The Pragmatic IA - An exploration into IA job roles and the MBTI
(presentation: ppt, 800 kb)

What makes us good at the things we do?

Sometimes, when telling someone about my job or things that I do at work, they seem amazed, while to me, it's just a day's work. At last year's summit, many seemed intimidated by the design side of IA. I find that the easiest part. I, myself, am cowed by heavy duty taxonomy work  - the "little IA" stuff. What makes us different?

I chose to investigate this for this year's summit. While initially proposing a presentation that would focus more on the unique challenges of my current job and what I do to get past them, this presentation has morphed into what I hope will become a launchpad for perhaps more fully defining what we do as IA's - and why.

I began by looking at the types of activities I do on a daily basis. I grouped those activities into 4 categories: IA as IA, IA as Development Liaison, IA as Interdepartmental Representative, and IA as Corporate Strategist. I then outlined skills that I needed to possess in order to accomplish each role.

After doing some research, an article by Max Wideman caught my attention. Having completed the same process a few years back with the project management field, he had assigned names to these roles: Administrator, Driver, Coordinator, and Explorer. The problem was that this still didn't answer my basic question of what makes us good at the things we do.

Continuing with Wideman’s work, I read that he cross-referenced these roles with Myers-Briggs types. The Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) was initially designed in the 1920’s by a mother-daughter team. It is based on the principles of Jungian Psychology and illustrates preferences in the way that we process information. Although it’s somewhat controversial, it has been used extensively by Industrial Psychologists and as a result, many professions have been mapped with specific MBTI types. This, I felt, might be pointing me toward the answer of why.

Studying further, I gained an understanding of what the MBTI is assessing –
•    How a person orients and receives energy (introvert/extrovert)
•    How a person prefers to receive data (sensing/intuition)
•    How a person makes decisions using data (thinking/feeling)
•    How a person processes the information received (judging/perceiving)

After an individual answers a series of questions, a pattern of preferred processing methods emerges. Each individual falls somewhere along a continuum of the extremes listed above. The end result is a 4 character type title – one of 16 - that summarizes the way that the individual prefers to process information.

I returned to my original 4 categories and began to think of professions that might be similar to what I do on a daily basis. I came up with a few: software developer, project manager, visual communicator, and sales and marketing professionals. I began to investigate the MBTI types frequently associated with each profession. Patterns began to emerge, and when I looked at the descriptions associated with each pattern, I began to see how different each profession was.

I began to wonder how IAs fell. What other profession are we most like? Do we have our own pattern? To find out, I posted a quick survey using SurveyMonkey and posted the invitation to the IAI and Sig-IA lists. The first question inquired about the participant’s MBTI type and included a link to an online survey to complete if the participant did not know it. The second question gave the participant a list of common IA activities and asked them to rank the activities from most enjoyable to least enjoyable. The third question asked the participants to rank common IA activities from most frequently performed to least frequently performed. Although my goal was 100 responses, I received 85.

I mapped the types to the MBTI grid and found that the majority of IAs represent personality types in the intuitive hemisphere of the grid. This correlates with visual communicators, sales and marketing professionals, and some project managers.

I also attempted to correlate the personality types with the most-enjoyed IA activities. To accomplish this, I split the types into quadrants and analyzed the activities for the types in each quadrant. Three of the four quadrants most enjoyed Big IA activities. One quadrant most enjoyed Little IA activities. When looking at least-enjoyed activities, two quadrants representing the intuitive hemisphere least enjoyed providing marketing support. The other two quadrants, representing the sensing hemisphere, least enjoyed creative services coordination.

While this survey and investigation was not large enough or detailed enough to draw any definitive conclusions, it does open up some points that we should be discussing as a profession. Given our difficulty in defining just what IA’s can provide, and our difficulty in explaining the value we provide, this type of work could  - and should - provide a springboard into meaningful discussions about the type of language we should use during these discussions with colleagues.

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