[Sigia-l] The Intersection/Collision of Content Management and IA

[O'Neill, Todd]

Hey all!

I attended the pre-conference session at IA Summit on Content Management
for IA. It was great to see and meet the CM gurus. But I was looking for
more meat.

I've started formulating some ideas about the intersection between a
site IA and the CMS that manages the content thereof. We just went
through a ton of process work to prep for a CM deployment. During most
of it no one mentioned the site IA. We had Create New Content flows and
Modify Existing Content flows with content editor and metadata editor
(metator? -- thanks Mr. Boiko -- spell checks as "matador"; Hmmm...)
reviews.

So the process work starts to wrap up and I ask "What about the IA
review?" "What do you mean?"

"How do you place new content on the site without understanding where it
fits?" Light bulbs turned on and we added an IA review step to at least
the new content flow.

Yes, there is a question here. First some background.
- We have no documented IA. Many of us know where things are or where
they should belong (because we built it) but there is no officially
sanctioned "map" if you will of our site's IA. Resource issues and a
need for tightly defined job classifications or descriptions are the
common reasons why this work has not been done. The work was begun a few
months ago but when that project closed it was not followed up, so the
work is out of date.
- We have no job title or classification of IA. IA skills are employed
by the web producers and individual project IA are developed -- actually
more a page flow than a project IA. And that diagram only marginally
references the bigger picture.

Questions:
- Has there been work on the role of IA diagrams and IA people within
CM, CMS deployments and CMS operations?
- In a shop of 30+ people is it best practice to have no defined IA
person/role?
- Is it common for an ecommerce site to not have a documented, managed
IA diagram? (We are actually a pretty small, focused transactional site
of under 3,000 pages.)

With luck this will be THE topic of next year's IA Summit pre-session.
Perhaps a 200 or 300 level session in addition to the (very well done)
100 level session offered this year.

Thanks all!

Todd O'Neill Web Producer USAA Interaction Design and Architecture 
210-913-8312 todd.oneill at usaa.com 
These opinions mine not those of USAA. 
"The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer." Peter
Drucker