Dale Dougherty, publisher of
Web Review,
has an article
On Becoming Technical which describes "Seven Levels of Technical
Expertise".
Level 6 is Understands Perl and/or Java to build interactive systems
for analysis, development, and distribution of information online.
Level 7 is Understands how to manage people to design sites, systems
and applications that organize all previous levels of expertise and all
kinds of information in service of a greater goal.
Levels 1 - 6 focus on the tools and technologies, and Level 7
suddenly jumps to the management issues.
As a
software
systems engineer
for the past umpteen-plus years, I found that there is a very
important level lying between the technical and managerial domains that
is hard to grasp, and is often overlooked.
Let's call it the architectural design level.
Forget the development tools for a moment.
Forget even the underlying hardware and software...
You have to consider those things eventually, but in building complex
information systems, you first have to define requirements, and then
understand and
translate them into an abstract model representing data
sources and sinks, information flows, servers and interfaces, and so on.
It's a common blunder to think too soon in terms of implementation
decisions and the tools and technologies that will implement
those decisions.
At a high enough level of abstraction, those are details...
I think Dale may well appreciate all that and has assumed it to be
implicit in his Levels 6 and 7.
My point is that this extra level deserves explicit recognition.
You can find resumés listing all sort of
tools and technologies, and management skills - but can those people
visualise and design information systems ?
Well, the topic deserves far more than a couple of paragraphs, and we
are currently working on bringing you more articles on the
architecture of web
systems.
Steve Toub and Louis Rosenfeld of
Argus Associates
present
here
an analysis of this site from an
information architecture viewpoint.
They write the
Web Architect Columns in
Web Review.
