Plan for what won't change

“I frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ I almost never get the question: ‘What’s NOT going to change in the next 10 years?’ But you can build a strategy around the things that are stable; the effort we put into them will still be paying dividends 10 years from now.” —Jeff Bezos, Amazon re:MARS, Jun 6 2019

IA changes, even boring ones, are worth making, because they’re based on what won’t change. Content structures are very durable over time. While the internet did mess that up (cf. Karen McGrane Content in a Zombie Apocalypse), it’s still the most stable thing we’ve got. Information behavior is also pretty stable over time. We weren’t issued new brains along with our Wi-Fi passwords.

On the flip side, the very definition of architecture is that it’s the stuff that is expensive to change. So get it right.