WHILE THERE'S BEEN MANY PROJECTS IN THIS FIELD...
... I have to start with the beginning -- Capital One in 1997, tasked with welding together a collection of department-level stuff into one coherent corporate intranet. I bring that up because many years later, I got a second chance at it -- when COF was updating to a full-fledged intranet portal.
Turns out that project made Jakob Nielsen's 2006 list of best intranets in the world.
Now to be clear, I hate resume padders and I was only in the starting phases of this project. But that's also why I'm particularly proud here. I was the first information architect on the project and my bedrock concepts survived. The project took a great big team, and I'm grateful to have taken part.
I've done a lot of this ground-floor work over the years. Part of it was instinct (I was doing information architecture before the O'Reilly book came out) and part of it was from training (and having a good handle on what the managers, the marketers and the technicians would all be needing). But I also believe that in the early phases of these sort of projects, what's really needed is somebody who can think clearly, write clearly and move things along.
The ability to reduce complexity to simple concepts comes in handy because mixing information presentation and information retrieval can get really complicated in a hurry. Information taxonomy is one of those fields where if you do your job correctly, no one will ever notice the details. And that's fine by me.
