Mark Celsor has written an interesting post explaining how and why he uses Drupal for IA, prototyping and project management when building a site for a client. I've always been a fan of the white site or similar to get people to focus on how the site will work and to make holes in content glaringly obvious. The Drupal idea is worth a look. I was tickled also by his description of a typical web project:
1. IA expert designs a beautiful, well thought out site map in Microsoft Visio leveraging industry best practices and the web site sponsor's business objectives.2. Site map goes to the sponsor, there might be a few rounds of revisions but basically they love it, and say "Great start building it out. We'll write the content."
3. Large amounts of work by the graphic design and technical staff building toward the site map.
4. 10,000 years elapse, business objectives change, best practices are revised, great civilizations rise and fall.
5. Content finally shows up and it consists of 475 faxes, 280 Word documents and around 400 GB of photos and low resolution logos in weird file formats that only open on old Commodore 64s. All of which have no relation to the original beautiful, well thought out site map.
6. Hilarity ensues, everything is slammed together as quickly as possible to meet a deadline and nobody is amused with the final product.
So true it hurts.