In a world that seems increasingly about technology itself, it has become tempting to assume that the questions and challenges of new and better information products is about the technology.  While it is true that technology is the key enabler of the new information world we are building, it is also true that the decision making and judgment involved in how that technology is to be organized and deployed is of equal–and not decreasing–importance.  Indeed, as the products move toward increasing sophistication and flexibility–smart content you might say–the importance of the human and organizational parts of the information life cycle become even more important. 

It is a truism that you cannot deliver information products you can’t create and manage, and with the circle of participants in that creation and management ever widening, we must be sensitive to the limits of the creators.  Moreover, while just "getting it up on the web" used to be at least sufficient to justify deployment of information products, today’s information consumer has a much more extensive and demanding list of features required before he will accept web-based information.  The publisher who forgets  or ignores that list is for trouble.

In a half-day session preceding the Gilbane conference next week, the Gilbance consulting team will tackle some of the real world challenges inherent in this rapidly changing information world, providing both sign posts for issues likely to come up and "in the trenches" suggestions for how to deal with them.  The goal of the session, scheduled for the afternoon of December 1, is that the attendees leave with a better handle on how to proceed in the quest for better information products and the role "smart content" should play. 

The presenters, in addition to their expertise in the technology and tools of information, bring a unique resource to their efforts: years of design, implementation and evaluation of real organizations facing real challenges.