Information architect

An information architect is a technical professional who serves to help a Product Manager by focusing and supporting the creation of a commercial product. An IA helps to clarify and organize, through the use of schematics and scientific methods. By and large, most products an IA will work with will be connected in some way to websites, web applications, and/or information technology products. 
It is generally thought that an IA participates in a User Experience team, which generally resides in either Research & Development or Marketing Communications. User experience, defined as communication and behavior design of a product. 
That being said, at the core, the goal of the IA is to bring credibility and relevancy to a product idea. Sometimes that means grounding a concept by generating a specification that can be analyzed and reviewed by business stakeholders as well as designers and software developers. 
==Creation==
Information architects tend to be auto-didactic, since their creation was informal, generated from the need to help define and prepare a business concept, before it is transferred to a development group. Thus information architects tend to have started from one of the subject domains that is involved. Examples include:
* A designer who values the solidity of a product before it is given a visual look
* A software developer who desires to define a product before it is to be created in code
* A cognitive science or human factors specialist who desires to be closer to the creation of a product
* An mba, or Product Manager who desires the task of filling out product concepts.
==Etymology==
The term itself was coined by Richard Saul Wurman in the book Information Architects, but at the time, the field of internet-based products was still in its infancy. Some consider his viewpoint as literal, since he focused on the presentation of data rather than the task of creating it. Thus he focused much on what is now called Information Design and/or Data Visualization, which is the art of presenting data in an intricate fashion. That particular field is occupied mostly by graphic designers.
Thus, the definition of an IA tends to move between product design or tasks of a business analyst, to the actual design and visual behavior. The specific definition tends to be regional. For Portland, an IA is simply a web designer who is skilled in presenting and discussing a visual behavior of a web product before it is illustrated.
==Information Architects in Portland==
The IA role is still fairly new. Though noted at length by Wurman, the actual profession and title did not become popular until 2005, when an existing role, the interaction designer had specialized in the planning of a web app rather than the design of one. In Portland there is still some confusion between interaction designer tasks and IA tasks. Thus many information architects find themselves working as designers.
==Tools==
When the information architect role first appeared, there were no tools specifically designed for them. The bulk of IA work tend to be flow charts and schematic blueprints representing screen behavior. Thus the products they presented were too simple to justify using CAD programs such as AutoCad. Instead, more basic schematic programs were used such as Visio. 
Older Tools
* Microsoft Visio
* Microsoft Powerpoint
* Adobe InDesign
* Adobe Illustrator
New Tools
* Omnigraffle
* Balsamiq Mockups
* Axure
* Irise