Content strategy contract in Calgary

[Rahel Bailie]

Vancouver-based Habaneros is looking for a content strategy contractor for Calgary client. It's for a few months of work, with a fair bit of onsite presence. Email csanders at habaneros dot com if you're interested.

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Rahel Anne Bailie, Content Strategist / CM Consultant
Intentional Design Inc. www.intentionaldesign.ca
Content strategies for business impact      Tel. 604.837.0034 (PT, GMT -8)
Social apps (skype, twitter, etc): rahelab
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/rahelannebailie

[Alyson-Kathleen Riley]

Hi there, content strategists --

Question for you... well, part question and part shameless advertisement for an upcoming publishing opportunity.  

The question is this: how would you describe the difference between information architecture and content strategy?  

And now for the shameless advertisement:  I'd love to see new dialogue about the intersections between strategic information architecture and content strategy in the January 2012 edition of STC's Intercom magazine.  

In the May issue of Intercom, Andrea Ames and I launched a new column that explores the strategic and business aspects of information architecture (IA).   (You can see that new column at http://intercom.stc.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/art13.pdf or see the whole issue at http://intercom.stc.org/.)  In that column, we also launched a call for proposals for a special edition of Intercom to be focused on strategic information architecture, exploring topics such as:

• Business issues—for example, the relationship between IA and business strategy, how strategic IA can be used to achieve business objectives, and how IA practitioners can measure the impact of IA in the language of business.
• Strategy issues—for example, defining a strategic approach to IA using tools, such as compelling end goals, marketplace trends and futures, evocative user stories, participatory design, incremental roadmaps to implementation, and rhetoric that targets business value.
• User experience issues—for example, ensuring coherence and consistency by aligning an entire information experience or product identity, not just "documentation.”
• Organizational issues—for example, teaming models and collaboration methods for creating and delivering IA in professional, multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural, and multi-geography work contexts; best practices for content governance across distributed teams.
• Content management issues—for example, the relationship between strategic IA and emerging trends in content management systems and strategies, what IAs need to know about things like taxonomy and metadata (and why), how to manage issues of scale, and the ways in which IAs can leverage technical innovations in content management to advance users’ experiences with complex information systems.
• Implementation issues—for example, best practices for implementing IA in an Agile manner; prioritizing components of an information strategy for incremental architecture and implementation.
• Classic IA issues—new thinking about ways to help our customers understand complex information and accomplish difficult tasks, including such classic IA techniques as information chunking, effective navigation systems (we use the term broadly), affordances for way-finding and retrievability, minimalism, and the like.

Andrea and I suspect that these topics are also of interest to content strategists, and we're interested in your take on the relationships between disciplines.  How are they similar?  How are they different?  How do (should?) the roles interact?  Why do we have both roles?

We'd like to personally invite you to consider an article for publication in that special edition.  (You can find complete information about the special edition at http://intercom.stc.org/write-for-intercom/2010-editorial-calendar/#201201.)  In the meantime, we're curious and would like to start a discussion here -- what's the relationship between strategic information architecture and content strategy?

Looking forward to your feedback --



Alyson Riley

IBM Corporate Information Strategy
Home office: 651.457.3317
Mobile: 612.961.2565

[Rahel Bailie]

Great question! I would like to jump in and answer, but I'd like to give other people space to answer, so I'll hold on for a while. Glad you're taking this on - it's sure to create a lot of controversy.

Rahel

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[donn.d...@vertexinc.com]

Everyone --

Great question! I've been curious and learning about both CS and IA for
awhile now. I think your Strategic IA column will be a great forum to share
and learn about IA.

Well, information architecture to me deals with the structure and
organization of a product or service (ie Web site). There may or may not be
an overarching taxonomy that drives this organization. My impression is
that the IA of a product or service doesn't change after initial
implementation or until a redesign occurs. How extensible can an IA be?

CS, on the other hand, deals with knowledge or information/content
(procedures or processes, concepts, etc) that may be associated with a
product or service. Content may tagged somehow through metadata (for
example, DITA or Info Mapping). This allows for reuse/recombination of
content across a variety of media for a variety of audiences. CS deals with
the creation-to-archive cycle of content lifecycle. CS is driven by
structured authoring. I'm not certain how you'd balance a CS with
collaborative writing that includes customer-written content. Also, I think
you could make a flexible information architecture as part of your content
strategy.

I've got plenty of holes here to fill with a better understanding ;-)

I'm looking forward to learning through these discussions as well as your
column.

Thanks,

~ Donn

Donn DeBoard
Sr. Information Developer
Vertex Inc.
Tel: 484.595.6216
Fax: 610.407.4217
donn.d...@vertexinc.com
vertexinc.com

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