There’s a famous drawing by Cartoonist W.E. Hill that when looked at one way features an old lady, but looked at another way, shows a picture of a young woman. This drawing mirrors the current world of technology and content; IT professionals and CIOs look at the picture from one perspective, and content managers see it quite differently.

In this day and age, separating content from technology is irrelevant. According to most of our end user research and feedback about portals and websites featuring both internal and external content, it’s clear that most sites are akin to a confusing drawing where the old lady and the young lady often look like one indecipherable, hard-to-use mess. It will take the two worlds of content and technology coming together to make the picture meaningful for the end user.

For years, IT professionals and information professionals or content managers?what I call information content or IC professionals?have been operating on parallel paths. Now their worlds are colliding fast. Computer networks and the Web are cornerstones of our modern workplace. Content is the star attraction on these systems, but who’s paying attention?

In dealing with all the issues and complications of building the fastest networks, the zippiest websites or the most efficient supply chains, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees?or, as is more often the case, the content for the technology. While we live in a world where technology rules, we must not forget that technology is really the enabler that makes content relevant for real people doing real things and making real decisions. Yet content is often the stepchild (dare I say it??the old lady) in the picture.

Best of Both Worlds

So how do we make corporate portal investments meaningful, e-commerce sites useful, or the terabytes of internally generated content and tactit knowledge available to users? By bringing the best skills from both IT and IC to the development of every application. To do this, however, IT needs to talk more with IC, recognizing that content professionals have been around for years, and they know more about content management, acquisition, filtering, taxonomy development and categorization than any tool or technology. These information professionals?also known as librarians?already know the answers to many of the content questions posed by the IT side of the house. They know where to get content and how to present it in a meaningful way. IT doesn’t have to reinvent the IC wheel.