Like my friend, Matthew, I have been con­firmed as a speaker at Oz-​​IA 2007.

I will be dis­cussing the issues and hur­dles involved in get­ting busi­ness to take IA and UX seri­ously as a strate­gic dis­ci­pline. Here’s my pro­posal blurb:

Love in an Ele­va­tor — Sell­ing the value of IA to business

Is the IA and UX work you’re doing being seen as a road­block on the way to deliv­ery of sites and sys­tems? Do you con­tin­u­ally find your­self hav­ing to jus­tify your exis­tence and dif­fer­en­ti­ate your­self from the BAs? Is senior man­age­ment blithely unaware of what you actu­ally do?

If your answer is yes, per­haps IA and UX are being posi­tioned the wrong way in your organisation.

Stephen Collins talks through sev­eral strate­gies and case stud­ies that will help you con­vince busi­ness and your col­leagues that IA is a strate­gic dis­ci­pline that touches the entire devel­op­ment life­cy­cle (and even before that!).

If this sounds like your thing, come along to the con­fer­ence on the week­end of 22 – 23 Sep­tem­ber 2007. I’d love to meet all those IA and UX folks who are mostly just avatar icons to me.