May 26, 2003

IA and CM

CMSWatch's Tony Byrne has an interesting interview with Information Architecture guru Lou Rosenfeld (of Polar Bear fame).

I think the time has come for a closer discussion and at least mutual awareness between the two fields of IA and CM.  We have a lot to offer each other and I’m concerned and a little surprised that more hasn’t happened at this point.  I’m curious as to why that is.  It may be that because of how the fields have developed -- one with a software industry and one not -- that we somehow just missed each other. We end up being in different business units inside the same companies and we end up at different conferences.  But it seems like a natural pairing and I hope that people in the content management community will look at us and reach out to us and help us see them.

I think that IA and CM are awfully similar in many respects. This might be because I learned about CM at the iSchool, where the historical focus has been in libraries and information. Still, the methodologies used in both fields can be quite similar. If done right, they both follow a user-centered design methodology. Both start with attempting to define the audience, their goals, and their content needs. Both fields live and die by metadata. While there are differences, it sometimes seems like CM is IA with a bigger software budget.