Two questions resound throughout the content industry: Why do Enterprise Content Management (ECM) projects take so long to implement? And why do they fail with such alarming frequency? While all enterprise-level IT projects prove to be difficult and risky undertakings, a deeper examination of the ECM challenge in particular will reveal an endemic inattention to-or at best belated appreciation of-its critical corollary: the need for Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA).

Information Architecture (IA) is commonly understood to be the art and science of structuring, organizing, and labeling information so that content owners can better manage it and users can find what they're looking for more effectively. IA can be bottom-up (i.e. analyzing and labeling content chunks) or top-down (i.e developing standardized categorization schemes or taxonomies).