What are the most common mistakes in CMS and IA leadership, and how can you avoid them?

Defining user-centric IA will often expose gnarly, organizational challenges around who is responsible for aspects of the customer journey. While some ownership is 1:1 (e.g. HR being responsible for Careers content), other sections in the IA are likely owned by multiple stakeholders. An IA that is clear to the user often requires facilitating cross-functional teams to support a successful implementation of any IA and CMS strategy, including adherence to content goals and brand guidelines. When this fails you will often see IA that resembles an organization’s internal structure rather than one that is relatable to your audience.

Common mistakes in CMS and IA leadership include: 1. Overcomplicating IA: Keep it simple and intuitive for users. 2. Ignoring user feedback: Regularly gather and incorporate user insights into IA decisions. 3. Lack of flexibility: Adapt IA to evolving content and user needs. 4. Poor governance: Establish clear roles, responsibilities, and processes for IA management. 5. Not prioritizing scalability: Plan IA with future growth in mind. Avoid these mistakes by prioritizing user-centricity, maintaining flexibility, fostering collaboration, and investing in ongoing IA governance and optimization.

Liderar proyectos de CMS e IA exige evitar errores comunes: 1) Alineación - Es clave vincular los objetivos del proyecto con las metas empresariales. 2) Gobernanza - Define claramente roles y responsabilidades. 3) Flexibilidad - Adopta sistemas modulares y escalables. 4) Pruebas - Realiza pruebas exhaustivas para garantizar funcionalidad. 5) Tendencias - Mantente actualizado con las innovaciones tecnológicas. El éxito radica en la planificación estratégica, una gobernanza efectiva y mantenerse al día con las tendencias, asegurando que los proyectos cumplan con las expectativas y agreguen valor real al negocio.

Figuring out the objectives of your IA Architecture is a decent place to get going. What is it being used for? How do you ensure that the information you are placing into your content management systems is timely, relevant and accurate? Are you provisioning the information architecture where either systems or users can access it fast enough? Does it need to be searchable? Who or what needs access to the content, etc. These and many other questions may need to be surfaced in order to reach alignment / agreement with your various stakeholders. The integrations of the system both human and system need to be aware of what the content set is and does. Consideration has to be made around the communication of that and how it is documented.

Common mistakes in CMS and IA leadership include: ??Lack of Clear Strategy ??Ignoring User Needs ??Inadequate Training and Documentation ??Complex Navigation Structures ??Ignoring Scalability ??Inconsistent Patterns and Behaviours ??Not Prioritizing Accessibility ??Ignoring Analytics and Data

Poor governance primarily causes delay and irrelevant documentation deliverables. Lack of focusing on governance includes mismanagement of documentation life-cycle and document versioning, which may lead to wrong deliverables and consume lot of time in organizing and updating the content. Proper structuring, branching of contents/topics, and recording reuse of contents help to improve the governance.

Complex governance workflows are never followed and can cause frustration. Define processes by understanding how the team wants to work. That guarantees their buy-in. When creating content, ruthlessly identify who needs to be included. Clearly define the content that needs to be created today. Align on an outline. Define a process with the team that allows good work to get done. Remember, content creation can be iterative. When maintaining content, your governance process should be simple and automated. Start small with broken link reports. Then add reports that indicate old content without many views. Then add reports that identify content related to industry or product updates. Again, keep teams small, relevant, and focused for reviews.

Plan how your product information architecture will scale and accommodate that. Run regular tree tests with users and stakeholders

I think we can all agree that insufficient governance is a common issue but we need to recognise why it occurs. And usually, its because the senior stakeholders who initially sponsored the project have moved onto something else, leaving the team in place looking at each other scratching their heads. Projects need proper handover, no matter how important people are, that should be Governance 101. It's like a human blockchain, preserving the reason and purpose of the project as it evolves.

Poor governance is definitely a problem, because the policies, processes and practices must be updated in certain time manner. If this policies are not continuosly updated with the best industry practices and the IA design that a team wants to apply, this credibility and usability are going to be useless. We need to assign specific colleagues to those tasks, to monitor and update accordingly with the content strategy that we are implementing in that company. It is an objective, so in order to align it, we need to make sure that everybody in that hierarchy is having that sense of accountability and responsibility to delegate and report any concern.

Start by asking the question: How is your content going to be used in your organization? All of this work is iterative. First, understanding where your organization is regarding content. Are you just starting out? Need to get some content created? Start there. When you have a collection of content, move to the next step to provide that semantic layer for organization. Your CMS needs will evolve as will your business goals for content.

Your structure needs to adapt and grow with the business needs and requirements. A stringent structure will not fulfill needs to different orgs, prompting a need for new IA sooner or later. Build IA considering flexibility and growth. Aim for an IA to grow over a period of at least 5-7 years before going through a redesign process.

Understanding how to make your content accessible and searchable within a CMS is crucial in avoiding the duplication of information. Good CMS management will mean structuring the CMS according to a number of structures be it organisational, domain, function or otherwise and factoring in the need for future change. Ensuring that information has review dates, or expires after specific periods, having version control and valid ownership (teams or roles vs individuals) means that notifications are given for content becoming irrelevant or outdated. Starting with the end in mind. Do you want a monolithic CMS that will be a challenge to migrate or change in the future, or would you break the CMS into more atomic stores from the beginning?

Always start outlining your product information architecture by incorporating the 8 IA principles: 1. Objects 2. Choices 3. Disclosure 4. Exemplars 5. Front Door 6. Multiple Classification 7. Focused Navigation 8. Growth

A really common error here is copying the management structure for the CMS. What happens when risk moves from Finance to Corporate Affairs? A content migration with all the mess involved. The right way to model business CMS is around business teams and activities. Application support is unlikely to be moving to HR or Finance anytime soon.

Too often applications are developed in an echo chamber of those who are too close to the build. Independent user testing is a key step that will surface many usability issues that the team might miss. Always have fresh eyes look at features early and often.

Efectivamente, no realizar pruebas suficientes o implementar soluciones de IA solo por creencias puede hacer que el resultado final de un proyecto se vea truncado. Antes de implementar una IA se deberían realizar pruebas que nos guien a garantizar el éxito de dicha implementación. Y como éxito me refiero a cumplir los objetivos finales de una IA, es decir, que los usuarios accedan correctamente a la información o contenido que les facilitamos.

Conway's Law describes the biggest sin in the land of digital content design: structuring your website based on internal departments/silos instead of user needs. I've seen it happen time and time again. Thankfully there are various user research methods which can make a massive difference. This will help turn a mystifying maze into something that not only improves findability and comprehension but significantly contributes to those all-important conversion metrics. Communicating the findings of user research internally (in a succinct and clear way, of course!) will also help colleagues consider the user experience of public-facing assets more holistically, instead of thinking only of their department.

Workshops can be tiring, and both participants and facilitators can be over eager to bank the outputs. IA drafts generated in workshops need to be treated as very rough drafts, really just a brainstorm. By all means implement them, but just to POC or small pilot test groups. Refine and grow the group multiple times. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

The accuracy and effectiveness of the content may be questioned if the content is developed without proper testing. Validating the content against the application helps to provide the information clear, concise and accurate. Testing the contents increases the chances for the author to acquire more knowledge on the product, features, flow, etc. thus helps to develop- the content with better readability.

This can go both ways, however. Content management systems, once implemented, will likely be in place for years, and settling too early on a trend without understanding the implications of that trend can lead to user discontent and frustration. In my experience as an editor, I've rolled out new features only to discover that no one is using them, or have made seemingly innocuous changes that have had writers, readers, or sometimes senior management up in arms. A good idea is to maintain a beta-features versions for a more limited risk-tropic audience that can be rolled back if something simply does not seem to work before it impacts the bulk of your users.

In my over 40 years of Advertising, design, and UX the biggest issue is not being genuine - not walking the talk of your brand promise. That’s why companies adopt on all these methods… to cheat on their promise.

1. Confusing IA with navigation and not distinguishing the two. 2. Designing and presenting IA as a visual structure rather than a metadata structure. 3. Designing an IA around a CMS.

I think this question is out of context. CMS and IA are connected, but not as directly and they are concepts, not as much people that there needs to be governance. This is a weird question