Sleuthing Out Data – Emerging Technology – CIO Magazine May 1,2003: “More and more, the problems that earn CIOs their paychecks revolve around making it easier for users to explore huge volumes of data. They do this through finding known objects in huge search spaces, assembling top-down overviews that summarize the important points of a topic, and helping searchers decide what they really want when their initial search ideas are confused, misguided or ambiguous.” Sounds like IA.

Even though they have a simplistic idea of categorization (“trees”), there’s a good bit about the politics of searching: “It’s difficult for anyone to understand who hasn’t lived through it to appreciate how political categorization management is […] We had a category nomination process. We had a category retirement process. They all required long meetings.” Auch. Categorization by comittee is even worse than design by comittee.