Re: the relationship between CM and IA(information architecture)

There is often confusion between information architecture (IA) and 
content management (CM or CMS), usually from professionals who identify 
with just one of these fields.

Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville defined the relationship in their 
book (Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, p.11):

"Content management and information architecture are really two sides of 
the same coin. IA portrays a 'snapshot' or spatial view of an 
information system, while CM decribes a temporal view by showing how 
information should flow into, around, and out of that same system over 
time."

The idea that you can separate a formal architectural element 
(presentation) from the content itself is of course a mantra of content 
management.

But philosophers since ancient Greeks (Plato's Forms are the original 
idea of "Ideas") to Immanuel Kant have cautioned us on this separation. 
Kant said something like "Form without Content is Empty. Content without 
Form is Invisible."

We can comfortably abstract timeless structural elements of information 
organization, labelling and describing with metadata, the 
storage/retrieval process, and the user interface (the navigation 
system).  In this sense, we can agree with Morville and Rosenfeld that 
IA is something like a snapshot of the system.

And the concrete management of content surely is ephemeral, with 
distinct phases of the content "lifecycle," creating it, tagging it with 
metadata, controlling the workflow, delivering it to various publishing 
media, and finally archiving it.

Stepping back however, we should see that this is all part of one big 
process, what Ann Rockley calls a "Unified Content Strategy." You must 
organize your existing content to understand how it can fit into the 
workings of any CMS, and this organizing requires an Information Architect.

I moderated a panel on Content Models and Information Architecture with 
Ann Rockley and Victor Lombardi of the Asilomar Institute at the recent 
Seybold/Gilbane Conference on Content Management.

The panel description said:

"It is tempting for businesses to look, at and even choose, content 
management technology first, and relegate the difficult task of 
analyzing and organizing the content that needs to be managed to an 
"implementation detail". Such a "detail" [often] determines whether CMS 
deployment is a success or failure."

-- 
Bob Doyle, Editor In Chief
CMS Review
http://www.cmsreview.com
77 Huron Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
617-876-5678


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