Jonatan@natanoJ.dk

The second internship at the 8th semester of the information architecture study was held at Taleinstituttet with a fellow student. In this case we held five interviews with a total of 13 employees in order to attain background knowledge that could be used for outlining requirements for the development of a new Intranet at Taleinstituttet.

Taleinstituttet helps people that have problems related to speaking which may be based on many different reasons ranging form brain injuries to stuttering. This also mean that a large group of their employees are not physically located at Taleinstituttet but also at the different hospitals in the region. We therefore needed to conduct interviews with the 13 employees to make sure that we covered a broad range of the organisation and thereby were able to get an overview of the information ecology surrounding the various employees.

The five interviews were recorded with a video camera and we made rough transcriptions. The quotations from the transcriptions were divided into groups of related topics. The result of all this work was a rather complex report stating how the employees were collaborating but it also contain many other interesting aspects related to:

- The integration of new employees
- Overview and structure of the organization
- IT
- Knowledge sharing and supervision
- How employees view the structural changes of the organization
- How economy influences the daily work

The report of our findings were positively received and our contact which were working in the management expressed that it was a really useful report when considering how to improve the organization as a whole.

In retrospect I am really happy about having created this extensive report that Taleinstituttet could use for improving their organization. But I also feel that we somehow dealt with topics that were not necessary for the original task of developing a new intranet.

I think that it is interesting to see how we moved from solving the task related to the Intranet they wanted into a whole new assignment that they also needed to get solved. I do however feel that it is important as an information architect to keep focus on the original assignment. I actually believe that it might have been possible to develop the list of requirements for their Intranet by taking a different approach to the interviews and the processing of our data. But I do not regret the work we did and the results we achieved. I think it was a valuable lesson for me to see the variety of results that we could achieve by conducting such a thorough study. But I actually do believe that the results were useful for the development of a new Intranet for Taleinstituttet as they surely provided an appropriate background knowledge.