Hi all,
 
Terry, thanks for your overview of our discussion and your own attribution.
We'd like to talk some more on the integration of skills. We are currently doing some research on this matter: what skills do you need to successfully deliver a portal site?
 
We have tried to discern several areas which often map on the organization's  departments and some common project phases. We combined them into a matrix. We are currently working on defining several threads within this matrix that ensure collaboration or alignment between the areas. 
 
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|               | Concept                      | Implementation           | Evaluation |
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|               | Analysis | Conceptual Design | Development | Deployment |            |
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|Quality        | Goals    |                   |             |            |            |
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|Business       |          |                   |Content      |            |            |
|               |          |                   |Workflow     |            |            |
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|User           | Needs    |                   |             |            |            |
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|Content        | Sources  | Information       |Content Model|            |            |
|               |          | Architecture      |             |            |            |
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|Functionality  |          |                   |Funct Specs  |            |            |
|               |          |                   |Nav. Design  |            |            |
|               |          |                   |Visual Design|            |            |
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|Infrastructure |          |                   |             |            |            |
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(We hope the legibility of the matrix suffices for everyone)
 
Matrix vs Lou's User-Content-Context:
As we interpret Lou's user-content-context and compare these areas to ours, context is split up into quality and business. The reason to do this was that you need different people for each area: in quality you gather higher management and get them to define what they want the site to achieve, in business your looking at the people that are going to perform the supporting processes of gathering, writing and editing content and the processes that get initiated through interaction (e-mail, transactions, etc).
Content is also split. We think providing the functionality of a site has to be done by a different set of people. The ownership of the content of a site, i.e. the information/knowledge, has to be placed with the people who know what it means, when it is ROT (redundant, outdated, trivial) and who feel the pain when there's something wrong. 
 
Information Architecture is a good candidate for the job of a thread in this matrix. If you look at Information Architecture in its context within a project, it might provide some explanation on the discussion between bigIA and littleIA. LittleIA would be the set of skills needed for the design of the information architecture. If there is no one who is providing your input, you need to do provide them yourself. If there are, you should at least be able to understand the people involved. Some holds for the successors to the information architecture in the matrix.
As an example we have tried to fill in some of the tasks an IA is involved in. 
First you need to understand goals, users needs and available sources of information / content / knowledge before you can start on the Information Architecture. And afterwards the Information Architecture provides input for the content management processes, functional specification, navigation design and visual design.
Note that according to the Argus definition of Information Architecture, IA includes the navigation design. In the matrix above we have moved the navigation design to the area of functionality.
 
By no means we claim soundness or completeness for this interpretation of the IA-thread, but just maybe this can provide some structure for our discussions. We would really like to hear what you think of this matrix and the way we position IA within it. Does this help the discussion of what IA is? Any addenda are welcome. 
 
 
Natasja Paulssen & Petra Heck