Adam Zeiner

This post is meant to be a foundational building block for further thinking on emerging standards in the shape of design organizations.

The impact of these influences remains today. It shows up in the language of business, for example – think of all the business jargon that clearly has military roots. [...] Even my own business school was organized into cohorts—a structure modeled after the Roman legions.

Content ecosystem maps are snapshots of your digital strategy and what the heck is going on with content in your organization: where content is coming from, high-level processes, internal and external audiences, business objectives, technology—and how it all interacts.

We also need to stop treating them as monolithic models of the entire system. We’re in the digital age now and maps are cheap. There’s no reason we can’t have multiple versions or break our research up into multiple maps, each with a well defined scope and focus.

And though it's useful to be able to tell them apart, design is about strategic and tactical work happening together. At the heart of many stubborn design projects and unimpressive outcomes are people coming in with an incompatible mental models; overplaying strategy or tactics, and neglecting the other.