Richard Sheffield — Wed, 09 May 2007 22:29:24 GMT

Rachel,

Again, great post and thread. I’ve been a CS since we all kinda thought up the term, and agree with lots of what has been said about some real, and imagined, overlap with the IA function. This has had a real impact on my career as back in the dot-com bust, the big agency I worked for decided that the CS job actually COULD be done by the IA team and laid of all the content strategists. What they found was that in most projects, the IA is already on the critical path in the project plan, and there was just no time for them to also do the deep content dive required for a good content strategy. So they brought most of us back on contract to help a number of projects that had fallen behind.

Here is one example of this kind of CS/IA problem. We had a client that wanted to create and upscale ecommerce site. They spent a bunch of money having a site completely designed (customer analysis, wireframes, graphic design, etc.). A CS was brought into the project to matrix and plan the content development. Once she did the analysis of how long it was going to take to author each product description (they wanted a very J Peterman feel to the product descriptions), get each description approved and published using the yet-to-be-created WCMS, it became quickly obvious that this was going to be a very long and costly process (they wanted new descriptions for thousands of products). The IA had created the product classification system (product buckets) and the designed the product description page, but it was the CS who had to figure out how to actually create, get approvals for, and publish thousands of individual instantiations of this page that the IA only had to design once. Eventually the whole project was cancelled.

Obviously this is an oversimplification, and there were mistakes made. Having done this for a long time I’ve seen that sure, IAs can do much of this work but they really don’t have time, it’s usually not something they enjoy doing, and good IAs are scarce and hard to come by, this is really not a good use of their time. A good CS can offload a lot of the content-related work from the IA, dig deeper and get real and useful numbers for planning and scoping, and figure out how all of the content is actually going to be created before the project team commits to a bad project plan. I see more and more Web development teams realizing that the biggest reason for late projects is late content (not late wireframes or other IA work products). And late content is almost always a lack of sound, detailed content development planning and tracking.

Sorry for the long post!

Richard Sheffield — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:05:25 GMT

Another interesting point of complexity is choosing to manage your site’s structure in the CMS as well as the content. In our system we maintain all page hierarchies and subnavigation structures as part of the content we create. This forces everything to be inside the CMS or it cannot be linked to without building some kind of placeholder page. When building out a site redesign, having to create and re-create the site’s structure (in an environment that is very fluid) while implementing a new CMS, while also writing and developing content is another sure way to missed deadlines.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Richard Sheffield