Content Choreography

Content Choreography – The Art of Dynamic Web Content: I like this new name – “content choreography” – for a summation of all the skills and governance required to make content work, along with the coordination to make them all work together.

It’s relatively straightforward to distill content strategy and information architecture down to their bare elements, and then make sure those elements are covered in your organization. It’s much harder to get your arms around all of those elements and get them working together towards a common goal.

It turns out that the whole is more than just the sum of its parts.

Earley and Associates relates a story of how they were working with an organization on a huge taxonomy project, when they ran into a problem.

While we could explain in detail every taxonomy, technique and task, and how it would be used in every workgroup on the project to coordinate the dynamic content experience, it took too long to communicate the vision. By describing each element individually, it looked like it was already covered by each of the teams. It crossed every system layer and organization, but was too big for any one team to take on the responsibility of making sure all the pieces were designed to work together.

This is one of those situation where you have a checklist and you can go down each item and say, “yeah, we got that.” But there’s no item at the bottom for, “Now, make it all work together.”

I wonder if there’s a special discipline of project management, just for content projects?