Another aspect of the Enterprise Information Architecture in Context diagram (PDF) that people have asked about is the nature of the intersection between content and business process. As with any IA issue worth talking about, it depends. I’ve identified four kinds of intersections between a business process and content. There are probably more, but these four cover a lot of ground. So I put the out there for people to think about, comment on, and refine.

1. Business creates content
   (e.g. records resulting from a business process)
2. Business uses content
   (e.g. knowledge workers sharing documents to do their jobs)
3. Business is content
   (e.g. content management, tagging, or publishing where the business
   process exists to support content)
4. Content initiates business
   (e.g. online form submissions that kick off a business process)

These four kinds or modes of interaction are handy, but I also came up with another way of thinking about it (as I said, it depends). You could also break it into separate but related business processes and leave content out of it. It is still heavily content-centric, but given how crucial information is to nearly every organization, I think this bias is fair. There are three kinds of business operation:

1. Business operations
   This is the conduct of business to directly serve the mission of the organization. If you work for a bank, this would be finance. If you work in retail, it would be sales. If you work in shipping, it would be logistics. We can also lump in administrative operations like human resources, business administration and financial management here. It’s the business of business.
2. Content operations
   Content operations deal with the creation, use, management, and publication of content. There are many points of intersection between content operations and business operations, since nearly all business operations work with content. The business operation is to do the work, therefore the content operation is to record or communicate the work.
3. EIA operations
   Lastly, there are EIA operations, which create the tools and structures to help people create, use, manage, and publish content. Essentially, for every point of intersection between business and content, there is a mediation that is the EIA operation. For example, when a writer finishes an article and submits it for approval, they tag it with metadata. What metadata they use and how it is stored and displayed is controlled by the EIA. We have a business process resulting in content, mediated through the EIA.

This is actually the model the diagram is based on.