WHAT DOES AN INFORMATION ARCHITECT DO?
Published: Aug 26, 2025 - The Information Architect conducts user research, competitive analysis, and site audits to identify design improvements and guide user-focused functionality. This role collaborates closely with strategists, designers, and developers to ensure that deliverables align with business goals and project specifications. The architect also manages timelines, communicates progress with project teams, and identifies opportunities for future enhancements.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Information Architect
1. Information Architect Duties
- Risk Management: Identifies and manages existing and emerging risks that stem from business activities and the job role
- Risk Monitoring: Ensures risks associated with business activities are effectively identified, measured, monitored, and controlled
- Policy Compliance: Follows written risk and compliance policies and procedures for business activities
- Tool Utilization: Uses information architecture tools to include Infosphere Data Architect (IDA), Inforsphere Governance Catalog (IGC), Infosphere Metadata Workbench to create information architecture deliverables
- Capability Assessment: Applies intermediate knowledge to perform regular assessments of the health and maturity of information capabilities for a given domain
- Capability Identification: Applies intermediate knowledge to identify new information capabilities to support existing business capabilities of a given business domain
- Repository Maintenance: Maintains the information capability repository with these identified needs
- Strategy Definition: Participates in efforts to define the mission, goals, critical success factors, principles, and policies for information strategy and information architecture
- Case Development: Participates in building the business cases to secure approval and funding for the Data and Analytical efforts
- Model Advising: Applies intermediate knowledge to advise on the maintenance of a conceptual model supporting information capabilities for a given domain
- Change Impact: Understands the end-to-end change impact by managing linkages from information capabilities to technical assets (operational and analytical)
- Model Maintenance: Maintains integrated logical data models to understand data and its interdependencies regardless of its usage pattern
2. Information Architect Details
- User Research: Identify user requirements by researching and analyzing user needs, preferences, objectives, and working methods
- Content Analysis: Study how users consume content, including data categorization and labeling
- Focus Meetings: Meet with focus groups
- Architecture Planning: Plan information architecture by studying the software application concept, strategy, and target audience
- Design Envisioning: Envision architectural scheme, information structure, and features, functionality, and user-interface design
- Scenario Modeling: Create user scenarios and prepare data models
- Workflow Design: Design information structure, workflow, and navigation
- Creative Evaluation: Evaluate information representation and conduct creative meetings
- Behavior Translation: Organize information by translating user behavior into media structure and elements
- Experience Crafting: Craft interactive experiences and produce workflow diagrams, user scenarios, flowcharts, and storyboards
- Spec Preparation: Prepare interaction specifications, navigation rules, organization of information, and site maps
- Team Coordination: Coordinate with business, technology, visual, structural, editorial, cognitive, and brand strategists
- Mockup Implementation: Implement information architecture by preparing paper and interactive prototypes and mockups, including page layout and navigational elements
- Stakeholder Integration: Coordinate with stakeholders, UX, and UI teams to integrate site concept, visual design, writing, interface, and navigational structure
- Process Documentation: Document structure and processes
- Usability Testing: Validate information delivery by developing and completing usability test plans
- Feedback Evaluation: Evaluate traffic patterns, study user feedback and coordinate with Usability Specialists
- Reputation Enhancement: Enhance the organization's reputation by accepting ownership for accomplishing new and different requests
- Value Exploration: Explore opportunities to add value to job accomplishments
3. Information Architect Responsibilities
- Client Consultation: Meet with clients to discuss the necessary features and functionality for the project
- User Research: Conduct user research and competitive analysis
- Site Auditing: Perform heuristic site or application audits and analyze data from various measurement tools
- Behavior Analysis: Provide insights on user behavior and identify recommended design changes
- Deliverable Presentation: Present deliverables to clients, partners, and colleagues
- UX Strategy: Research and employ the adoption of UX best practices specifically for websites and web applications
- Project Management: Effectively prioritize projects, manage and execute tasks, and communicate with the project management team, delivering projects on time and on budget
- Team Collaboration: Collaborate with digital strategists, designers, developers, and quality assurance analysts
- Design Alignment: Ensure the design and implementation of the product meet the vision of the original intention and business goals
- Specification Development: Collaborate with developers to create a functional specification, documenting the approach and the intended functionality of the wireframes and prototypes
- Opportunity Identification: Identify potential future opportunities through recommended enhancements, functionality, or improvements for later stages
4. Senior Information Architect Job Summary
- Content Strategy: Create an information, content and learning framework and strategy, using adult learning theory, instructional design, and behavior analysis
- Documentation Simplification: Make a diverse scope of internal documentation spaces easier to consume, and inspire internal documentation evangelism
- Content Analysis: Drive the content baseline analysis and content inventory audit, using resultant data points to develop and propose an overall content strategy for internal documentation
- Governance Standards: Establish standards and guidelines for internal content across the organization, engaging with cross-functional stakeholders for ongoing governance
- Terminology Consultation: Consult as an expert with designers and others on terminology, taxonomy and navigational structure strategy to drive uniform standards
- Taxonomy Management: Ensure taxonomy management that supports effective information discovery and enables meaningful search results and navigation
- Experience Facilitation: Conduct collaboration and customer experience work sessions to facilitate alignment across groups, to inspire customer empathy and investments that improve the customer journey
- Content Research: Identify content needs and behaviors through research and data, and customer context-based needs, such as industry and vertical markets
- Stakeholder Recommendations: Provide actionable recommendations to authors and stakeholders based on research
- Investment Monitoring: Monitor information investments to track them through metrics and analytics
- Feedback Integration: Proactively seek and use input from data sources, the business, and customer feedback
- Audience Understanding: Gain a deep understanding of the motivations, behaviors and learning styles of target audiences to increase the relevance and effectiveness of content and information
5. Senior Information Architect Accountabilities
- Architecture Practice: Extend the information architecture practice, controls, data models, and canonical data exchange interfaces development
- Platform Support: Support the creation of an enterprise data integration platform and line-of-business-specific reporting solutions
- Framework Development: Develop enterprise integration (data vault) frameworks and create standards for data vault models and informart models
- Integration Support: Support enterprise data integration and line-of-business reporting needs
- Asset Standards: Develop and define standards for information assets to discover and expose curated information assets for review and usage
- Taxonomy Management: Create, manage, and integrate information taxonomies for business standardization and classification of banking and finance core business concepts like products, accounts, collateral types, parties, etc.
- Metadata Modeling: Create and manage meta-models in tools like Collibra, Metacenter, and ERWIN to integrate metadata across business and technical metadata tools
- Requirement Translation: Translate business and technical metadata requirements into an information architecture framework and solution to enable a metadata-driven data/information architecture
- Pattern Definition: Assist solution architects and technology partners in defining and mapping standard integration patterns to solutions, standardizing integration and data format transformation technologies, and resolving issues with real-time and scheduled application integration
- Design Advisory: Translate business requirements to technical requirements for integration and advise solution providers on designs that leverage core middleware platforms, enterprise integration patterns, and standard service interfaces
- Capability Evaluation: Lead the evaluation of data/information architecture capabilities, business solutions, and tools to be managed within the organization
- Roadmap Architecture: Architect the strategic integration architecture roadmap and create short-, medium-, and long-term implementation plans including API modeling, middleware design, and development of integration relationship structures to meet business objectives
- Practice Enforcement: Maintain and enforce best practices to optimize software development, standardize and classify information, and design canonical interfaces
- Team Leadership: Lead and direct the work of others through either direct management reporting or dotted-line facilitation
- Flow Management: Support data flow processes end-to-end for projects and major initiatives, including troubleshooting integration issues through information transfer and interface model design
- Performance Access: Resolve issues related to access to information and performance/speed resulting from integration challenges