RE: the relationship between CM and IA

IA has been defined a number of different ways but the sense i get most of
the time is pretty close to this: "Information architecture is the science
of figuring out what you want your site to do." (from webmonkey -
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/design/tutorials/tutorial1.html?tw=desig
n). this seems to be a pretty accurate distillation of rosenfeld and
morville and of probably 95% of all discussions of IA you'll find. it seems
to be the one guiding the aifia.

as darrel austin points out, the relationship between IA and CM depends on
your definition of IA. my problem with this definition is more or less the
same problem i have with the way content management is typically defined -
that is, very web-centrically, very presentation-oriented. this definition
of IA - again, the standard, commonly used one - also includes a lot of what
i would argue is not about _content_ and therefore not really about
_information_ - usability, software/network/enterprise architecture, etc.

look at IA from a the perspective of content architecture. what is content
architecture? my list would include -

- content models (relationships between atomic chunks of content as
expressed in schema, DTD, etc; comprises data models)
- content standards (encodings, languages, embedded xhtml, etc)
- metadata, taxonomies, etc

in other words, the "content" part of rosenfeld's "IA techniques" in the
slides srinivas kothuri mentioned. you might include things like file
systems, portals, workflows, etc, but i wouldn't. to me, these are not
essential or intrinsic to the content itself; neither is the GUI or
navigation of a website intrinsic to the information it presents - though
you could argue that that the medium is the message. but i wouldn't. in
other words, the users and context spheres (again, from rosenfeld's slide)
are specialized areas unto themselves and not really IA at all.

the point being that if content is a species of information, CA is part of
IA, and roughly the same kinds of things fall within IA that fall within CA
- data models, relationships, metadata, etc - with the main difference being
that IA encompasses _all_ kinds of information - financials, hr, supply
chain, shopping carts, etc.

where information becomes content is obviously fuzzy and therefore arguable.
for me it's easy: i work for a publishing company. what goes in the books or
on the website is content; everything else is information.

so what is the relationship between CM and IA? it seems to me they can be as
tightly or as loosely coupled as you want - or as your cms allows. we've got
a home-grown system for managing most of our digital content (the stuff that
doesn't go into the books). the create/edit/version/store part that users
encounter more or less dictates the IA (in the usual sense). navigation and
UI are generally based on our content models, as are (as you might expect)
most of our digital products. the extraction part is very closedly tied to
our CA.

our content models and metadata rule out presentation architectures that
require information we don't have - we can't build pages around the concept
of a company traded on an exchange, for example, and you can't search our
content by where and when peaches are in season - so i take darrel's point
about how a cms can be limiting in this regard. (and on the aifia site
there's an interesting survey of info architects on the problems they have
with cm systems. 47.6% said they aren't "flexible enough to accomodate my
design." nearly a third said their publishing processes are "poor." see
http://aifia.org/pg/the_problems_with_cms.php.)

but if you accept a narrower definition of IA as the architecture of your
_information_ and not of your _website_ or your presentation layer, it
follows that the relationship between your IA and your CMS would probably be
fairly close.

bruce melendy
content services manager
lonely planet publications


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