizations becomes paramount as organizations mature over time. This section of the DSIA™ Portal offers introductory perspectives for establishing a practice model that cultivates professional discipline within IA and UX design organizations by answering the following questions:

• How should an IA practice build and maintain professional discipline regardless of the development environment?
• What measures should be in place to assess and improve practitioner and organizational competency?
• What should in-house IA and UX design organizations do to add business value?

The foundation for research in this area is established by a concept of practice introduced by Nathaniel Davis. Scientific inquiry focuses on translating this viewpoint into actionable solutions that can be used by practitioners who are responsible for the function of information architecture within their organization.

Learn more about practice modeling.


Crawling Before We Walk
By Nathaniel Davis

This article offers my perspective on a major campaign of the DSIA™ Portal: to educate aspiring, new, and seasoned information architecture professionals about the importance of a practice mindset.

At the close of the 20th century, the emerging field of interest we now call information architecture was solving new and urgent business challenges in a volatile commercial market driven by the Web. It became an industry that would mature straight to walking before it had the ability to appreciate the value of a good crawl. Continue reading


A Universal Idea for Business Stakeholders
While the audience for practice modeling research is targeted for information architects and related UX design professionals, the work products appear to be extensible to other business environments that would benefit from the existence of disciplined professional approaches. More discussion on the extensibility of practice modeling will become available in the future.