Comments on Better Content Management through Information Architecture

Masood Nasser — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 03:58:13 GMT

Thanks mike. You have given me an excellent lesson in CMS. Now am provoked to think and try to redefine the term.. and use the grandma test on it.

cheers
masood

mike belgeri — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 12:10:21 GMT

Struggling through questions and suggested answers seems to be a growing part of life on the web. I found your article thought provoking. I came to it through a link here: http://www.namahn.com/resources/documents/note-CMap.pdf, which is an excellent paper on content management.

My criticism also comes from reading the namahn article. Mr Namahn points out that IT tends to speak IT and that content management is an IT term, so when one is writing about the subject of content management, one should not use the term. the addage reads that one should never use the term you are defining in the definition.

Masood Nasser — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 09:51:47 GMT

Thanks Eric. The dynamism and evolving nature of information objects is a reality that should be understood, but is often neglected, while planning a content strategy, which I believe is an intrinsic part of information architecture. IA’s should anticipate and plan for the future scalability of content. Only then will your Portals deliver business value. While it would be ideal if all stakeholders understand IA, you are absolutely right that people responsible for CMS should be committed to IA. In fact I say that IA’s should have more stake and be willing to take additional responsibility in content management than what we are currently doing.

Eric Moorehead — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 14:42:48 GMT

Nice article. Solid premise, well stated. I also agree with many of the comments regarding organizational challenges to good information architecture. In my experience, not all stakeholders truly understand holistic information architecture, or worse they confuse it with technical design, layout, and simple taxonomy. Information objects in CMS solutions tend to move, grow, change, and evolve. If you take a traditional IT structural approach to setting up taxonomy in a CMS you are bound to fail. Managing information architecture simply has to be user-centric, and is more about understanding user experiences and interactions than it is about portals, channels, pages, and features. Ideally all stakeholders should have a basic understanding of IA, but whoever is responsible for your CMS must be committed to it.

Jonathan Baker-Bates — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 00:51:17 GMT

There seems to be a lot of overlap here with Mr Veen’s article of several years ago on this topic. I’m not sure if this advances the argument that much, but it’s a nice read none the less. In my opinion, UE/X has far too little to say about content and the management of it.

Masood Nasser — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 06:57:37 GMT

Jay, you are right about organization culture and other factors like budget, but even the vision, even what to expect from a CMS not being clear is one of the fundamental reasons why they fail.

David,
My point here is why do we expect the authors to know HTML or any other coding language? Authors should focus on writing and not coding. And vice versa.
Roman,
You are spot on when you say “Authors/editors should only have access to content (create a page, a news line or other information block)”

Thanks Praveen. Communicating the value of what we do is a very important part of our job. I use a lot of scenarios in what could go wrong. Step into the shoes of your customer’s customer is what I would do. I do extensive field studies and understand usage scenarios/environmental factors to understand context before presenting to CEOS/ CTOs

Masood Nasser — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:22:25 GMT

James,
Thanks. I am fed up of discussions that revolve around technology. What is the RDMS? What is the middle-ware?
What are the file formats. Is the XML valid? While there is a place for these questions, it should not be at the expense of the crucial factors that are mentioned.

Masood Nasser — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:15:01 GMT

Richard
Thanks. And your suggestion of defining the communications plan which is anyways a PMI mandated process would be great; especially in this context. In my second part, I talk about the approval and publishing process. the global and the local news is a good example of content categorization that I feel the CMS should provide.

Roman Malakhov — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 14:12:20 GMT

David Shen, it is possible to separate totally content and code. Authors/editors should only have access to content (create a page, a news line or other information block). Developers may change templates, appearance and logic of information blocks.
According to inconsistent look of pages. I guess you can filter out most of irrelevant tags on the server side, and do not forget to write a styleguide like this one:
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/about/house_styleguide

Austin Govella — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 11:32:13 GMT

Praveen,

So how do we communicate that value?

Praveen Kumar Verma — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 14:12:00 GMT

Nice article Masood. I think the problem lies in educating the organizations about the value of User Centered Design. Organizations must consider design as an intrinsic and integral part of all the processes rather than an extrinsic or secondary option. Many organizations still look down upon their design units as a burden rather than a revenue generating center.
Organizations are full of left brained people who find it easier to embrace technology than design. Vendors convince organizations for buying technology by showing figures; on the other hand design is about value and user delight rather than figures. If we could quantify the value of design successfully for CIOs and CEOs, they would find it easier to embrace design rather than technology and the world would be a much better place to live in.

David Shen — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 22:06:05 GMT

Adding to the problems of CMS systems is the fact that current popular Web coding languages are embedded in page HTML, like Java or PHP. Sometimes content is interlaced with developer code and how do you protect naive users from accidentally changing or deleting important code, or to even know how to insert content in/around code? This problem has not been solved at all. Even the fact that HTML is potentially insertable into the content is problematic. You might have users who do not know what references the CSS file uses and you may have content that looks inconsistent with the rest of the site.

Yes you can dumb down CMSes so that code is never shown, but it may so dumbed down that the content can’t change based on other parameters, ie. a widget that scrolls through images related to an article that is embedded only in this current story.

The interaction between developers, content producers, and product managers through CMS needs further research and thought…

Jay Kumar — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 02:49:43 GMT

In my experience the biggest issues with content management and information architecture is not that the organization does not understand the concepts you’re talking about. Its more that the development and management of these systems tend to go across the various functional groups and thus leading to fragementation of work and responsibilties. Its like a broken process flow, each looking at its end but never at the entire picture.

The culture, the organizational structure, the budget etc etc..all these cause the end results of a badly developed and managed content management system and information architecture implementation.

The vision is always clear and the end result never is.

James Robertson — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 06:53:58 GMT

Hi Masood,

Excellent article! As an industry, I don’t think we can have too many articles that remind organisations of the fundamentals, encouraging them not to get caught up in the technology.

As I tend to say in workshops: “the CMS won’t solve any of your business problems, it’s just an enabler”. It’s the work around the CMS (publishing processes, content, IA, etc) that really adds the value…

Cheers,
James

Richard Marsh — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 06:53:14 GMT

Well said Masood, this is a key stage in most aspects of business analysis – lifting the Businesses eyes from looking at technology as the solution, to communicating the issues. Your take on this from a content publishing perspective is nicely presented.

Another aspect which should part of the strategic process is the definition of a communications plan. This should also help the information architecture by defining the nature of the communications, i.e. the dialogues between Author and Reader and some the properties that define what is considered global or local news when dealing with large enterprise projects.

I look forward to your follow up article, in addition to the lifecycle, will you also be mentioning meta data considerations or internationalisation / localisation considerations?

Thanks for a good article.

Richard Marsh
http://www.creative-resonance.com