Joe Lamantia.com

While look­ing around inside the Share­point doc­u­men­ta­tion, I found this tasty snip­pet that explains a great deal about the way Microsoft approaches infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture, prob­a­bly design and archi­tec­ture:
“Cre­at­ing an effec­tive cat­e­gory struc­ture requires plan­ning and some under­stand­ing of how oth­ers might orga­nize the con­tent.“
Yes, that’s right — you only need SOME under­stand­ing of how oth­ers MIGHT orga­nize the con­tent. No need to get the right peo­ple, even — any­one off the street will do, as long as they are clearly a mem­ber of the group ‘oth­ers’, so maybe even the neighbor’s kid would be fine.
Besides, I’m sure the incon­ve­nience asso­ci­ated with try­ing to develop a decent infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture informed by knowl­edge of users’ men­tal mod­els would prob­a­bly get in the way of all that plan­ning that’s so impor­tant to the suc­cess of your por­tal project.