What if you could escape copy-and-paste and build dynamic learning experiences at scale? In this podcast, host Sarah O’Keefe and guest Mike Buoy explore the benefits of structured learning content. They share how organizations can break down silos between techcomm and learning content, deliver content across channels, and support personalized learning experiences at scale.

The good thing about structured authoring is that you have a structure. If this is the concept that we need to talk about and discuss, here’s all the background information that goes with it. With that structure comes consistency, and with that consistency, you have more of your information and knowledge documented so that it can then be distributed and repackaged in different ways. If all you have is a PowerPoint, you can’t give somebody a PowerPoint in the middle of an oil change and say, “Here’s the bare minimum you need,” when I need to know, “Okay, what do I do if I’ve cross-threaded my oil drain bolt?” That’s probably not in the PowerPoint. That could be an instructor story that’s going to be told if you have a good instructor who’s been down that really rocky road, but again, a consistent structure is going to set you up so that you have robust base content.

— Mike Buoy

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Transcript:

Introduction with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.

Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.

Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky; you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.

Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and processes that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.

End of introduction

Sarah O’Keefe: Hi everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe. I’m here today with Mike Buoy. Hey, Mike.

Mike Buoy: Good morning, Sarah. How are you?

SO: I’m doing well, welcome. For those of you who don’t know, Mike Buoy is the Senior Solutions Consultant for AEM Guides at Adobe since the beginning of this year of 2025. And before that had a, we’ll say, long career in learning.

MB: Long is accurate, long is accurate. There may have been some gray hair grown along the way, in the about 20-plus years.

SO: There might have been. No video for us, no reason in particular. Mike, what else do we need to know about you before we get into today’s topic, which is the intersection of techcomm and learning?

MB: Oh gosh, so if I think just quickly about my career, my background’s in instructional design, consulting, instructor, all the things related to what you would consider a corporate L&D, moving into the software side of things into the learning content management space. And so what we call now component content management, we, when I say we, those are all the different organizations I’ve worked for throughout my career, have been focused in on how do you take content that is usually file-based and sitting in a SharePoint drive somewhere, and how do you bring it in, get it organized so it’s actually an asset as opposed to a bunch of files? And how do you take care of that? How do you maintain it? How do you get it out to the right people at the right time and the right combination, all the rights, all the right nows, that’s really the background of where I come from.

And that’s not just in learning content; at the end of the day, learning content is often the technical communication-type content with an experience wrapped around it. So it’s really a very fun retrospective when you look back on where both industries have been running in parallel and where they’re really starting to intersect now.

SO: Yeah, and I think that’s really the key here. When we start talking about learning content, structured authoring, techcomm, why is it that these things are running in parallel and sitting in different silos? What’s your take on that? Why haven’t they intersected more until maybe now we’re seeing some rumblings of maybe we should consider this, but until now it’s been straight up, we’re learning and your techcomm, or vice versa, and never the twain shall meet, so why?

MB: Yeah, and it’s interesting, when you look at most organizations, the two major silos that you’re seeing, one is going to be product. So whether it’s a software product, a hardware product, an insurance or financial product, whatever that product is, technical communication, what is it? How do you do it? What are all the standard operating procedures surrounding it? That all tends to fall under that product umbrella. And then you get to the other side of the other silo, and that’s the hey, we have customers, whether those customers are our customers or the internal customers, our own employees that we need to trade and bring up the speed on products and how to use them, or perhaps even partners that sit there. And so, typically, techcomm is living under the product umbrella, and L&D is either living under HR or customer success or customer service of some sort, depending on where they’re coming from.

Now in the learning space you, over the last probably decade or so, seeing where there’s a consolidation between internal and external L&D teams and having them get smarter about, what are we building, how are we building it, who are we delivering it to, and what are all those delivery channels? And then when I think about why are they running in parallel, well, they have different goals in mind, right? techcomm has to ship with the product and service and training ideally is doing that, but is often, there’s a little bit of a lag behind, “Okay, we ship the thing, how long is it before we start having all the educational frameworks around it to support the thing that was shipped?”

And so I think leadership-wise, very different philosophies, very different principles on that. techcomm, very much focused on the knowledge side of things. What is it? How do you do it? What are all the SOPs? And L&D leans more towards creating a learning experience around, “Okay, well here’s the knowledge, here’s the information, how do we create that arc going from I’m a complete novice to whatever the next level is?” Or even, I may be an expert and I need to learn how to apply this to get whatever new changes there are in my world and help me get knowledgeable and then skilled in that regard.

So I think those are kind the competing mindsets and philosophies as well as, I won’t say competing, but parallel business organization of why we don’t usually see those two. And if we think about from a workflow perspective, you have engineering or whoever’s building the product, handing over documentation of what they’re building to techcomm and techcomm is taking all of that and then building out their documentation, and then that documentation then gets handed to L&D for them to then say, “Well, how do we contextualize this and build all the best practices around it and recommendations and learning experiences?” So there is a little bit of a waterfall effect for how a product moves through the organization. I think those are the things that really contribute to it being siloed and running in parallel.

SO: Yeah. And I mean many, many organizations, the presence of engineering documentation or product design documentation is also a big question mark, but we’ll set that aside. And I think the key point here is that learning content, and you’ve said this twice already, learning content in general and delivery of learning content is about experience. What is the learning experience? How does the learner interact with this information and how do we bring them from, they don’t understand anything to they can capably do their job? The techcomm side of things is more of a point of need. You’re capable enough but you need some reference documentation or you need to know how to log into the system or various other things. But techcomm to your point, tends to be focused much less on experience and much more on efficiency. How do we get this out the door as fast as possible to ship it with the product? Because the product’s shipping and if you hold up the product because your documentation isn’t ready, very, very bad things will happen to you.

MB: Bad, bad, very bad.

SO: Not a good choice.

MB: It’s not a good look. It’s not a good look.

SO: Now, what’s interesting to me is, and this sort of ties into some of the conversations we have around pre-sales versus post-sales marketing versus techcomm kinds of things, as technical content has moved into a web experience, online environment, and all the rest of it, it has shifted more into pre-sales. People read technical documentation, they read that content to decide whether or not to buy, which means the experience matters more.

And conversely, the learning content has fractured into classroom learning and online instructor led and e-learning a bunch of things I’m not even going to get into, and so they have fractured into multi-channel. So they evolved from classroom into lots of different channels for learning where techcomm evolved from print into lots of different channels, but online and so the two are kind of converging where techcomm needs to be more interested in experience and learning content needs to be more interested in efficiency, which brings us then to, can we meet in the middle and what does it look like to apply some of the structured authoring principles to learning content? We’ve talked a lot about making techcomm better and improving the experience. So now let’s flip it around and talk about how do we bring learning content into structured authoring? Is that a sensible thing to do? I guess that’s the first question: is that a sensible thing to do?

MB: Yeah, and here’s the thing that I like to keep in mind when talking about structured authoring, the context for why in the world would we even consider it? And when I think of traditional L&D training courses, whether it’s butts in seats at an instructor-led training event, whether I’m actually in a physical classroom or I’m sitting virtually in a Zoom class for example, or it’s self-paced e-learning, so much great content is built and encapsulated in that experience and is not able to be extracted out.

My favorite example of talking about this is I’ve got a big truck sitting in my driveway, I need to change the oil on it, it’s time. If it’s the first time I’ve ever changed oil, absolutely, I want all the learning. I want the scaffolding. I want the best practices, how I’m going to set up my work environment, the types of tools. How I’m going to need to deal with all the fluids, what I need to purchase. I’m going to dive into all that. In the real world, university of YouTube, I’m going to go watch videos on this and there’s going to be some bad content, there’s going to be some gems, and I’m going to pay attention to the ones that are good.

Now as I go from a novice, I’m going to build that knowledge of how to do it, I’m going to apply that knowledge. I’m actually going to go do it, now I’m probably going to make a mess and make mistakes my first time through, but that’s also building experience. So I’m moving from novice to knowledgeable to building skills to as I do it more and more, I move into that realm of being experienced.

Now as you move further up that chain, you need less and less support to the point where I’m like, “Crap, which oil do I need to buy? What are the torque specs on my drain plug?” I really only need three or four data points to do the job now. So that’s where as I move from a novice to an expert, I need to be able to skim and find exactly what I need in the moment of need, the just enough information. And so I’ll take the oil changing experience and let’s take that to any product or service training your customers, the people who are consuming your content are going through the same thing.

So learning-wise, why structured? Once I get to the expert level of things, I am not going to log into the LMS and I’m not going to launch that e-learning course, and I’m not going to click next 5 to 10 to 20 times to get to the answer that has the specification tables of, here’s what I need and what I need to do in order to accomplish the task at hand. Everybody’s nodding their head. Every time I ask, “When was the last time you logged into the LMS to get an answer to a question?” The only time I’ve ever had somebody go, “Oh, me,” it was actually an LMS administrator.

So learning is great at creating that initial experience, but their content’s trapped. It is stuck inside that initial learning experience. So getting back to the question, why structured authoring? Well, if you move to a structured authoring where you’re taking your content and building it in chunks, yes, you can create that initial learning experience where you’ve assembled that very crafted, we’re taking you from novice, getting you the knowledge, giving you the opportunities to practice the skill in a safe environment and fail well and learn from that and get you to a place where you move from novice to skilled. And then over time, this is where a lot of the L&D in general, because their content’s trapped in that initial learning experience, they can’t easily extract that information out and provide the things people need to move from skilled to experienced and experienced to mastery.

So that’s where when I think about, “Well, what does techcomm do really well? Techcomm supports that, I’ve got enough skills to do the job and I need to reference the very specific information, or the SOP, I’m on step four, I forget what are the things I need to enter in to get through step four, I can hop over the documentation and find that. So techcomm has figured out the structured authoring part. You mentioned creating new varied experiences for getting to the technical communication. Multi-channel delivery, I want to hop on and hit my search or hit my AI chatbot and pull up the information and just get me just enough to get through the tasks that I’m doing.

Learning’s still often stuck, if we equate it to the tech communication side, they’re still stuck in the, “I’m hand building a Microsoft Word based 500 page user guide that to get anything out of that, it’s a lot of work to build it, it’s a lot of work to maintain it, and it’s not easy to extract that information out to use it for other things.”

So why structured authoring, feature proof your content, make it more flexible. You’ve invested so much time and energy creating great content, great experiences, why not make it so it’s modular so you can pull things out and create new and different ways of consuming that content and delivering it in different bite size bits and pieces along the way?

SO: And I guess we have to tackle the elephant in the room, which is PowerPoint. So much learning and training, in particular, especially classroom training, is identified with an instructor standing at the front, running through a bunch of slides. And we like to say that PowerPoint is the black hole of content, that’s where content goes to die, and once it goes in, you never get it back out. So what do we say to the people that come in and they’re like, “You will pry PowerPoint from my cold, dead hands.”

MB: Such a great question. I’ll jokingly refer to PowerPoint as “My precious.” Here’s the reality: PowerPoint is not the knowledge chunk. That knowledge is actually sitting in the head of the instructor, the PowerPoint is providing the framework for them to deliver and impart that knowledge and impart those best practices. It’s there to provide guardrails so that it’s done in a consistent fashion, and there’s a bare minimum amount of structure that… There’s a bullet point there, they’re going to talk about it. The degree to the quality of how they’re going to talk about it and present it is going to vary based on the person delivering the content. So if you’ve got a bunch of PowerPoint slides, you don’t necessarily have all of your training material well documented. Now, if you’ve got parallel instructor guides and student guides that talk about the details of what should be said behind those bullet points, you’re a lot closer to having that information.

So why structured authoring? Well, it’s kind of, again, the good thing about structured authoring is you have a structure. You have a, if this is the concept that we need to talk about and discuss, here’s all the background information that goes with it. So with that structure comes consistency, and with that consistency, that means that you have more of your information and knowledge documented so that it can then be distributed and repackaged in different ways. Because if all you have is a PowerPoint, you can’t give somebody a PowerPoint when they’re in the middle of an oil change and say, “Here’s the bare minimum you need.” When I need to know, “Okay, what do I do if I’ve cross-threaded my oil drain bolt?” That’s probably not in there. That may be an instructor story that’s going to be told if you have a good instructor who’s been down that really rocky road. But again, structure and being consistent about it is going to set you up so that you have robust base content. 

We’ve got Legos in the house, I got two boys. Gosh, I’ve stepped on so many Legos in my life, it’s ridiculous. But the Lego metaphor works because you have a more robust batch of Legos that you can create new creations from, rather than a limited set if you’re only doing PowerPoint.

SO: And because you’re nice, and I’m not, I’ll say this, we can produce PowerPoint out of structured content, that is a thing we can do. I’m not saying it’s going to be award-winning, every page is a special snowflake PowerPoint, but we can generate PowerPoint out of structured content. And if you’re using it as a little bit of an instructor support in the context of a classroom or live training, that’s fine.

A lot of the PowerPoint that we see that people say, “This is what I want, and if you don’t allow me to do this,” and there’s this rainbow unicorn traipsing across the side of the page kind of thing, and no, we can’t do one-off slides, we can’t do crazy every slide is different stuff, but the vast majority of the content that I see that is PowerPoint based and kind of all over the place is not actually effective. So it’s like, this is not good. We have the same issue with InDesign. We see these InDesign pages that are highly, highly laid out, and it’s like, “We need this.” Well, why? It’s terrible. I mean, it’s awful. What are you doing here? No, we can give you a framework.

MB: Now, you’re telling somebody that their baby’s ugly when you say that, that’s somebody’s baby.

SO: I would never tell somebody that their baby is ugly, but I have seen a lot of really bad PowerPoint. Babies are wonderful.

MB: Yes.

SO: It’s so bad. So why does the PowerPoint exist, and how do we work around that? And also, are you delivering in multiple languages? Because if so, we need a way to localize this efficiently, and we’re right back to the structured content piece.

MB: And as soon as you’re talking about with PowerPoint, it is the poster child of pixel-perfect placement. As soon as I take a perfectly placed pixel product and have to translate it from English to let’s just say French, just the growth of the text alone, now I’ve got what was a perfectly placed pixel layout, my beautiful slide is now a jumbled mess. So just because you can doesn’t mean you should. And the thing is, PowerPoint and Microsoft Excel are the duct tape that runs business. Everybody has it. Everybody uses it. That’s the reality.

Now, the thing is, does everything have to be structured? I don’t believe it has to be. They are absolutely the one-off snowflake instances where, you know what? PowerPoint is the exact right tool for the job. Maybe it’s the one-off presentation that really is not going to see any reuse, it’s expendable, it’s disposable. We need to get the information communicated quickly. I’m going to fire it PowerPoint. I’m going to use it as my, I’m going to do air quotes, “My throwaway content” because it’s something that is short, sweet, and needs to be communicated, absolutely. I’m not, and I don’t think you are either, saying that PowerPoint has to go away, it’s the when is it appropriate and when is it not?

SO: I mean, I am the queen of the one-off can never be reused content being developed in, now I refuse to use PowerPoint, but in slideware for a short presentation, so the next one of you that’s listening to this and walks up to me at a conference and says, “Oh, is your presentation structured content?” No, it is not. Thank you for asking. Why isn’t it structured? Because I don’t reuse it at scale. Because in fact, every presentation at every conference is a special snowflake and has been lovingly handcrafted by me to deliver the message that I need, the context that I need, potentially the language, but to your point, even if I’m not localizing the presentation itself, the cultural context matters. So if my audience is largely English-speaking or primarily English, or… I mean, we’re going to Atlanta for LavaCon, that is going to be mostly a US-based audience, and maybe we get some Canadians, eh. And other than that… But mostly US and a US context. Will I be using excessive amounts of images from the Georgia Aquarium? Yes, I will.

Now, when I go to conferences elsewhere, so let’s take tcworld in Germany in November, that audience is, we’re delivering content in English, and the audience ranges from perfect English speakers to sort of barely hanging on. And so my practice at a conference like that is to include more text on my slides because if I include some additional text, it gives the people that are not quite as comfortable in English, a little bit more scaffolding to hang onto as they’re trying to follow my ridiculous analogies and insane references to cultural things. I also do try to pay attention to the kinds of words that I’m using and the kinds of idioms that I’m using so that they’re just not completely lost in space or things are not coming from left field or whatever. So the context matters, and no, my presentations are not structured.

But pulling this back, let’s talk about the potential. So when we look at learning content and you think about saying, okay, we’re going to structure our learning content or we’re going to structure some of our learning content, what does that mean in terms of what gets enabled? What are the possibilities? What are the things that you can do with structured learning content that you cannot do in unstructured, by which I mean PowerPoint, but unstructured, locked-in content? If we break this stuff into components and we deliver on structured learning content, what are the ideas there? What are the possibilities?

MB: Well, as you’re explaining the PowerPoint point of view, a word that came up a few times was scale. I’m not having to do it at scale. Effectively, it is a one-off. Yes, I’m going to personalize it for the audience, and the degree of personalization and customization that you’re doing per conference, per audience, per default language that they’re speaking, you’re able to scale that to the degree that you need to. There’s no need for you to put your content in data and localize it and do all the things that you need to do. So it’s really that word at scale, that, I think, is the key word.

It’s when you hit that tipping point where the desktop tools that you’re using today, and we can say this with tech communications as well, I was using Word and Excel and copy and pasting and keeping things in sync, it works until you get to a tipping point where the scale no longer is sustainable. That same exact problem exists in training. So when you’re looking at things like, I have my training content that when I deliver it in California, I have to put my Prop 65 note in everything because Lord forbid, as soon as I step across the state line into California, everything that’s around me is going to give me cancer. Prop 65 is the default thing that you see plastered everywhere.

So do I need to customize my content for delivering in California? Perhaps. Maybe different states have different regional laws or policies that apply to only that audience. That’s where that mass customization and mass personalization are really hard to scale because now you don’t have just one course, you have potentially 50 courses, if I’m just talking about the US, 50 states, 50 courses, and I have to have 50 different variations, which means that not if something changes, but when something changes, now I have to open up and change 50 different courses, and it’s not, did I miss anything? It’s, “What did I miss?” That’s the thing that you wake up in the morning in a cold sweat of, “Oh my God, what did I miss?”

So why structured for learning? Largely when you get to that tipping point where you’re copy/pasting, and I call it the copy/paste published treadmill, when you are on that hamster wheel of copy/paste/publish, copy/paste/publish, and that is the majority of what you’re doing, and you’re looking at a pie chart of how much time is spent maintaining your courses or taking a base course and creating all the variations, that precious PowerPoint that is the handcrafted bespoke one-off, you can’t do that anymore. That’s the equivalent of, you look at a Lamborghini, how many do they make a year? They can afford to make a very small number per year because they’re really expensive to make. When you look at a Ford Mustang, which probably gives you 80% of the performance at a fraction of the cost and exponentially scales well beyond, it’s because they’ve taken that structured approach of, every frame’s the same, every hood’s the same, very few handcrafted things, and the things that are going to be handcrafted, that’s when I go order the special edition Shelby Cobra that has some handcrafted components put onto the basic structure. That’s that same metaphor applied.

So why structured content? Because I want to have modular content that can be reassembled really quickly, that I may have chunks that are reused so that when I need to slip in my Prop 65 disclaimers, I can do that at scale and have 50 variations of a course, but when it comes time to update it, I’m literally updating one or two things and it’s automatically updating all 50 courses and of course all the efficiencies of publishing things out in a structured format.

So that pixel-perfect placement, I’m going to give that up to stay sane so I can get home and have dinner with my family, because the amount of time that I’ve spent in my life doing pixel-perfect placement and updating things, God, I wish I could hit the way back machine and reclaim all that time in my life. How many… Guilty as charged. Show of hands of anybody who’s listening, how many times have you sat there and fiddled with the slide or a text box in InDesign then design to get it just right, that two days later, something changes and you’re back there spending 10, 15 minutes doing it to fiddle it in just right. So, as I affectionately like to say, I’m a recovered FrameMaker, InDesign, PowerPoint, and Word user because I want to author it in a structured format so that I am giving up the responsibility of layout and look and feel.

SO: I like to tell people, “I’m not lazy, I’m efficient.” The fact that I don’t want to do it is just a bonus; I can get out of doing all this work.

MB: That’s right, that’s right.

SO: Because we are not allowed to leave any podcast without covering this topic, what does it look like to have AI in this context?

MB: There are two sides of the AI coin from a content perspective, I think, and it’s the, “How can AI help me do my job better to create content?” Some things that when we’re looking at duplication of content, things that AI can do really well that, working smart, not hard, help me find things that already exist in my repository of structured content that look like this, that are really close. The human in the loop, so helping me deduplicate or help me not create new unnecessary variations of content. I think that’s one area of AI-based assistance for content creation that people may not be necessarily thinking about. Because right now, the easy one is like, “Hey, ChatGPT, help me write an introduction or an overview for the following,” it spits that out. That’s great, but that overview and that content may have already been written by somebody else, and so what ends up happening is you start generating content drift where it’s almost exactly the same but just slightly different. And in reality, yes, I could have used the one that was already there.

So I think that’s one of the areas where AI from a content authoring perspective is one that I’m really excited about. Because at the end of the day, and this leads us into the second part of AI, AI is only as good as what you feed it, and if you feed it junk food, you’re going to get junk results. So it’s that whole thing of do you eat healthy food or are you going to eat Cheetos? If you’re pointing your AI at a SharePoint repository and saying, “Hey, read all of this,” and all the content shifts and variations and content drift and out-of-date and perhaps out-of-context content that exists inside of that repository, your results are not going to be as accurate as they need to be. So, how do you ensure that AI is providing good results? Well, you feed good content.

And so within an organization, I think the two silos that we started our conversation with, technical communications and L&D, tend to have some of the most highly vetted, highly accurate, up-to-date content in an organization. And so this is my encouragement to everybody who’s in this space, you are the owners of what is good, highly nutritious food that you can feed your AI. So taking it back to the structured content perspective, if I’m authoring in the structured content, publishing it out in a format that is AI ready, all of your tags, all of your enrichments, all of your, here’s the California version of the content versus the Georgia or Florida’s version of the content, all of that context and enrichment and tagging that’s gone on, you’re now feeding AI all of that context so that AI can provide the proper answer. So that’s my short, it’s sweet for the AI side. We could talk for probably days on all sorts of other variations, but right now, that’s where I’m seeing the biggest impact that it’s going to have on techcomm and L&D.

SO: I think that’s a great place to wrap it up. And I want to say thank you for being here and for a great conversation around all of these issues, and we will reconvene at a future conference somewhere to cause some more trouble and talk some more about all of these things. So Mike, thank you.

MB: You are welcome. And yeah, I think the next conference we’re going to see each other is going to be LavaCon, so I’ll be talking in and around the convergence of L&D and techcomm and what life can look like with that. So certainly a deeper dive and continuation of what we started here, and super excited to sit on your session as well.

SO: Yep, super. I will see you there. I’m pretty sure I’m doing one on the same topic, but it will be more complaining and less positive, so that seems to be my role. Okay, with that, thank you everybody, and we’ll see you on the next one. 

Conclusion with ambient background music

CC: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit Scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

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Every time someone views your product content, it’s a purposeful engagement with direct business value. Are you making the most of that interaction? In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, special guest Patrick Bosek, co-founder and CEO of Heretto, and Sarah O’Keefe, founder and CEO of Scriptorium, explore how your techcomm traffic reduces support costs, improves customer retention, and creates a cohesive user experience.

Patrick Bosek: Nobody reads a page in your documentation site for no reason. Everybody that is there has a purpose, and that purpose always has an economic impact on your business. People who are on the documentation site are not using your support, which means they’re saving you a ton of money. It means that they’re learning about your product, either because they’ve just purchased it and they want to utilize it, so they’re onboarding, and we all know that utilization turns into retention and retention is good because people who retain pay us more money, or they’re trying to figure out how to use other aspects of the system and get more value out of it. There’s nobody who goes to a doc site who’s like, “I’m bored. I’m just going to go and see what’s on the doc site today.” Every person, every session on your documentation site is there with a purpose, and it’s a purpose that matters to your business.

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Transcript:

Introduction with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.

Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.

Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.

Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.

End of introduction

Sarah O’Keefe: Hi, everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe and I’m here today with our guest, Patrick Bosek, who is one of the founders and the CEO of Heretto. Welcome.

Patrick Bosek: Thanks, Sarah. It’s lovely to be here. I think this is may be my third or fourth time getting to chat with you on the Scriptorium podcast.

SO:  Well, we talk all the time. This is talking and then we’re going to publi- no, let’s not go down that road. Of all the things that happen when we’re not being recorded. Okay. Well we’re glad to have you again and looking forward to productive discussion here. The theme that we had for today was actually traffic and I think web traffic and why you want traffic and where this is going to go with your business case for technical documentation. So, Patrick, for those of you that have not heard from you before, give us a little bit of background on who you are and what Heretto is and then just jump right in and tell us about web traffic.

PB: No small requests from you, Sarah.

SO: Nope.

PB: So I’m Patrick Bosek. I am the CEO and one of the co-founders of Heretto. Heretto is a CCMS based on DITA. It’s a full stack that goes from the management and authoring layer all the way up to actually producing help sites. So as you’re moving around the internet and working with technology companies, primarily help_your_product.com or help_your_company.com, it might be powered by Heretto. That’s what we set out to do. We set out to do it as efficiently as possible, and that gives me some insight into traffic, which is what we’re talking about today, and how that can become a really important and powerful point when teams are looking to make a case for better content operations, showing up more, producing more for their customers, and being able to get the funding that allows them to do all those great things that they set out to do every day.

SO: So here we are as content ops, CCMS people, and we’re basically saying you should put your content on the internet, which is a fairly unsurprising kind of priority to have. But why specifically are you saying that web traffic and putting that content out there and getting people to use the content helps you with your sort of overall business and your overall business case for tech docs?

PB: Yeah. So I want to answer that in a fairly roundabout way because I think it’s more fun to get there by beating around the bush. But I want to start with something that seems really obvious, but for some reason it isn’t in tech pubs. So first of all, if you went to an executive and you said, I can double the traffic to your website, and then you put a number in front of them, probably say a hundred thousand dollars, almost like any executive at any major organization is like a hundred thousand dollars, of course, I’ll double my web traffic. That’s a no-brainer. Right? And when they’re thinking of website, they’re thinking of the marketing site and how important traffic is to it. So intrinsically, everybody pays quite a bit of money and by transference puts a lot of value on the traffic that goes to the website and, as they should. It’s the primary way we interact with organizations asynchronously today.

Digital experience is really important. But if you went to an executive and you said, I can double your traffic to your doc site, they would probably be like, wait a second. But that makes no sense because nobody reads the docs for no reason. I want to repeat that because I think that’s a really important thing for us, as technical content creators to not only understand, I think we understand it, but to internalize it and start to represent it more in the marketplace and to our businesses and to the other stakeholders. People might show up at your marketing site, because they misclick an advertisement. They might show up in your marketing site because they Googled something and your market and a blog like caught them and they looked at it. So there’s probably a lot of traffic where people are just curious. They’re just window shopping. Maybe they’re there by mistake. But nobody shows up at your documentation site.

Nobody reads a page in your documentation site for no reason. Everybody that is there has a purpose and that purpose always has an economic impact on your business. People who are on the documentation site are either not utilizing your support, which means that they’re saving you a ton of money. It means that they’re learning about your product, either because they’ve just purchased it and they want to utilize it, so they’re onboarding, and we all know that utilization turns into retention and retention is good because people who retain pay us more money, or they’re trying to figure out how to use other aspects of the system and get more value out of it. There’s nobody who goes to a doc site who’s like, I’m bored. I’m just going to go and see what’s on the doc site today. So every person, every session on your documentation site is there with a purpose and it’s a purpose that matters to your business. So that’s why I want to start. That’s why it matters. That’s why I think traffic is important, but you look like you want to contribute here, so.

SO: We talk about enabling content. Right? Tech docs are enabling content. They enable people to do a thing, and this is what you’re saying. People don’t read tech docs for fun. I know of, actually, I do know one person. One person I have met in my life who thought it was fun to read tech docs. One.

PB: Okay. So to be fair, I also know somebody who loves reading release notes.

SO: Okay. So two in the world.

PB: But hang on, hang on. But this person, part of the thing is this person is an absolute, can I say fanboy, is that, they’re a huge fan of this product and they talk about this product in the context of the release notes. So even though this person loves the release notes, the release notes are a way that they go and generate word-of-mouth and they’re promoting your product because of the thing they saw in the release notes. The release notes are a marketing piece that goes through this person. All the people who are your biggest fans are going to tell people about that little thing they found in your release notes. Sorry. Anyways.

SO: So again, they’re trying to learn. Okay. But, so two people in the universe that we know of read docs for fun. Cool. Everybody else is reading them, as you said, for a purpose. They’re reading them because they are blocked on something or they need information, usually it’s they need information. And then you slid in that when they do this, this is producing, providing value to the organization or saving the organization money. So what’s that all about?

PB: Well, I mean there’s a number of ways to look at this. You want to start with the hard numbers, the accounting stuff, the stuff you can take the CFO. That stuff is actually, it’s pretty easy to do. You can do it in just a couple of lines. So every support ticket costs a certain amount of money. Somebody in your organization knows that number, if your organization is sufficiently large and sufficiently large is like 20 people probably. Maybe that’s not that small, but if you’re a couple hundred people, everybody knows what that number is. So it’s very easy to figure out how much it costs when somebody actually goes to the support.

SO: Somewhere between $20 and $50 is kind of the industry average per call. You may have better numbers internally in your organization, but if you don’t or you don’t know where to start there. Every call is $25.

PB: Yeah. $20, $25. A little more, if you’re in a complex industry. The reality is that when you start comparing it to how much you spend answering a question with content, it’s kind of like, oh, is it a thousand times cheaper or is it 2,000 times cheaper? So it’s not really that big of a difference. The cost of answering a question with content is also pretty straightforward. So all you really need to know is how much are you spending on your content, which is typically speaking just the combination of the people and tools, so people in content operations stack that you’re using to get that content out in front of people. And then the page views. I mean, fundamentally if you exclude search, so take search out of your page views, take home page out of your page views, if you can filter section pages, so just look at actual content pages and then you have to pick a resolution rate.

Obviously, if you want to say 100%, if you don’t have any better metrics, that’s probably too high. Maybe it’s unreasonable, but it’s very simple. It makes the equation easier. If you want to say that 50% percent of people who read what you’ve considered to be like a content page, resolve their issue, that’s probably too low. So pick a number between those two things and you run the multiplication on that and you’re going to find out that it’s going to cost you, in most situations, less than a penny to answer a question, typically way less than a penny to answer a question with content as opposed to the $25. That’s the pure economic math of it. There’s more though.

SO: Okay. So yeah, we did some math and we’re basically saying, looking at this in a tech support centric way, usually we talk about call deflection. Right? So the idea is that every time somebody does not call tech support, you save $25 and spend a penny, a fraction of a penny instead, which seems good. Now interestingly to me, I think, you can look at this as the first time somebody hits that site and hits a content page, costs really a lot of money. Right? Because the people and the tools and the setup and the publishing, but then the next one is zero.

So you’re replacing sort of an upfront planned cost with a recurring cost because every time somebody calls, it’s another 25 or 50 or whatever dollars. So there’s a huge scalability argument here, and I can make a decent case for if you are a startup, a day one startup, you have no content, you have nothing, you have no infrastructure, cool. Hire a tech support person. Let them do their thing for maybe a year, and then look at the top 10 queries that they had and write some docs and deflect off those top 10 queries and handle it that way. But most of our customers, speaking for both of us, are medium to large to incredibly large organizations that have content. We’re not talking about the you have nothing start from scratch scenario.

PB: A hundred percent. When you’re really thinking about where you get the value, both on the accounting side, like saving money, so bottom line stuff, and then also the customer experience, which I think is worth getting into in a minute, that’s really going to take place when you start scaling up. I agree with you that a startup style organization should write content. Even small organizations benefit from it. I think they, small organizations actually benefit in a slightly different way than the deflection, which is the word you’re using. And I’m going to come back to that because I have a pet peeve with that word, but I’ll use it right now for the purposes because we’ve been using it. I think that what, the value that a smaller organization gets is not in the deflection, but it’s actually in the presence. So if you’re trying to show up and you’re trying to compete with larger organizations and you’re doing something, which is technical or considered to be highly important, so you’re in a high technology industry, your buyer is going to go look at your documentation. They’re going to look at your competitor’s documentation as well.

And if your documentation appears to be not that great, it’s very thin, there’s not a lot there, that’s going to be a factor in a buying decision. And I know everybody kind of like, yeah, but it really is, and I can tell you because we’re not a huge organization, that we’ve won deals because our docs were better. We invest in it, as we should. We’re a documentation tool. You know? So it does matter at the smaller end, even if you can’t build a really scalable content operation stack that you probably don’t need.

SO: Now, personally, I’m okay with deflection, and I’ll also say that the key thing here is that if you’re doing additional research on this as a listener, call deflection is sort of the industry term that will help you in your Google/AI searches. But tell us about why call deflection is bad and evil.

PB: Okay. So that is true. If you are talking to executives, you should probably say deflection, but maybe forward-thinking executives would appreciate why I think deflection is a bad term. I think we should use, you’re shaking your head at me. Fine. I think we should be talking about call avoidance. And the reason that I think this is because when most people think about deflection, they’re thinking about it as being very reactive, and it’s that box that pops up when you’re trying to put a support ticket in that’s like, well, have you already looked at this? And by the time someone has arrived at your support site and they have decided that they want to interact with a human, they are annoyed. They don’t want to be there. Nobody visits the support site because they want to. They have made the emotional commitment that they’re going to go and deal with one of your human beings to solve their problem, which is not something they planned on doing today. Nobody wanted to do this when they got up in the morning. So you’ve already failed. And at that point in time, the best thing you can do is get them to a human efficiently without sticking things in front of them and trying to deflect them. So that’s why I don’t like deflection. Avoidance is that that never happened. They Googled it because Google is tier zero support for everybody, even if yours is bad. They got an answer or they ChatGPT-ed it, different topic, there’s problems there. But probably they Googled it. They got an answer very quickly. They solved their issue. You never heard about it. It cost you a fraction of a penny. They had a great experience. It’s how they prefer to get their information, and you avoided the support rather than trying to deflect them to save yourself a couple of bucks when they were annoyed and broke their customer experience.

SO: Yeah. I’m on board with that. It’s just that terminology-wise, we’ve got to work with what we’ve got. But I would agree that avoiding the call in the first place, and I talk about how when people call tech support, they’re mad. If you think about the emotional state of your customer, the tech support person is angry. There’s also the issue that they asked ChatGPT and it said something wrong, and then they call up tech support and yell at you because ChatGPT was wrong, which is, that’s a whole other podcast. So let’s just set that aside for a moment, but okay.

PB: Maybe you’ll invite me back. We can talk about that.

SO: Yeah. So the, it’d be a long podcast and we’ll have to lift our no profanity rule for that one just to get through the topic.

PB: Oh. Special edition.

SO: Special edition. Okay. So you were talking about the value though of a documentation site and we’ve sort of paired it with tech support and with this avoidance, deflection, get them the answers that they need before they get angry at the product. Right?

PB: Yeah. For sure.

SO: How does the customer experience tie into that? And what is the value of the customer experience?

PB: So the value of the customer experience is subjective, but every organization already has an opinion on it. Some organizations place a lot of value in customer experience, have done a lot of work to tie customer experience to the metrics and analytics and things like that they use to track financial performance. Other organizations less. So the first thing I would say is go and see where your organization is relative to their thinking on customer experience. But, as you’re talking about customer experience, other than the support, which I think we’ve covered that quite a bit, for someone who’s showing up your documentation site, really what it’s touching on is a couple of things, what they’re trying to get to. So there’s the discovery aspect of it. And this can be very, very simple or it can be very, very complex. The simple one I like is like let’s say you sell gym equipment and that gym equipment goes out to people who own gyms, as it would make sense, and they’re going to go and they’re thinking of buying a new treadmill or something from you.

They’re going to want to know, is this going to fit in my gym? Can the power I have set up work with it? What are the other details of this product? And then how much information is there to service it? So somebody, once they get past the whole like, okay, I kind of like this brand, maybe this is a good thing, it’s kind of cool, they’re going to go into the documentation because they’re making a purchase that matters to them. And having confidence and trust in the product based on the depth of information that they get prior to purchasing it is a major factor. And this only increases as the economic value and the end implementation, like how critical it is, how system critical it is, increases. So there’s a discovery, evaluation, and confidence, those are the three things I think of, aspect to your documentation or your help site that is there, even if you’re not thinking about it, even if it’s not coming up directly in sales conversations. I promise you, because I have the data that people are doing this during the process of deciding if they want to work with your organization. And that’s the kind of pre-customer experience that’s really, really critical that most organizations are just not thinking about and they’re probably leaving a lot on the table relative to their competitors that either could be advantage or they’re behind.

SO: There was a study. It was a while back, maybe five or 10 years ago that came out from, I always have trouble finding it. It was either PwC or IBM. The gist of it was that 80% of people that were buying consumer products were doing pre-buying research, the technical research. So they were looking at specs and they were looking at how do I install this thing and various other things that we consider to be not marketing information. They were looking at what is traditionally labeled post-sales documentation.

PB: Yeah. Because people care. And the other thing too is like as we move into an economic environment where people are more careful about what they’re spending on, they’re only going to do more research to make sure the things they’re buying are things that are going to last and be supported. I bought a pair of headphones a year ago, and I have an issue with one of them. They’re like the ones that go in your ears, one of them’s not working. I ended up going to the documentation to try to figure it out, and the documentation was so bad I could not make heads or tails of it. And I just gave up and I was like, okay, if I had spent hundreds of dollars on these, I’d go through the process, but they were like 30 bucks or whatever. But I’m never going to do business with that company again. Ever.

If I see another one of the products, I will never buy it. So they don’t know about that experience. But if you have, not even just bad content operations, because frankly their site was, it was kind of nice, it wasn’t bad. I think it could have been better, but you know, funny that I would have that opinion, but it was really the information architecture, so it was kind of the stuff that Scriptorium, Sarah, you guys would help them with. It wasn’t so much they had bad tools. They had terrible organization, and the content was, I’m not allowed to swear, which I wouldn’t anyways…

SO: Sorry.

PB: … but the content was, think of your word, it was bad. It was completely unhelpful. So you can have the best content operations in the world, but without the right information architecture, who cares?

SO: Yeah. This is the infamous if a tree falls in the forest. You know, and to your point, A, the company doesn’t know that your headphones are broken and you’re unhappy, but you just told me, and the next time I’m in the market to buy a pair of headphones, I’m going to remember this story and I’m going to call you, I won’t call you. I’ll send a text and say, hey, what brand was that? Right? And you’re going to tell me and then I’m going to not buy them. So the impact of this failure of documenting, well, actually it’s a product fail, right, but also of support. Because if they had come back with, oh, we’re so sorry, send them in or we’ll send you a new pair, whatever, they could have rescued this encounter, but they didn’t. So the next thing that’s going to happen is that you and every single one of your friends that hears the story will never buy that brand.

PB: Right.

SO: So as we talk about this, the really critical point here though is, I think, there are a bunch of really critical points, but the one that I really want to zoom in on is that the content has to be there. Right? You have to have helpful content that solves the problem that a person is on the website for. And, in your case, it might have been, oh, sometimes this happens and you have to repair them, or you have to this or you have to that, you know, press all these weird buttons in this weird sequence and sacrifice the chicken and stand on your head. Cool.

PB: Right. Which I would’ve done.

SO: Which you would’ve done. But the bigger problem is that you went to their website and we don’t actually know whether or not this problem is fixable because you didn’t find it. Right? You didn’t find the answer. And that means that it’s sort of like a last mile problem. I can write all these really good procedures, they can be super accurate, they can be amazing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You come onto my website, you can’t find the answer your question, it exists, but you can’t find it, right, you, the customer, and so it fails, and now you either, A, tell all your friends that company XYZ is terrible, or, B, you call tech support and you’re mad. Right?

PB: Yeah.

SO: That’s actually the best outcome.

PB: It is. Yeah.

SO: Yeah. And interestingly, we’ve got some, I’ll be very non-specific, but we have a project right now where one of the top tech support topics, you know how you look at what are the top 10 things that people call and ask about, and it’s like, my headphones aren’t working, or how do I return this or whatever. One of the most common reasons that people call their tech support is to ask, where is the documentation? I can’t find it.

PB: Do you have any idea how common that is? I mean, you probably do, but it’s so common.

SO: Yeah.

PB: And we’ve started doing this thing in the process of helping people think through this where we have a very simple tool that we use. It’s a sheet, happy to share it with anybody, and a process where you effectively go through and you just do a very simple 15 to 30 minute interview with X number of support people. You know, we recommend three to five. Some people do more. And you just go through the last 10 support cases, the ones that they worked on, and there’s a few things you mark off, but the idea is to do lightning round, very, very quick. And could this be solved by documentation? And the amount of it that is just looking for documentation, I can’t find it, is so funny. And you’re like, I think that’s a problem. And people are like, wow. But you can’t blame them because people don’t think about these things and it doesn’t make sense that you would because it’s non-obvious, and I think that’s one of the really critical things I want to leave people with.

And I have one other thing that I, you know, we’ve been talking for a while that I want to let people go soon, but this one, I want to zoom in on this for a second. People shouldn’t feel bad that they haven’t thought about this. They shouldn’t feel bad that they haven’t thought about the value of the traffic, the impact of the traffic, the customer experience side of it, the cost ratio of the traffic relative to support people. It really isn’t that obvious. And there’s so much momentum around the way that we’ve done business in having people solve problems for other people in direct communications that even if that isn’t ideal, that’s just the way it’s done and that’s what feels obvious. So don’t feel bad about not having thought about this if you haven’t. Your colleagues shouldn’t either. But it is the way the world is moving, and I think it’s critical to start thinking about it now.

SO: Yeah. And you started this by talking about customer experience needing to be asynchronous. People can get the stuff, self-service when they want it and digital as opposed to call somebody on the phone. So let’s sort of wrap this up and say, what’s your advice to people that know that they’re struggling with this? They know that they have huge tech support volumes and nobody’s happy. And I mean, we know we have a problem. So where should they start? What’s the first step that they can take to begin attacking this thing in a way that will lead to forward progress within a large organization that has as their informal motto, oh, they can just call tech support.

PB: Yeah. So I would say buy-in is always step one, and that means that there’s going to be some selling that has to happen at the organization. You have to get people to recognize the value, the potential, and also the ability to achieve it. So it’s those things when they come together, there can be a ground swell where people are going to actually support these projects and fund them and get involved, and then you’ll have really successful projects. One of the big challenges with getting that buy-in historically has been that there’s no precedent. So when you’re looking for a better website, you already have a website. What if you increase traffic by 10%? You know, people can start to draw some lines between that and sales or the bottom line or value, those types of things. And oftentimes, even organizations that I would say are somewhat up to maturity curve in terms of tech pubs, they don’t have any metrics about their site, like how many people come to it? I don’t know.

They just don’t track it. So there’s not this historical precedent of metrics that can be back to results, and that can create some issues. So the advice that I give organizations that are in that situation is if you are in a technology field and you have a relatively complex product, so something where it breaks, it’s not always obvious how to use it, there’s a reason that people would need to learn about your product for some reason, what our data shows from having done this many times with organizations that fit that profile is that a well-implemented documentation help site, whatever you want to call it, gets about as much traffic as the dot com, the primary marketing site. It tends to be plus or minus 15%. We’ve actually seen as high as 65% of the total traffic between the two sites being on documentation.

That’s a bit of an outlier, but so is 30%. You know, we’ve seen that too. So if you’re want to be conservative, say you’ll get 40% of the total traffic. So four sessions for every six on a marketing site. If you want to be, what we tend to see on an average, just say it’s one for one. If it’s one for one and you don’t have metrics, that’s a target. And you have to ask the internal question, what’s the value of that? If we get a hundred thousand sessions per month or per year or whatever on the marketing site, what if we had a hundred thousand sessions on the help content? Well, those people are there for a reason. Remember? They’re there because they’re not calling support. They’re there because they’re onboarding and using our system better, or they’re there because they’re trying to figure out if our stuff’s going to work for them.

So like how valuable would that be? And once you get the organization to a place where they’re like, oh, that would actually be quite valuable, could we get that, I think 80% of the work is done and well, 80% of the work of getting started is done. And then you probably call somebody like Scriptorium or Scriptorium specifically, if you’re not familiar with this, and you start the process of actually thinking through of how to do it. But I do think the organizational buy-in and giving people in the right head space to think about the value of this is step one, and that’s the process I use for it.

SO: Yeah. I think I would agree with all of that, especially the part where they should call us.

PB: Go figure.

SO: But the key thing in here is, and you said this a different way, but changing the momentum, right, getting organizational buy-in, getting people on board with this concept. The other thing I’ll say is that ultimately one of the biggest problems we face in content ops is that so much of it is invisible in the sense that we’re going to refactor this and we’re going to do it better, and we’re going to produce it faster and we’re going to automate, okay, great, but you’re still producing the same thing. One of the most powerful things we can do early in the process is say to people, look at this portal that we can deliver. Look at this experience that we can deliver. It’s not the first thing or the only thing or even necessarily the most important thing we need to do, because the portal has to have content. Right?

PB: Yeah.

SO: I mean, it’s kind of a chicken and egg thing, but showing people the vision of what can be works typically much, much better than saying we should do structured content because it will help automate things and speed up time to market. That’s all behind the scenes, and it’s not visual and nobody cares. I mean, people care, but it’s hard to visualize. So, okay, I think we’ve promised people a whole bunch of resources. We will put those in the show notes. I’m quite certain that we could go on for a very long time about this topic, but I am going to wrap it up there ’cause I feel like we hit a good starting point for people.

PB: Yeah.

SO: So if there are other questions, I would say reach out to me or to Patrick, because I know we’ve only scratched the surface on this thing. Patrick, thank you for being here.

PB: Of course. Always a blast.

SO: Always good to see you. And we will wrap this thing up, and thanks for being here. Feel free to reach out if you have any other questions.

The post Every click counts: Uncovering the business value of your product content appeared first on Scriptorium.

In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow unpack the promise, pitfalls, and disruptive impact of AI on multilingual content. From pivot languages to content hygiene, they explore what’s next for language service providers and global enterprises alike.

Bill Swallow: I think it goes without saying that there’s going to be disruption again. Every single change, whether it’s in the localization industry or not, has resulted in some type of disruption. Something has changed. I’ll be blunt about it. In some cases, jobs were lost, jobs were replaced, new jobs were created. For LSPs, I think AI is going to, again, be another shift, the same that happened when machine translation came out. LSPs had to shift and pivot how they approach their bottom line with people. GenAI is going to take a lot of the heavy lifting off of the translators, for better or for worse, and it’s going to force a copy edit workflow. I think it’s really going to be a model where people are going to be training and cleaning up after AI.

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Transcript:

Introduction with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.

Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.

Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.

Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.

End of introduction

Sarah O’Keefe: Hey, everyone. I’m Sarah O’Keefe, and I’m here today with Bill Swallow.

Bill Swallow: Hey there.

SO: They have let us out of the basement. Mistakes were made. And we have been asked to talk to you on this podcast about AI in translation and localization. I have subtitled this podcast, What Could Possibly Go Wrong? As always, what could possibly go wrong, both in this topic and also with this particular group of people who have been given microphones. So Bill.

BS: They’ll take them away eventually.

SO: They will eventually. Bill, what’s your generalized take right now on AI in translation and localization? And I apologize in advance. We will almost certainly use those two terms interchangeably, even though we fully understand that they are not. What’s your thesis?

BS: Let’s see. It’s still early. It is promising. It will likely go wrong for a little while, at least. Any new model that translation has taken has first gone wrong before it corrected and went right, but it might be good enough. I think that pretty much sums up where I’m at.

SO: Okay. So when we look at this … Let’s start at the end. So generative AI, instead of machine translation. Let’s walk a little bit through the traditional translation process and compare that to what it looks like to employ GenAI or AI in translation.

BS: All right. So regardless of how you’re going about traditional translation, there is usually a source language that is authored. It gets passed over to someone who, if they’re doing their job correctly, has tools available to parse that information, essentially stick it in a database, perhaps do some matching against what’s been translated before, fill in the gaps with the translation, and then output the translated product. On the GenAI side, it really does look like you have a bit of information that you’ve written. And it just goes out, and GenAI does its little thing and bingo, you got a translation. And I guess the real key is what’s in that magic little thing that it does.

SO: Right. And so when we look at best practices for translation management up until this point, it’s been, as you said, accumulate assets, accumulate language segment pairs, right? This English has been previously translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese. I have those pairs, so I can match it up. And keeping track of those assets, which are your intellectual property, you as the company put all this time and money into getting those translations, where are those assets in your GenAI workflow?

BS: They’re not there, and that’s the odd part about it.

SO: Awesome. So we just throw them away? What?

BS: I mean, they might be used to seed the AI at first, just to get an idea of how you’ve talked about things in the past. But generally, AI is going to consume its knowledge, it’s going to store that knowledge, and then it’s going to adapt it over time. When it’s asked for something, it’s going to produce it with the best way it knows how, based on what it was given. And it’s going to learn things along the way that will help it improve or not improve over time. And that part right there, the improve or not improve, is the real catch in why I say it might be good enough but it might go wrong as well, because GenAI tends to … I don’t want to say hallucinate because it’s not really doing that at this stage. It’s taking all the information it has, it’s learning things about that information, and it’s applying it going forward. And if it makes an assumption based on new information that it’s fed, it could go in the wrong direction.

SO: Yeah. I think two things here. One is that what we’re describing applies whether you have an AI-driven workflow inside your organization where you’re only allowing the AI to access your, for example, prior translation. So a very limited corpus of knowledge, or if you’re sending it out like all of us are doing, where you’re just shoving it into a public-facing translation engine of some sort and just saying, “Hey, give me a translation.” In the second case, you have no control over the IP, no control over what’s put in there and how it’s used going forward, and no control over what anyone else has put in there, which could cause it to evolve in a direction that you do or do not want it to. So the public-facing engines are very, very powerful because they have so much volume, and at the same time, you’re giving up that control. Whereas if you have an internal system that you’ve set up … And when I say internal, I mean private. It doesn’t have to be internal to your organization, but it might be that your localization vendor has set up something for you. But anyway, gated from the generalized internet and all the other people out there.

BS: We hope.

SO: Or the other content. You hope. Right. Also, if you don’t know exactly how these large learning models are being employed by your vendors, you should ask some questions, some very pointed questions. Okay, we’ll come back to that, but first I want to talk a little bit about pivot languages. So again, looking at traditional localization, you run into this thing of … Basically many, many, many organizations have a single-language authoring workflow and a multi-language translation workflow. So you write everything in English and then you translate. So all of the translations are target languages, they are downstream, they are derived from the English, et cetera. Now let’s talk a little bit about… First of all, what is a multilingual workflow? Let’s start there. What is that?

BS: Okay. So yeah, the traditional model usually is author one language, which maybe 90% of the time is English, whether it’s being authored in an English-speaking country or not, and then it’s being pushed out to multiple different languages. In a multilingual environment, you have people authoring in their own native language, and it should be coming in and being translated out as it needs to be to all the other target languages. Traditionally, that has been done using pivot languages because infrastructures were built. It is just the way it is. It was built on English. English has been used as a pivot language more than any other language out there. There are some outliers that use a different pivot language for a very specific reason, but for the sake of this conversation, English is the predominant pivot language out there.

SO: So I have a team of engineers in South Korea. They are writing in Korean. And in order to get from Korean to, let’s say, Italian, we translate from Korean to English and then from English to Italian, and English becomes the pivot language. And the generalized rationale for this is that there are more people collectively that speak Korean and English and then English and Italian than there are people that speak Korean and Italian.

BS: With nothing in between, yeah.

SO: With nothing in between. Right. Directly. So bilingual in those two languages is a pretty small set of people. And so instead of hiring the four people in the world that know how to do that, you pivot through English. And in a human-driven workflow, that makes an awful lot of sense because you’re looking at the question of where do I find English … Sorry, not English, but rather Italian and Korean speakers that can do translation work for my biotech firm. So I need a PhD in biochemistry that speaks these two languages. I think I’ve just identified a specific human in the universe. So that’s the old way. What is a multilingual workflow then?

BS: So yeah, as we were discussing, the multilingual workflow is something where you have two, three, four different language sources that you’re authoring in. So you’re authoring in English, you have people authoring in German, you have people authoring in Korean and, let’s say, Italian. And they’re all working strictly in their native language, and those would go out for translation into any other target language. It’s tricky because the current model still uses a pivot language, but I think when we talk about generative AI, it’s going to avoid that completely. It’s going to skip that pivot and just say, “Okay, I know the subject matter that you’re talking about and I know the language that you’ve presented it in. Let’s take this subject and meaning and just represent it in a different language and not even worry about trying to figure out what does this mean in English. It doesn’t matter at this point.”

SO: Right. And so I think the one caveat here as we’re looking at this issue is to remember that GenAI in general is going to do better when it has larger volumes of content. And a lot of the generative AI tools are tuned for English. That’s kind of where they started. But it’s also useful to remember that GenAI is math. GenAI doesn’t really have a concept of knowledge or learning or any of these other things. It’s just math. So math is a language of its own, and we should be able to express mathematical concepts in a human language of choice. So there’s some really interesting stuff happening there. Okay. So stepping back a little bit from this, let’s talk about where this is coming from and the history of machine translation in translation localization. Where did we start? And isn’t it true that localization really was one of the leaders in adopting AI early on?

BS: It really was. So way, way, way back, you had essentially transcription in a different language. So people were given a block of text and asked to reproduce it in a different language, and they went line by line and just rewrote it in a different language. Then you start getting into the old-school machine translation or statistical machine translation. What this did was it kept, essentially, a corpus of the translations that you’ve done in the past, and it also broke down the information that you were feeding it into small segments. And it would do a statistical query, taking one segment from what your source said and throwing it out into its memory and say, “Okay, is there anything out here? Was this translated before? And give me a ranking of these results of what was done before.” And essentially, the highest result floated to the top, and it used that. Translators could modify those results over time based on actual accuracy versus systematic or statistical accuracy. But that is forever old. Over the past 10, 15 years, we’ve seen neural machine translation come out, which is getting a lot closer to AI-based translation. So it takes away the text matching and replaces it with more pattern matching. So it’s better at gisting. It will find, let’s say, a 95% match and can fill in those gaps for the most part, or at least say, “Hey, this gets us 95% of the way there. I’m going to put this out over here, and then the translator will essentially verify that translation going forward.” It’s a bit more accurate, but it still relies on this corpus of translation memory that you build over time. And now we’ve got generative AI machine translation, which completely takes everything that was done before, and it doesn’t necessarily throw it away, but it says, “Thank you for all the hard work you did. I will absorb that information and move forward.”

SO: Does it actually say thank you?

BS: It could. It depends on the prompt you use. But I mean, really, you’re looking at a situation where the generative AI model, it uses a transfer learning model to do the translation work. So it takes everything that it knows, applies it to what you feed it for translation, produces an output, learns a lot of things along the way in getting that translation to a point where you say, “Okay, great, thank you. This was good,” and then applies what it learned to the next time you ask. And it keeps doing that and doing that and doing that. On the plus side is that, yes, you can train your generative AI to get really, really, really good if you train it the right way. If someone … And I am not saying it’s malicious or anything, but if you train your GenAI translation model to start augmenting how it translates, then you’ll start getting these mixed results over time because it’s going to learn a different way to apply your request to provide an output.

SO: So the question that I actually have, which I’m not going to ask you to answer because that would be mean, is whether AI is actually storing content in a language, like in English, or is language, in the case of GenAI, just an expression of the math that underlies the engines? You don’t want to tackle that, no. Moving on.

BS: Well, it’s worth poking at, at least, because … Does GenAI actually do anything with the language that we give it now, just for answers? If we’re asking it to write a stupid limerick about a news event, or are we asking, “Summarize this document,” does it care that it’s written in any language? I honestly don’t know.

SO: As meta as it is to ask the question, what is the math that underlies it, the other thing that’s helpful to me, and again, we’re grossly oversimplifying what’s going on, but what is very helpful to me is to think of AI as autocorrect, or autocomplete, actually, on steroids. It’s more than that, but not a lot more. It has just learned that every time I type certain words in my text app, certain other words are likely to follow and it helpfully suggests them. And sometimes it’s right and sometimes it’s wrong, but it’s just doing math, right? Autocorrect learns that there are certain words that, when misspelled or that I do not wish to have corrected, or perhaps it introduces the concept that that word needs to be corrected to the word that I use more commonly, which can be extremely embarrassing. We had some questions about this. We’ve done some prior localization AI conversation, and I wanted to bring in a question that came from one of our audience members. Their question was, “Will we get to the point where we can effectively ask an AI help system a question in a foreign language, the AI system will parse the source language content, and then return the answer in the user’s language? Will translating documentation eventually be no longer necessary?” And what’s your take on that?

BS: Well, I think the answer is yes, and my take is that we are nearly there already. We already have… even apps that you can run on your phone. We have apps that can translate on the fly from verbal language. And I have used them when I travel abroad and I don’t know the language very well, to be able to speak it into my phone and it essentially translates the text for the person I’m trying to communicate with. There are other apps that take a step further and use a synthetic AI voice to read it so that they don’t have to look at my screen. They can just hear what the phone has to say because obviously I’m unable to say it myself.

SO: There’s also a version that does that through the camera. So you point the camera at a sign or a menu, more importantly, and it magically translates the menu into your language while you’re looking at it through your phone, or through your camera.

BS: That has been so helpful.

SO: Yes. Now that is actually a really good example, though, of a place where this kind of translation is hard because there’s very little context, and there’s a tendency in food culture to have very specific terms for things that maybe are not part of the AI’s daily routine. We were talking not too long ago about … What was it? We came up with half a dozen different words in German for dumpling. And we got into a big argument about which one was what and which one is correct for this type of dumpling and all the rest of it. So yeah. The thing I would point out here is that the question was, if someone comes in and asks the AI help system a question in, let’s say, French, but the underlying system is in, let’s say, English, but it would then return French. It’s a very English-centric perspective, to say, “Well, the French people … Our AI is going to be in English, essentially. Our AI database.” And that is a really interesting question to me. Is the AI database actually going to be in English? And maybe not.

BS: Probably not.

SO: I tried this about a year ago with ChatGPT. And you might experiment with this if you speak another language, or combine it with machine translation, which should work as well. I asked ChatGPT a specific question, and I got an answer. Cool. And then I asked the same question again and added, “Respond in, in this case, German.” The answer that I got in German was, obviously, it was in German, step one, which I wasn’t actually sure it could do. But step two, the reply that I got in German, the content was different. It wasn’t just a translated version of the English content. It was functionally a different answer. So it’s like in English, I said to ChatGPT, “What color is the sky?” And it said, “The sky is blue.” And then I said the same thing, “What color is the sky? Respond in German,” and it came back with, “The sky is green.” Now, it was actually did a DITA-related question, which kind of explains what happened here. But what happened was that ChatGPT, even though the prompt was in English, it pretty clearly used German language sources to assemble the answer. And those of you who know that DITA is more popular in the US than it is in Germany would not be too surprised that the answer I got regarding something DITA-specific in German was very much culturally bound to what German language content about DITA looks like. So it was processing the German content to give me my answer, not the English content. Now, if you ask an AI help system, the next question is what’s sitting in that corpus? Because if you ask it a question in French and it has no French in the corpus, then it’s probably going to generate an answer in English and machine translate. But if it has four topics in French and you ask it something in French, it is probably going to try and assemble an answer out of that French content, which could be…

BS: Before it falls back, yeah.

SO: Fascinating, which brings me to my next meta question that we’re not going to answer, which is can we capture meaning and separate it from language? And a knowledge graph is an attempt to capture relationships and meaning. And that can be rendered into a language, but it is not itself specifically English. It’s a database entry of person, which has a relationship with address, and you can say, “Person X lives at address Y,” but that sentence is just an expression of the mathematical or the database relationship that’s sitting inside the knowledge graph. I want to talk about the outlook for LSPs, for localization services providers. What does it look like to be an LSP, to be a translation service provider, in this AI world? What do you think is going to happen?

BS: I think it goes without saying that there’s going to be disruption again. Every single change, whether it’s in the localization industry or not, has resulted in some type of disruption. Something has changed. I’ll be blunt about it. In some cases, jobs were lost, jobs were replaced, new jobs were created. And I think that for LSPs, I think AI is going to, again, be another shift, the same that happened when machine translation came out, when neural machine translation came out, all of this. They’ve had to shift and pivot of how they approach their bottom line with people. GenAI is going to take a lot of the heavy lifting off of the translators, for better or for worse, and it’s going to force a more copy edit workflow. And perhaps, I guess, a corpus editing role or basically an information keeper who basically will go in and make sure that the information that the AI model is being trained on is correct and accurate for very specific purposes, and start teaching it that when you talk about this particular subject matter, this is the type of corpus we want you to consume and respond with, versus someone who actually does the translation work and pushes all the buttons and writes all of the translations. It’s really going to be a model where I think people are going to be training AI and cleaning up after it, essentially. And I don’t know any further than that. I mean, it’s still pretty young. I think also you will see LSPs turning more into consultative agencies with companies, rather than just a language service provider. So they will help companies establish that corpus and train their AI and work with their corporate staff to make sure that they are writing better queries, that they are providing better information out of the gate, and so forth. So I think it’s going to be a complete shift in how these companies function, at least between now and what’s to come.

SO: Yeah. The cost of a really bad translation getting into your database when it was human-driven… this AI thing is going to scale. There’s going to be more and more of it, everything’s going to go faster and faster. And we already have these conversations about AI slop and the internet degrading into just garbage because there’s all this AI-created stuff. And so if you apply that vision to a multilingual world, it’s quite troubling, right? So I think you’re right. I mean, this idea of content hygiene. How do we keep our content databases good, such that they can do all this interesting math processing instead of becoming more and more and more and more error-riddled is really interesting. We started by saying clearly this is a disruptive innovation. Disruptive innovations start out bad, clearly of lower quality than the thing they’re disrupting, but they’re cheaper and/or faster and/or have some aspect that they can do that the original thing cannot. So mobile phones are a great example. They were worse than landlines in every possible way, but they were mobile, right? They were not tethered to a cord in the wall. And then over time, a mobile phone turned into something that really is a computer that is context and location-aware and can do all sorts of nifty things. It doesn’t look at what resemblance it bears to POTS, to plain old telephone service. And we hear people. Oh, I don’t use my phone to make phone calls. Why would I do that? That’s terrible, because we have all these other options.

So from a localization point of view, any organization that is using person-driven, manually-driven, inefficient, fragmented processes is going to be in trouble. And that stuff’s all going to get squeezed out. And I think it’s actually helpful to look at the structured authoring concept and how it eliminated desktop publishing, right? It just got squeezed right out because it all got automated. We do the same thing with localization. I think AI is going to have a similar impact, whether it’s on content creation in any language, that it’s going to remove that manual labor over time. And I think that maybe we’re going to reach a point where content creation is just content creation. It’s not creating content in English so that I can translate it into the target languages. I think that that distinction between source and target is really going to evaporate. It’ll just be somebody created content, and then we have ways of making that available in other languages, and that’s where this is going to go. I’ve talked to a lot of localization service providers recently, and certainly this is one of the things that they are thinking about and looking at, is the question of what it means, to your point, to be a localization service provider in a universe where language translation specifically is automatable, maybe. Okay. Bill, any closing thoughts before we let you go here?

BS: I think this is a good place to end this one.

SO: We’ll wrap it up, and they will come and take away our microphones and put us back in the corner. Good to see you, as always.

BS: Good to see you.

CC: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post AI in localization: What could possibly go wrong? (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

Is AI really ready to generate your training materials? In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle tackle the trends around AI in learning content. They explore where generative AI adds value—like creating assessments and streamlining translation—and where it falls short. If you’re exploring how AI can fit into your learning content strategy, this episode is for you.

Sarah O’Keefe: But what’s actually being said is AI will generate your presentation for you. If your presentation is so not new, if the information in it is so basic that generative AI can successfully generate your presentation for you, that implies to me that you don’t have anything interesting to say. So then, we get to this question of how do we use AI in learning content to make good choices, to make better learning content? How do we advance the cause?

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Transcript:

Introduction with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.

Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.

Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.

Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.

End of introduction

Alan Pringle: Hey everybody, I am Alan Pringle, and today I’m talking to Sarah O’Keefe.

Sarah O’Keefe: Hey everybody, how’s it going?

AP: And today, Sarah and I want to discuss artificial intelligence and learning content. How can you apply artificial intelligence to learning content? We’ve talked a whole lot, Sarah, about AI and technical communication and product content, let’s talk more about learning and development and how AI can help or maybe not help putting together learning content. So how is it being used right now? Let’s start with that. Do you know of cases? I know of one or two, and I’m sure you do too.

SO: Yeah. So the big news, the big push, is AI in presentations. So how can I use AI to generate my presentation? How can it help me put together my slides? Now, the problem with that from our point of view, for those of you that have been listening to what we’re saying about AI, this will be no surprise whatsoever, I think this is all wrong. It’s the wrong strategy, it’s the wrong approach. If you want to take AI and generate an outline of your presentation and then fill in that outline with your knowledge, that’s great, I think that’s a great idea. Also, if you have existing really good content and you want to take that content and generate slides from it, I don’t have a problem with that. But what’s actually being said is AI will generate your presentation for you. If your presentation is so not new, if the information in it is so basic that generative AI can successfully generate your presentation for you, that implies to me that you don’t have anything interesting to say.

AP: And you’re going to say it with very pretty generated images and a level of authority that makes it sound like there’s something that’s actually there when it’s not.

SO: Oh, yeah. It’ll look very plausible and authoritative and it will be wrong, because that’s how this generative stuff-

AP: Or not even wrong, surface-skimmy, just nothing of any real value there.

SO: Yeah. So then, we go into this question of, how do we use AI in learning content to make good choices, to make better learning content, how do we advance the cause?

AP: Well, there’s that one case where we have done it, because we have our own learning site, LearningDITA.com, and we were trying to think about ways to apply AI to our efforts to create courses, to tell people how to use the DITA standard for content. And I think you and I both agree, one of the strengths of artificial intelligence is its ability to summarize and synthesize things, I don’t think that’s controversial. So if you think about writing assessments from existing content in a way that’s summarizing, so one of us suggested to our team, why don’t y’all try that and see what these AI engines can do to generate questions from our existing lesson content. And then, of course, we suggested that they—the people who were creating the courses—review them. So our folks reviewed them, and I think some of the questions were actually quite usable, decent.

SO: And some of them were not.

AP: True, this is true.

SO: But the net of it was they saved a bunch of time, because they said, “Generate a bunch of assessment questions,” they went through them, they fixed the ones that were wrong, they improved the ones that were maybe not the greatest, they got a couple that were actually pretty usable. And so, it took less time to write the assessments than it would’ve taken to do that process by hand, to slowly go through the entire corpus to say, “Okay, what are the key objectives and how do I map that to the assessments?” So that’s a pretty good example, I think, of using generative AI, as you said, to summarize down, to synthesize existing content. On the LMS side, so when we start looking at learning management systems and how the learning content goes into the LMS and then is given or delivered to the learner, there are some big opportunities there, because if you think about what it means for me as a learner, as a person taking the course, to work my way through course material, maybe the assumptions that the course developer made about my expertise were too optimistic. I’m really struggling with this content, it’s trying to teach me how to use Photoshop and I am just not good at Photoshop. There’s this idea of adaptive learning, this is not an AI concept, the idea behind adaptive learning is that if you’re doing really well, it goes faster. If you’re struggling, it goes deeper, or maybe you do better with videos than you do with text, or vice versa. It’s that adapt to the learner and to the learner’s needs in order to make the learning more effective. Now, if you think about that, that is a matter of uncovering patterns in how the learner learns and then delivering a better fit for those patterns. Well, that’s AI. AI and machine learning do a great job of saying, “Oh, you seem to be preferring video, so I’m going to feed you more video.” Now, we can do this by hand or we can build it in with personalization logic, but you can also do this at scale with AI and machine learning. So there are definitely some opportunities to improve adaptive learning with an AI backbone.

AP: I think it’s worth noting at this point, when you’re talking about gathering the data to make, I hate to, I’m going to personalize AI, so it can make these decisions or do the synthesis, there’s got to be intelligence that’s built into your content, and that goes all the way back to the content creation, going back from the presentation layer, back to how you’re creating your content. And again, this loops back, in my mind, to the idea of building in that intelligence with structured content, that is your baseline.

SO: Yeah. I know we’re just relentless on this drum of you need structured content for learning content, but it’s because of all these use cases, because as you try to scale this stuff, this is what you’re going to run into. I also see a huge opportunity for translation workflows specifically for learning content. So if you look at translation and multilingual delivery, there’s a lot of AI and machine learning going on in machine translation. So now, we think a little bit about what that means for learning content, and of course, all of the benefits that you get just in general from machine translation still apply, but the one that I’m looking at that I think would be really, really interesting to apply to learning is learning has a lot of audio in it, audio and video, but specifically audio, and audio typically is going to be bound to a language. You’re going to have a voiceover, you’re going to have a person saying, “Here’s what you need to know, and I’m going to show you this screenshot,” or, “I’m going to show you how to operate this machine.” And so, you’ve got audio and potentially captions that are giving you the text or the audio that goes with that video. Okay, well, we can translate the captions, that’s relatively easy, but what about the voiceover? And the answer could be that you do synthetic voiceovers. So you take your original, let’s say, English audio and you turn it into French, Italian, German, Spanish or whatever else you need, but you synthesize the voice instead of re-recording. Now, is it going to be as good as a human, an actual human person who has expression and emotion in their delivery? No. Is it better than the alternative where you don’t provide it in the target language at all? Probably, yes. And when we start talking about machines, “Here is how to safely operate this machine,” the pretty good synthetic voice in target language is probably better than, “Here it is in English, deal with it,” or, “Here it is in English with a translated caption in German, but no audio.” I think that’s what we’re looking at is, is the synthetic audio good enough that it will improve the learner experience, and I think the answer is yes.

AP: I’m turning this over in my mind, and there’s part of me that’s very resistant to the idea of these synthesized voices. For example, and this is bias on my part, when I am downloading audiobooks from the library, they now, in the app that I use that’s connected to the local library, a lot of the narration, it will say, “This is an AI-generated voice.” I tend to avoid those, I do, because sometimes the inflection’s a little odd, there’s no personality there. However, I can buy that having that slightly robotic-esque voice in another language is better than not having it at all, I can buy that.

SO: Right. And I think the audiobooks that we listen to for fun are different than I need to figure out how to use this machine without hurting myself, those are different, and I don’t need a… It wouldn’t hurt. I don’t need a personable obviously human voice to voiceover the video that helps me figure out how to use this thing on the factory floor. I wouldn’t object, but I would prefer to get something in my language. That’s really the key, because when we start asking the question, the question is less, would you prefer a really good artistic performance voiceover versus a robotic voice… That’s what you’re getting from the library, you’re saying, I am not going to consume entertainment content that is like this, and I think a lot of people are onboard with that. But what about technical product and learning content that you need? You’re not making a choice that this is something I want to do in my downtime, but rather, if I can’t figure out how to do this, bad things will happen.

AP: Yeah. There is a legitimate use case there, and they’re two different things, and I do think, based on some of the synthetic voices I’ve heard, they are getting better, quite better, and sounding a little more realistic as well.

SO: Right. We’ve already experimented with this. We have a podcast where we actually generated, it was a synthetic voice, but it was based on a person’s voice print. So it wasn’t fake AI, it was fake AI voice, but it was fake AI voice generated off of a specific person. The audio is quite good. Every once in a while between paragraphs, it shifts weirdly as you’re listening, as a new thought is introduced, and it shifts in ways that a human would not, but all in all, I thought it was pretty acceptable. So I think that what I’m trying to say in an extremely long-winded way is that when you have scalability issues in your content production, learning content or otherwise, AI has the potential to help you with productivity across multichannel workflows with repurposing content from it’s the learning content versus it’s the assessments, it’s in language A versus language B, it’s audio, it’s video. There are things that we can do there to use the AI tools for productivity to support these workflows and scale them, and to your point, and therefore, we need underlying structured content. We can’t do this with slapped-together one-off formatted mess.

AP: Yeah. The intelligence has to be built in at the very foundation, and that is when you are creating the content. That intelligence really can’t be a layer that’s put on when you transform things or you connect to an LMS, it’s not a presentation layer thing. The presentation layer needs to pull that intelligence from your source content. Again, this is why you need structured content, the metadata built in, to help drive the way you transform and distribute your learning content.

SO: Yeah. I’m, again, very skeptical of GenAI in the process of generating net-new content, new information, nobody’s ever written it before, it’s a new product, it needs to be explained, taught, whatever. Maybe an outline, this is what a typical intro course looks like, now go fill in the details, okay, maybe even a first draft, especially if product A is based on product B, or I guess the other way around. But our world is structured content, obviously, but also our world is content where it matters that the content is accurate, because when the content is wrong, bad, bad things happen, people get hurt, people die, companies get shut down for compliance reasons, that type of thing. So the content has to be accurate, and at the end of the day, it’s actually quite difficult to get GenAI to gen accurate content. That’s not what it does; that’s not its function. So I’m very interested in applying AI to various product and content roadmaps to enable productivity, to enable new deliverables, to enable new synthesis summaries, et cetera, but I’m very, very worried about what happens if you apply it on top of bad content or you apply it to the wrong use case in an effort to just get your stuff for free, essentially.

AP: So what I’m hearing in summary is that content creation for learning, AI is probably not a good fit now. To support you and help you possibly develop on the edges of that content or give you outlines and ideas, and also to augment and support delivery channels, it could be helpful. So it’s a support mechanism for the development of the content, distribution of the content, but not necessarily for the direct creation of that content.

SO: Yeah, I think that’s fair, and I think that’s where we land. I’d be quite curious to hear from our listeners, what they’re doing with this and where they’re going with it.

AP: And I’m sure people are having the same struggles right now over the best way to apply it. But I think right now, as of the moment that we’re recording this, AI is in no way ready for prime time to basically take the place of a learning content person. It should be there to support them, not to replace them.

SO: Yeah, for meaningful content.

AP: Exactly.

SO: And if it’s not meaningful, what are you even doing?

AP: Right.

SO: Well, that’s cheery, okay.

AP: And on that very cheerful note, we’re going to wrap up. So thank you, Sarah. And folks, do get in contact with us to let us know how you’re using AI, because that is of great interest to us. So thank you. Thanks, Sarah.

SO: Thank you. And maybe let us know how you’re being made to use AI.

AP: That too. Thanks, everyone.

Conclusion with ambient background music

CC: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit Scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

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The post Help or hype? AI in learning content appeared first on Scriptorium.

Tempted to jump straight to a new tool to solve your content problems? In this episode, Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow share real-world stories that show how premature solutioning without proper analysis can lead to costly misalignment, poor adoption, and missed opportunities for company-wide operational improvement.

Bill Swallow: On paper, it looked like a perfect solution. But everyone, including the people who greenlit the project, hated it. Absolutely hated it. Why? It was difficult to use, very slow, and very buggy. Sometimes it would crash and leave processes running, so you couldn’t relaunch it. There was no easy way to use it. So everyone bypassed using it at every opportunity.

Alan Pringle: It sounds to me like there was a bit of a fixation. This product checked all the boxes without actually doing any in-depth analysis of what was needed, much less actually thinking about what users needed and how that product could fill those needs.

Related links:

LinkedIn:

Transcript:

Introduction with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.

Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.

Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.

Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.

End of introduction

Bill Swallow: Hi, I’m Bill Swallow

Alan Pringle: And I’m Alan Pringle.

BS: And in this episode we’re going to talk about the pitfalls of putting solutioning before doing proper analysis. And Alan, I’m going to kick this right off to you. Why should you not put solutioning before doing proper analysis?

AP: Well, it’s very shortsighted and oftentimes it means you’re not going to get the funding that you need to do the project to solve the problems that you have. And with that, we can wrap this podcast up because there’s not a whole lot more to talk about here, really. But no, seriously, we do need to dive into this. It is very easy to fall into the trap of taking a tool’s first point of view. You’ve got a problem, it’s really weighing on you. So it’s not unusual for a mind to go, this tool will fix this problem, but it’s really not the way to go. You need to go back many steps, shut that part of your brain off and start doing analysis. And Bill, you’ve got an example, I believe, of how taking a tool’s first point of view didn’t help back in a previous job you had.

BS: I do, and I’m not going to bury the lead here, but they didn’t do their homework upfront to see how people would use the system. So I worked for a company many, many, many years ago that decided to roll out and I will name the product. They rolled out Lotus Notes.

AP: You’re killing me. That’s also very old, but we won’t discuss that angle.

BS: But they did so because it checked every single box, every single box on the needs list, it did email, it had calendar entries, it did messaging, notes, documents, linking, sharing, robust permissions, and you even had the ability to create mini portals for different departments and projects. So on paper, it looked like a perfect solution. And everyone, including the people who greenlit the implementation of Lotus Notes, hated it. Absolutely hated it. Why did they hate it? It was difficult to use. It was very slow. It was very buggy. Sometimes it would crash and leave processes running, so you couldn’t relaunch it. There was no easy way to use it. Back at that point, we had PDAs, personal digital assistants, and very soon after that we had the birth of the smartphone. There was no easy way to use it in these mobile devices except for maybe hooking up to email. It didn’t fit how we were working at all. While it shouldn’t count, it really wasn’t very pretty to look at either. So everyone bypassed using it at every opportunity. They would set up a Wiki instead of using the Lotus Notes document or notes portal that they had. They would use other messaging services. This is back during Yahoo Messenger and ICQ. But yes, we had that going on and in the end it was discontinued after its initial three-year maintenance period ended because nobody liked it.

AP: Yeah, so sounds to me like there was a bit of a fixation. This product checks all the boxes without actually doing any in-depth analysis of what you needed, much less actually thinking about what users needed and how that product could fill those needs. And I think it’s worth noting too, think about this from an IT department point of view, because they’re often a partner on any kind of technology project, especially if new software is going to be involved because they’re going to be the ones a lot of times that say yay or nay, this tool is a duplicate of what we already have. Or no, you have some special requirements and we do need to buy a new system. So if I as an IT person, the person who vets tools hears from someone, and let’s get back into the content world, I need a way to do content management and I need to have a single source of truth and I need to be able to take the content that is my single source of truth and then publish to a bunch of different formats. This is a very common use case. I would be more interested as an IT person in hearing that than hearing I have to have a component content management system. There’s a subtle difference there. And I think, and this is possibly unfair and grouchy of me, but that is me, grouchy and unfair. If I hear someone come to me, I need this tool instead of I have these issues and I have these requirements. It sounds selfish and half-baked.

BS: It does.

AP: And again, I am thinking about this from the receiving end of these queries, of these requests, but I also want to step back into the shoes of the person making a request. You can be so frustrated by your inefficiency and your problems, you latch onto the tools. So I completely understand why you want to do that, but you are basically punching yourself in the face when you go and make a request that is, I need this tool instead of I have these issues, these requirements, and I need to address these things. It’s subtle, but it’s different.

BS: It’s very different. And also if you do take that approach of looking at your needs, you find that there’s more to uncover than just fixing the technological problem itself.

AP: Yes.

BS: There might be a workflow problem in your company that you may acknowledge, you may not know it’s quite there. Once you start looking at the requirements and looking at the flow of how you need to work, and how you need any type of new system to work, you start seeing where the holes are in your organization. Who does what? What does a handoff look like? Is it recorded? What does the review process look like? When does it go out for formal review? What does the translation workflow look like? And you start seeing that there may be a lot of ad hoc processes in place currently that could be fixed as well.

AP: True. And I also think when you’re talking about solving problems and developing your requirements from that problem solving, you are potentially opening up the solution to more than just your department, your group. It can possibly be a wider situation there, too. And also by presenting it as a set of problems and requirements to address those problems, there may be already a tool in-house at your company that you don’t know about or there may be part of a suite of tools, and if you add another component to it will address your problem instead of just buying something completely outright. And we’ve seen this before, where it turned out there was an incumbent vendor that had some related tools already at the company, and that company also had a tool that could solve the problems that our client had or our prospect had. We’ve had both prospects and clients have this issue, so it doesn’t make sense, therefore, to go and say, I need this tool, which is essentially a competitor of what’s already in place. You’re going to have a very uphill battle trying to get that in place. It is also very easy, as someone who has already done a content ops improvement project, to understand this tool is good. It saves me at this company, but you’ve got to be careful of thinking just because it helped you over at company A. Now you’re at company B, it may not be a fit for company B culturally, there may be already something in-house. So you’ve got to let go of those preconceived notions. I am not saying that the tool you used before was bad. It may be the greatest thing ever, but there may be cultural issues, political issues, and even IT tech issues that mean you cannot pick that tool. So why are you pushing on it when you have got all of these things against you? Again, it is easy to fall into these traps. Don’t do it.

BS: Yep. On the flip side of that, we had a situation where a customer of ours years ago was looking for a particular system, a CCMS, component content management system, and they had what they perceived to be a very hard requirement of being able to connect to another very specific system.

AP: Yes, I remember this. It was about 10 or 11 years ago.

BS: And it was such a hard requirement that it basically threw out all of their options except for one. And we got the system working the way they needed it to. It needed quite a bit of customization, especially over the years as their requirements grew. But in the end, they never connected to that requirement system. The one that everyone said this would be a showstopper. They never connected to it because they just decided it wasn’t a requirement after X many years. And that just kills me because there could have been three or four other candidate systems that would’ve easily have fit the bill for them as well and probably would’ve cost them a little bit less money. But there we are.

AP: In fairness, all parties involved, including us, we’re working on the information that we had at the time. And I think this is a case where a requirement that we thought was a hard requirement turned out not to be. However, just because this happened in this case, folks out there listening to us, that does not mean that if a particular requirement points at a particular system that it could be not a real requirement because you want another system really badly. So you want to ignore that really hard, not how that works. It’s not how that should work. So I think there is a balance here that needs to be struck, and I think this is probably a good closing message. Don’t follow your knee-jerk instinct in regard to, I need this tool. Really look at the requirements, do an analysis. And because we’re humans, sometimes that analysis is not going to catch other things that it should have. Or you may end up having, like you just mentioned, a requirement that that’s not necessarily as real as you thought that it was. But I think your chance at project success and getting a tool purchased can configure and up and running are much higher when you start with those requirements than you start off with, I need tool Y.

BS: Well said. Do the homework before the test.

AP: And don’t put the cart before the horse.

BS: Well, thank you, Alan.

AP: Thank you. This was shorter, but it’s an important thing, and I think, again, this points to any kind of operational change being a human problem and dealing with people’s emotions and their instincts as much or more than an actual technological issue.

CC: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post Tool or trap? Find the problem, then the platform appeared first on Scriptorium.

Struggling to get the right content to the right people, exactly when and where they need it? In this podcast, Scriptorium CEO Sarah O’Keefe and Fluid Topics CEO Fabrice Lacroix explore dynamic content delivery—pushing content beyond static PDFs into flexible platforms that power search, personalization, and multi-channel distribution.

When we deliver the content, whether it’s through the APIs or the portal that you’ve built that is served by the platform, we render the content in a way that we can dynamically remove or hide parts of the content that would not apply to the context, the profile of the user. That’s the magic of a CDP. It’s delivering that content dynamically.

— Fabrice Lacroix

Related links:

LinkedIn:

Transcript:

Introduction with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.

Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.

Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.

Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.

End of introduction

Sarah O’Keefe: Hi everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe and I’m here today with the CEO of Fluid Topics. Fabrice, Lacroix. Fabrice, welcome.

Fabrice Lacroix: Hey. Hi Sarah. Nice being with you today. Thanks for welcoming me.

SO: It’s nice to see you. So as many of you probably know, Fluid Topics is a content delivery portal or possibly a content delivery platform. And we’re going to talk about the difference between those two things as we get into this. So Fabrice, tell us a little bit about Fluid Topics and what that content delivery portal or maybe platform. Which one is it? What do you prefer?

FL: For us, it’s platform definitely. But you’re right, depends on where people are in this evolution process, on how they deliver content. And for many, many customers, the piece stands for a portal. You’re right, because that is the first need. That’s how they come to us, because they need a portal.

SO: Okay, so in your view, the portal is a front end, an access point for content, and then what makes it a platform rather than a portal?

FL: Probably because the goal that many companies have to achieve is delivering that content where it’s needed. It’s many places most of the time. So it’s not just the portal itself, and that’s where solving the problem of being able to disseminate this content to many touch points, you need a platform for that. The portal is one touch point only, but when you start having multiple touch points like doing in-product help or you want to feed your helpdesk tool or field service application or whatever sort of chatbot somewhere else, whatever use case you have that is not just the portal itself, then that becomes a platform thing.

SO: So looking at this from our point of view, so many of our projects start with component content management systems, CCMSs, which are the back end. This is where you’re authoring and managing and taking care of all your information, and then you have to deliver it. And one of the ways that you could solve your delivery front-end would be with a content delivery platform such as Fluid Topics. Okay. So then, what are the prerequisites, when you start thinking about this? So our hypothetical customer has content obviously, and they have, we’re going to say probably a back-end content management system of some sort, probably.

FL: Most of the time.

SO: Most of the time.

FL: Depends where you go, depends on the maturity and the industry. If you go to some manufacturing somewhere, they mostly still are maybe on the word and FrameMaker or something like that in design, and then they generate PDFs.

SO: So maybe we have a backend authoring, well, we have an authoring environment of some sort on the back-end. Maybe it’s a CCMS, maybe it’s something not like that. And now we’re going to say, all right, we’re going to take all this content that we’ve created and we’re going to put it into the CDP, the content delivery platform. Now, what does success look like? What do you need from that content or from the project to make sure that your CDP can succeed in doing what it needs to do?

FL: The first answer to that question that comes to my mind is no PDFs. I mean, if you look at it, don’t laugh at me. If you look at it from an evolutionary perspective, it’s like regardless how people were writing before, it was not CCMS, mostly unstructured. And at the end of the day, people were pressing a button and generating PDFs and putting the PDF somewhere, CRM, USB key, website for download. But managing the content unstructured was painful. That’s where you start working with the CCMS, because you have multiple versions, variants, you want to work in parallel, you want to avoid copy paste, translation, so the story around that. So then companies start and they start moving their content into CCMS. All of the content, part of the content, but they start investing in a modern way of managing, creating their content. But again, if you look at it once they have made that move, most of those companies 10, 15 years ago probably were still pressing a button and still generating PDFs. And then they realized that they had solved one problem for themselves, which is streamlining the production capability and managing the content in a better way. But from a conception perspective, regardless whether you work with word FrameMaker or in DITA with the most advanced CCMS of the market, if you still deliver PDF, you are not improving the life of your customers. And then people started realizing that, oh yeah, so we should do better. So let’s try to output that content in another way than PDFs. And then say, “What else than PDF, do we have? HTML.” And was like, okay, and let’s output HTML. But HTML that is pretty much the same as the PDF. You see what I mean? It’s like static document. Each document was a set of HTML pages. And then they started realizing that they need to reassemble the set of HTML pages into a website, which is even more painful than just putting PDFs on the website is reassembling zip files of HTML pages on the website, and then it’s like static HTML. And then you have to put a search on top and have to create consistency. And that’s why CDP have emerged. That’s solving this need, which is, how do we transition from PDF to static HTML to something that is easier, that ingest all this content, comes with search capabilities, comes with configuration capabilities, and as well at the same time as API, so that back to the platform thing, it’s not just a portal, but can serve other touch points. So that’s really because we are in the detail world, DITA is the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. So that’s a very Darwinian process that led to this creation of the CDP and the need of a CDP is the next step in the process. And many companies really follow that process of, I have to go from my old ways of writing, which are not working painful, move to a CCMS, but in fact realize that they don’t solve the real problem of the company, which is how can I help my customer, my support agent, my field technicians better find the content better use my content? And that’s where this T, oh, okay. That’s where we need a CDP.

SO: Yeah, and I think, I mean, we’ve talked for 20 years about PDFs and all the issues around them, but it’s probably worth remembering that PDF in the beginning was a replacement for a shelf of books, paper books that went out the door. And the improvement was that, instead of shipping 10 pounds, or I’m sorry, what four kilos of books you were shipping as you said, a CD-ROM or this was before USB, a zip drive. Remember those?

FL: Zip drive.

SO: A zip drive. But you were shipping electronic copies of your books and all you were really doing was shifting the process of printing from the creator, the software, hardware, the product company to the consumer. So the consumer gets a PDF, they print it, and then that’s what they use. Then we evolved into, oh, we can use the PDF online, we can do full-text search, that’s kind of cool, that was a big step forward. But now to your point, the way that we consume that information is not printed and it’s for the most part, and it’s not big PDFs, but rather small chunks of information like a website. So how do we evolve our content into those websites? So then what does it look like to have a, and I think here we’re talking about the portal specifically, but what does it look like to have a portal for the end user that allows them to get a really good experience in accessing and using and consuming the content that they need to use the product, whatever it may be. What are some of the key things that you need to do or that you can do?

FL: Yeah. I would say that the main thing that a CDP is achieving compared to static HTML, because now we have to compare not with PDFs that are probably still needed if you want to print as well, I’m not saying that PDF is dead and we should get rid of all PDFs. Just said that it’s just when you need to print, then you can get the PDF version of a document. But if we compare static HTML with what a CDP brings, we’re trying to make content personalized and contextual. If you pre-generate static HTML pages, it’s one size fits all. It’s the same HTML pages for everyone. And if you have two versions of your product and one variant, and then you translate the same zip file exists in 20 versions, so to say, and you have to assemble that and let people understand how to navigate that and that should become super complex. What a CDP solves is like, give me everything, and I will sort out this notion of I understand the fact that the same document can exist in 20 variants, whether it’s product version, document version, capabilities of the product version A, version, B, Asian market, European market, American market. And then you have subtilities and some paragraphs are here, some paragraphs are removed, added. And so we are adapting the content so that it fits the profile of the user. And if you ask me what’s needed to make a CDP work, it’s mostly metadata, metadata, metadata. And I can tell you a story, what was fun? It’s like, few years ago, some years ago, more than few, we had customers reaching out or expecting customers to reach out and say, “Oh, show me three topics.” And then we’re showing the capability and say, “Oh my God, it’s exactly what we need.” And then those guys disappeared for two years. And in fact, what they did during these two years is like adding metadata to the content. It was not about the product, but through this discussion we had with them and showing that you can put facets for the search and then varianting content and let people switch between variants and versions of the content through metadata and all that, and they realized that, oh my God, that’s exactly what we need. And then through their questions, they understood that they needed to have those metadata on the content and those metadata were not existing and still they were working with the CCMS. But if your output channel are PDFs, if you don’t put PDFs, you don’t care about putting this metadata on the content inside the CCMS. That’s a lot of work to do to maintain those metadata. But if at the end of the day you print a button and you generate a PDF, those metadata are lost, they are not used, they’re not leveraged by the PDF. So that becomes flat pages of content. So they had transitioned to a CCMS but never made this investment of tagging content. And when I mean tagging content, it’s not just the map, it’s like the section, the chapter, this is for installing, this is for removing, this is for configuring, this is for troubleshooting, this chapter is about this, this topic is about that for this version of the products. You know what I mean? Fine-grained tagging at different level of the documents. And because they were generating PDFs, they didn’t see the need of making that tagging at the right level, and they realized that suddenly the sheer value they could get from PDF is when the content is tagged because that’s using those tags and those metadata schemes that the CDP can adapt the content to the context profile of the user. So I would say, what’s needed to leverage the capabilities of a CDP? It’s mostly granularity of content and tags, metadata that let people, and you can design your metadata from a user perspective. As an end user, how would I like to filter the content? What are the tags I need for filtering the content? It’s like, if I run a search, I have these facets on the left side of the search result page, what would I like to click on to refine my search and spot the content that fits my needs?

SO: And I think, going back to our flat file PDF or static HTML, if we need to do this kind of thing, if you need context in a flat file, what you have to do is say something like, if you have product variant A, do this. And if you have product variant B, do this. Or if you are installing and the temperature, the ambient local temperature is greater than X, then do these extra steps. If you are baking and you are at high altitude, you have to adjust your recipe in these ways. So you end up with all these sort of if statements that are, hey, if this is you do these things, but it’s all in the text, because I have no way, maybe I can do two variants of the PDF like variant A for regular altitude and variant B for high altitude. But I can’t do one per country, right? I mean, I guess I could, but ultimately, what you’re describing is that instead of putting it into the text explicitly, “Hey Fabrice, if you meet these conditions, do these things or don’t do these things or do these extra things,” the delivery portal, platform is going to say, “Okay, what do I know about this end user? What do I know about Fabrice? I know he is in a certain location with a certain preferred language and a certain product. I know which products you bought.” So therefore you don’t get an if, if, if, if, you just get, here’s what you need to do in your context with your product.

FL: Exactly. When we deliver the content, whether it’s through the APIs or the portal that you’ve built and that is served by the platform, we render the content in a way that we can remove or hide dynamically parts of the content that would not apply to the context, the profile of the user. And that’s the magic of CDP. It’s making that content dynamically. It’s also called dynamic content delivery. You remember we had this concept, the dynamic part is, how can I dynamically leverage the metadata on the content side or the conditions that I adapted, read through metadata schemes and make that applicable to the situation and the user profile? So that’s the magic part of it, and that’s a huge improvement compared to a static document that lists all the conditions and then you put the burden on the reader to figure out, sort out inside the document what should be skipped and what to do depending on the product configuration.

SO: Which can of course get very complicated. Now you mentioned product help, in-app help, context sensitive help. So what does it look like to use a Fluid Topics or this class of tool to deliver context sensitive help or in-app help?

FL: We are back again to this granularity and the metadata. So imagine you are a software vendor, you design a web application that you have created and you want to do the inline help for your application, your web product. What would you do? You would say in that page, when people click on that question mark or help button, we should open a pane and display that information. That information needs to be a topic, it needs to be written, and the granularity should be a topic because that’s what you pull from the system. So that’s where we need the granularity that’s matching what you want to display inside your app, whether it’s a tool tip, maybe a small tool tip when you move something in the app and then that becomes some fragment of content you need to get from the CDP dynamically. That can be one page of explanation that you display in a pane that opens in your app, but you need to pull that content. So the same way that that’s how you would do it, you were embedding the content inside the application itself. You would write each part of the explanation, the help that you want to display as fragments of information. If you are doing it statically inside the application, but the problem is that if you want to fix something or enhance the content, you have to edit the application, change the… So it’s part of the development. Here, you want the app to pull the content dynamically because the same content can be not only used to be displayed live in the screen, real time. But can be the same content that is used on the doc portal or then you print a PDF on how to do this. That’s the same. You don’t want to maintain the same explanation, in the application, in the portal, in PDFs. So one source. So it’s exactly that. And then you’re pulling through metadata. The app will say, “Oh, give me what goes into that page.” So it’s metadata-driven as well.

SO: Right? So there’s an ID on the software or something like that, and it says, “Give me the content that belongs with this unique label.”

FL: Exactly. Behind each button you give an ID to that button, which is the question mark in that page. When people click pull content, inline content help, ID number 1, 2, 3, 4. And on your CCMS, you have a metadata, which is called content ID for inline help, whatever. And then you tag that piece of content, 1, 2, 3, 4, and then that’s it. Magic is done. So it’s that simple.

SO: So what I’m hearing, and this is in fairness, exactly what you started with is, you have to have metadata, right? On the content.

FL: You have to have metadata.

SO: And without the metadata there is, well, let’s talk about magic. So if you have a front end that is some sort of a large language model that bought something, what does that mean in terms of this content delivery platform? I mean, can’t you just use ChatGPT and call today?

FL: Yes, that’s a good one. I think most of the project AI project we’ve seen in large companies when they started to do, oh, let’s build a chatbot. That’s the magic dream of any company like building the chatbot that replies to any question. Okay, so how does the project start usually? You have the IT, some people in the IT team or the IT team is hiring external people specialized in AI and they realize that they need content. So the first thing they do is they come usually to the TechDoc team and say, “Give me all the content that you have.” And the TechDoc team says, “Okay, we have all these DITA contents.” You say, “No, I don’t want DITA, I want PDFs.” That’s huge to see that. Why? Because they use technology like something from Microsoft, you can build your chatbot in five minutes, but then the only content types you can fit this ready to use platform is with PDFs and Word. So all the magic you’ve put in your content and the tags are lost and you see people getting PDFs out of you wanting PDFs from your content, which is the exact opposite of the investment you’ve made. Putting PDFs somewhere on the storage place and say to Microsoft Chatbot, blah, blah, this is the content, this is the knowledge of the company. And then when you have 20 variants of the same product, then no metadata anymore. Then the chatbot is always mixing all the content. And when you start asking real questions about how to do this, how to do that with this version of the product, everything is lost. And then the chatbot start hallucinating, not because the LLM is hallucinating, because the LLM just the system, the chatbot does not know what PDF to use because it’s implicit to know that this PDF applies to that version of the product or that version. It’s even worse if you say, “If you have product A, do this, if you have product B, do that and start mixing conditions and then just the knowledge becomes barely readable by humans that make mistake reading it. So can you imagine how an LLM can make sure that it’s putting the right information from that complex text structure?

SO: Okay, so make PDFs out of DITA, dumb it down, send it to the chatbot, that’s bad.

FL: And then it’s guaranteed failure.

SO: So what’s the good version of this?

FL: But that’s how it works. I guess, I write that you’ve seen this sort of projects where people were asking for the content, thinking that the more they have, the better it’s going to be. And suddenly they realize that, that chatbot is not working and doing many mistakes. And they call that hallucination, because if the LLM was hallucinating, but it’s not, it’s just able to feed the LLM dynamically with the right retrieval, augmented generation scheme to dynamically provide the information for replying to the question because it’s difficult to pull from the PDF the right information that applies to the context. And we are back to, what is the context? What is the machine? What is the profile of the user? What is the variant, the version, the whatever you have in front of you? So that’s the complex part. So what’s the relationship? What is the successful AI? What’s the relationship between CDP and AI? All AI projects I’ve seen start regardless of us, regardless of Fluid Topics, start with we need to gather content. We need to take the content that we have, put it in one place, create this sort of unified repository of content. The promise that usually, as I said, they do it using static document, PDFs, to analyze blah blah. If you look at what a CDP is, that’s exactly what it is. It’s already your repository of content. At least everything around the product, because we’ve been talking about CCMS published to CDP. What also makes a CDP very special is that, not only can we ingest this DITA content, but also this legacy PDF and markdown content, API documentation knowledge bases. So the CDP is here to ingest all the knowledge that you have around your product, not just necessarily the formal techdoc, the proper techdoc that has been well written and validated. So we have already, well, the CDP is exactly that. It’s building, that’s the purpose of it. It’s building that unified repository and that’s where you should start from. And it’s fine grained, and we have the metadata and we have everything, so we know how to feed the LLM. So there are two things in an AI project. One is the LLM, but now people use generic LLM, you don’t fine tune, train an LLM anymore for this sort of use case that is just a chatbot for replying to questions and solving cases automatically. You use a generic LLM and you feed the LLM dynamically with the fragments of content of knowledge that you have in your repository. And that’s where just as a human, when you run a search, you look for content, you know what part of content, what are the fragments, the topics, the chapters that contain the knowledge for replying to that question? The tough part is, extracting that from the repository. Am I extracting the 2, 3, 4 pages around the question that are matching the version, the situation that I’m in? So that I can then feed the LLM and say, “This is the 10 pages of knowledge that we have, or 20 or 50 pages of knowledge. This is the question replied to the question using that knowledge.” That’s exactly what a chatbot does. You’re giving the question of the user, you give 5, 10, 20, whatever number of pages of knowledge that you have in your repository and you ask the LLM say, “This is the question, this is the knowledge, please reply.” So the test part is extracting the 5, 10, 20 pages that are really adapted to the situation, to the context.

SO: And the metadata helps you do that.

FL: And the metadata. Nothing else than metadata for doing that.

SO: Right. Okay. So we’ve talked a lot about metadata as I guess a precondition, right? A prerequisite. Yeah, it is. If you don’t have metadata, none of these other things are going to work. And I wanted to ask you about other, maybe, challenges or prerequisites. So other than people coming in and saying, oh, right, we need metadata, and then they go away for two years and then they come back and they have some metadata, what are the other issues that you run into when you’re trying to build out a CDP like this? What are some of the other… What are the top challenges that you run into other than clearly metadata? So we’ll put that one at number one.

FL: Oh yeah, clearly number one. I would say the second one now is the UX UI people want to design. Because modern platform have unlimited capabilities in designing the front end, the UI that you want. It’s like what do you want? What makes sense for regarding, based on your product types, the user that you have, the content that you have, what is the UX you want to build? That’s interesting, because probably five, no, let’s say 10 years ago, we were providing default interfaces out of the box with the product, with three topics to build your portal. And you could just brand that, put your colors, logo, tweak it a bit, and everybody was happy with that. And then we’ve seen a big evolution because now for many companies, marketing everywhere to say on UX, you have now UX director of VP of user experience that were not existing five years ago, 10 years ago. See what I mean, everybody was working is on swim lane. The techdoc department was in charge of writing the content and probably generating the PDFs and then setting up a doc portal. But many companies have realized that this tech doc portal is instrumental to the performance of the company. And now it says, “Oh, we need to have a look at that.” So it becomes a shared place. See, you’ve seen that I guess in your project.

SO: Yeah. Yeah.

FL: Five years ago, 10 years ago, the only people you had to work with and educate and discuss with were probably the tech dog team. And now you’ve got marketing and you’ve got customer support, and you’ve got customer experience people. And because they’ve realized the value there is in this content, but as well as how important it is to design the writer’s experience that fits with the other touch points of the company to create a seamless journey when you go from the corporate website to the documentation website to the help desk tool to the LMS. And you need some consistency around that, not only in terms of just branding colors and logos, but you go beyond that. And we see this as a new place where people struggle a bit. Our customers struggle is what do we want? In fact, they know that marketing says we need something that is more modern, more like this, more like that. But we start opening the discussion, what is it really that you want? Some companies are very mature, they got the Figma mockups and they come to us, “This is what we need to implement. We’ve spent two years with UX designer crafting the UX of our portal.” And some come and say, “Oh my God, you’re right. We don’t know what you need. Give us a default, something to start with and we’ll see.”

SO: Well, you’ll appreciate this. I had a call not too long ago with a very, very, very, very large company, very large. And they said, “We need a front end for our content, this tech content that needs to go out into the world, we need a design for it.” And because it’s a very large company, I said, “Great, where’s your UX team? And do you have a design system?” Because, I mean presumably they do. And the person I was talking to said, “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” And so I consulted the almighty search engine and discovered that not only did this particular company have a design system, they had something that is publicly available, that is their design system that you can go get all the pieces and parts and all the logos and all the behaviors and everything. It is all out there in the world. And yet, the people that work at this organization and in their defense, there are many, many tens of thousands of them did not know that this thing existed. And so all of their requirements in terms of what they had to do for their portal design were right out there in the world accessible to me.

FL: They didn’t even know about it.

SO: And they had no idea that it existed. And so we had to be the ones to make that connection and say, okay, we have to talk to the people or at least download all these assets and then figure out what to do with them and then make sure that we’re following the rules and all the rest of it. So to your point, the enterprise issues, and we also run out into this with metadata and taxonomy, that that is typically an enterprise problem, not a departmental problem. And actually making those connections across the departments for the first time is a task that very often falls to us as the consultants on the outside who are asking, “Do you have a taxonomy project? Do you have design systems? Do you have these enterprise assets that we need to align with and be consistent with?” And they’re not ready for that question, because it was until recently, put a pile of PDFs somewhere.

FL: That’s just a known and you don’t know what you don’t know. And when they start moving up to more capable tools, they discover that it comes with more capabilities, but they have to make choices, they have to invest in metadata, UX design and all that. And it’s probably some of those companies are not ready yet. I mean, they didn’t foresee that coming. And that’s where the project lag a bit in terms of complexity as well, because they realize that it’s not just buying the tool as well, making the investment on their content, their UX strategy, their design system and all that. That may be missing in some cases.

SO: And I think that probably saying it’s not just about buying the tool is really a good summary of this whole situation. Because we started with you’re really going to need metadata, and if you don’t have metadata, that’s a huge problem. And we’ve landed on, and there are all these other connections and pieces and parts that you have to think about. So Fabrice, thank you very much. This was a great discussion and I appreciate all your information and we will wrap this up there. Are there any parting thoughts that you want to leave people with?

FL: It was an absolute pleasure having this discussion with you, Sarah. I think it could have last another hour easily, so we need to stop somewhere. Maybe we’ll have another opportunities to keep on chatting about some of the subjects.

SO: Yep. Sounds good. And thank you again, and we will see you soon. 

Christine Cuellar: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post Deliver content dynamically with a content delivery platform appeared first on Scriptorium.

Are you considering a structured approach to creating your learning content? We built LearningDITA.com as an example of what DITA and structured learning content can do! In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe and Allison Beatty unpack the architecture of LearningDITA to provide a pattern for other learning content initiatives.

Because we used DITA XML for the content instead of the actual authoring in Moodle, we actually saved a lot of pain for ourselves. With Moodle, the name of the game is low-code/no-code. They want you to manually build out these courses, but we wanted to automate that for obvious reasons. SCORM allowed us to do that by having a transform that would take our DITA XML, put it in SCORM, and then we just upload the SCORM package to Moodle and don’t have to do all the painful things of, you know, “Let’s put a heading two here with this little piece of content.” And the key thing is that allowed us to reuse content.

— Allison Beatty

Related links:

LinkedIn:

Transcript:

Introduction with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.

Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.

Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.

Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.

End of introduction

Sarah O’Keefe: Hi everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe.

Allison Beatty: And I’m Allison Beatty.

SO: And in this episode, we’re focusing in on the LearningDITA architecture and how it might provide a pattern for other learning content initiatives, including maybe the one that you, the listener, are working on. We have a couple of major components in the learningDITA.com site architecture. We have learner records for the users. We have e-commerce, the way we actually sell the courses and monetize them. That is my personal favorite. And then we have the content itself and assorted relationships and connectors amongst all those pieces. So I’m here with Allison Beatty today, and her job is to explain all those things to us because Allison did all the actual work. So Allison, talk us through these things. Let’s start with Moodle. What is Moodle and what’s it doing in the site architecture?

AB: Okay. So Moodle is an open-source LMS that we-

SO: What’s an LMS?

AB: Learning management system, Sarah.

SO: Thank you.

AB: And we installed Moodle, our own instance of Moodle and customized it as we saw fit for our needs. And that is the component that acts as the layer between the content and the learning experience. So without the Moodle part, it’s just a big chunk of content that you can’t really interact with. And Moodle gives that a place to live.

SO: And then Moodle has the learner records, right?

AB: Yes.

SO: And what about groups? What does that look like?

AB: In Moodle, there’s a cohort functionality which allows us to use groups so that a manager can buy multiple seats and assign them to individuals and keep track of their course progress through group registration rather than individual self-service signups.

SO: So if I were a manager of a group that needs to learn DITA, instead of having to send five or 10 or 50 people individually to our site, I could just sign up once and buy five or 10 or 50 seats in a given course and then assign those via email addresses to all of my people, right?

AB: Exactly.

SO: Okay. So then speaking of buying things, we had to build out this e-commerce layer, which I was apparently traveling the entire time that this was going on, but I heard a lot of discussion about this in our Slack. So what does it look like? What does the commerce piece look like?

AB: Yeah. So it is a site outside of the actual learningDITA.com Moodle site that has a connector into Moodle so that you can buy a course or a group registration in the store, and then you get access to that content in Moodle.

SO: So we have this site, this actually separate site, and if you’re in there, you can do things like buy a course or buy a collection of courses or a number of seats. And then what were some of the fun complications that we ran into there?

AB: Oh yeah. So the fun complications there were figuring out how to set up an commerce site that A, connected to Moodle so that we could sell the courses, and B was able to process taxes and payments and all of that fun stuff. So Moodle has PayPal as a feature just out of the box and the base Moodle source code. But we wanted to accept credit cards directly and so that meant some additional layers, which is how we ended up with the store.scriptorium.com site, which is built on WordPress and uses a connector, the aforementioned connector, to make those two sites talk to each other. So they’re actually, the LMS and the e-commerce piece are totally separate websites, but exist within the same system environment.

SO: And most of you listening to this probably don’t care, but one of the things we learned was that digital training, downloadable training content is sometimes subject to sales tax and sometimes not, depending on the particular state or the particular jurisdiction. So it’s not just, what is sales tax in North Carolina versus what is sales tax in Washington state versus what is it in Oregon? But additionally, in each jurisdiction is this type of training subject to sales tax or not. So we spent a more than optimal amount of time on figuring out all of those things and making sure we get it right, because I’m extremely interested in making sure that those taxes are done correctly and keep us out of trouble.

AB: And the basic PayPal and Moodle wasn’t going to give us that level of granular control and specification.

SO: And typically our customers are looking to pay via credit card. So we’ve got the LMS piece with the learner experience, the actual learning platform. We’ve got the e-commerce piece with the Let’s Take Money piece. And then finally we have the content piece. So what does it look like to actually create these courses and create and manage the content that then eventually goes into Moodle?

AB: Yeah. So the content does have a single source of truth. It is all authored in DITA XML and stored in a central repository. You can see that content in GitHub. It’s open source. We took the DIT XML and we developed a SCORM transform that we could use to hook the content up into Moodle and be able to use all of the grading and progress and prerequisite type things that we needed to flush out the actual learning platform. We had learned a fun lesson along the way that Moodle does not support SCORM 2004. So that required a little bit of backtracking to make sure that we were getting the data into the correct SCORM to get into Moodle. And so because we used it XML for the content instead of the actual authoring in Moodle, we actually saved a lot of pain for ourselves with Moodle. The name of the game with Moodle is low-code/no-code, and they want you to manually build out these courses. But we wanted to automate that for obvious reasons, and SCORM allowed us to do that by having a transform that would take our DITA XML, put it in SCORM, and then we just upload the SCORM package to Moodle and don’t have to do all the painful things of let’s put a heading to here with this little piece of content. And the key thing is that allowed us to reuse content as well. And then if we need to update the content, all we have to do is replace the SCORM package in Moodle.

SO: So currently we have DITA 1.3 content out there. The DITA 2.0 content is under development, and I would say mostly done. We’re mainly waiting for the actual release of the those two chunks of content, although those courses are going to be in GitHub in the DITA training, or I think it’s called Learning DITA now, the Learning DITA project.

AB: Yep.

SO: Separately from that, we’re working on some new courses which are not going to be open sourced, but will be available on Moodle or… Sorry, on learningDITA.com. And so for those of you that are wondering, we’ve got a number of things on our roadmap. I’d love to hear more from people listening to this about what they need out of this. What more advanced courses are you looking for? One thing that we’ve heard a lot of requests for is a DITA open toolkit plugins 101.

How do I build a plugin? How do I use best practices? How do I make this all happen? So we have this, I don’t know, DITA inception thing happening because we’re training people on how to do DITA using DITA inside DITA, building out the stuff.

AB: It’s all very meta.

SO: It’s extremely meta. Hypothetically, what would it look like to localize this? So what we’ve delivered right now is in English, and in the past we have had people put together both, let’s see, German, Chinese, and I think French versions of the Learning DITA content. But what does it look like in this new architecture to localize?

AB: Yeah. So much like the tool chain for this new architecture, there are a couple of different components, and if you would like to localize the Learning DITA content, what you’ll want to look at is the content itself, translating and localizing the source content, but you’ll also need to localize Moodle some. So what you would do is make a, basically clone the Moodle site, and you’ll have to, not to go too into the Moodle weeds, but you’ll need to reconfigure the initializing PHP file a little bit. And then you would take your translated localized content and prep that up into your new Moodle for whichever language you’re localizing into.

SO: So it looks as though, you mentioned maintenance and this idea that Moodle by design wants you to make updates inside Moodle, and we pulled the content out of there. We’re basically saying Moodle is for learners and learning management and course records and sequencing and those kinds of things, and grading, I suppose, but the DITA back end is for content. So we’re putting all the content in DITA and then we push it over to SCORM, which then goes into learningDITA.com into the Moodle site. It sounds like more work, right? We had to build a SCORM transform. We had to put all this stuff in… We didn’t just go into Moodle and start authoring, which would be a lot faster on day one. So what’s the rationale for that? What does it look like in the long term to maintain something in Moodle versus to maintain something in the system that we’re describing?

AB: Yeah. It may seem easier on day one to manually put the content in, but when you need to make an update or change something, or particularly if you want to change something about a piece of content that is reused and repeated throughout the courses, you have to manually trawl through every single course page and make those updates, whereas with the SCORM package, once you have the SCORM transform set up and running to your liking, you can run your DITA content through there and then replace the SCORM package in Moodle instead of having to manually trawl through page by page. And maybe there is some content that is duplicated, but you mess it up because you were manually trawling through page by page. So it also, having DITA as the single source of truth helps you with maintenance, even if it seems scary at first.

SO: And I expect one of the things we’re looking at is CCMS courses, and the concept of what is a CCMS is going to be the same for all of them. The process of how do I check out files is going to be a little different for each of them. So if you think about that from a course material point of view, you would have that conceptual overview of, what is the component content management system and why do I care? And then there’s, how do I do the thing in specific component content management system? That would probably be unique, but the conceptual overview would be probably the same. So we might have two or five or 15 different courses, one for each CCMS, but you could see where the conceptual stuff would overlap.

AB: Exactly.

SO: Okay. Everyone, I hope this glimpse into content operations for structured learning content was useful. Of course, the learningDITA.com site is much smaller than what we typically do with our customers at scale, but we are getting more and more requests for learning content and structured content options for learning content. If you’re interested in learning more about learningDITA.com, would suggest you go there and check it out. Check out the DITA training, which has eight or nine courses on DITA stuff from what is structured authoring, all the way to tell me about the learning and training specialization. Allison, thank you so much for all your input.

AB: Thank you.

SO: And we’ll see you on the next one.

Christine Cuellar: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post LearningDITA: DITA-based structured learning content in action appeared first on Scriptorium.

In this episode, Alan Pringle, Bill Swallow, and Christine Cuellar explore how structured learning content supports the learning experience. They also discuss the similarities and differences between structured content for learning content and technical (techcomm) content.

Even if you are significantly reusing your learning content, you’re not just putting the same text everywhere. You can add personalization layers to the content and tailor certain parts of the content that are specific to your audience’s needs. If you were in a copy-and-paste scenario, you’d have to manually update it every single time you want to make a change. That scenario also makes it a lot more difficult to update content as you modify it for specific audiences over time, because you may not find everywhere a piece of information has been used and modified when you need to update it.

— Bill Swallow

Related links:

LinkedIn:

Transcript:

Introduction with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.

Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.

Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.

Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.

End of introduction

Christine Cuellar: Hey, everybody, and welcome to today’s show. I’m Christine Cuellar, and with me today I have Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow. Alan and Bill, thanks for being here.

Alan Pringle: Sure. Hello, everybody.

Bill Swallow: Hey, there.

CC: Today, Alan, Bill, and I are going to be talking about structured content for learning content. Before we get too far in the weeds, let’s kick it off with a intro question.

Alan, what is structured content?

AP: Structured content is a content workflow that lets you define and enforce consistent organization of your information. Let’s give a quick example in the learning space. For example, you could say that all learning overviews contain information about the audience for that content, the duration, prerequisites, and the learning objectives for that lesson or learning module. And by the way, that structure that I just mentioned … It actually comes from a structured content standard called the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, DITA for short. That is an open-source standard that has a set of elements that are expressly for learning content, including lessons and assessments. And I think it’s also worth noting, another big part of the whole idea of structured content is that you are creating content in a format agnostic way. You are not formatting your content specifically for, let’s say, a study guide, a lesson that’s in a learning management system, or even a slide deck. Instead, what a content creator instructional designer does … They are going to develop content that follows the predefined structure, and then an automated publishing process is going to apply the correct kind of formatting depending on how you’re delivering the content. That way, as a content creator and instructional designer, you’re not having to copy and paste your learning content into a bunch of different tools. And I know for a fact a lot of instructional designers are doing that right now. Instead of doing all that copying and pasting, you write it one time, and then you say, “I want to deliver it for these different delivery targets, whether it’s for online purposes, whether it’s for in-person training or maybe a combination of both.” You set up publishing processes to apply the formatting for whatever your delivery targets are so you, as a human being, don’t have to mess with that.

CC: Which is awesome. Part of the reason that we’re talking about this today is that structured content has been a part of the techcomm world for over 30 years, for a really long time, and now we’re starting to see it make inroads in the learning and development space. We’ve been doing a lot of work for structured content in the learning space, but how is it different from the techcomm space? And Bill, I’m going to kick this over to you for that.

BS: I think I’m going to take a higher-level view on this because there is a lot of overlap between techcomm and learning content. Where they really start to diverge is in delivery. Techcomm is pretty uniform in how it delivers content to people. There’s personalization involved and so forth, but essentially everyone’s getting the same thing. The experience is going to be the same. Everyone’s going to get a manual. Everyone’s going to get online help. Everyone’s going to get a web resource, what have you. It might be tailored to their specific needs, but it’s a pretty candid delivery experience. For training, the focus is on the learning experience itself, and it’s usually tailored to a very specific need, whether it’s a very specific type of audience that needs information, or it’s very specific information that needs to be delivered in a very specific way for those people. Beyond that, we start looking at the content itself under the hood, and the information starts to, I would say, broaden with learning content because it can consume all the different types of information you have with technical content. And generally in a structured world, we think of that as conceptual information, how-to information, and reference information, for the most part. With learning content, now you have a completely new set of content in addition to that where you have learning objectives. You have assessments. You have overviews, reviews, all sorts of different content that essentially expands on the wealth of information you have from your technical resources.

CC: That’s great. Typically, the arguments for structured content, and the reason it’s really valuable for organizations, is it introduces consistency in your content, consistency for your brand across wherever you’re delivering content. It also helps you build some scalable content processes, that kind of thing. What are some of the arguments for structured content for the learning environment specifically, if there are any other new ones?

AP: Some of the reasons that you want to do structured content for learning content are really similar to other types of content. We’ve already talked about one of them. I touched on this earlier in regard to automated formatting. You are not having to do all of the work as a human being, applying formatting to ever how many delivery formats that you have. That is a huge win that you’re not having to do that. And especially in the training space, I have seen so many organizations copying content from one platform to another because the platforms don’t play well together, so you’ve got multiple versions of what should be the same exact content to maintain. That is another huge reason to consider structure. You want a single source of truth for your content regardless of where that information is being delivered because if you’re looking at the overall learning experience and the excellence and quality of that learning experience, if you were telling learners slightly different things in different places in your content, you are not providing an optimal learning experience. Therefore, having that single source of truth for a particular bit of information gives your learners a consistent piece of information regardless of what channel they consume it for. That’s a really important win for a solid, dependable learning experience.

CC: Gotcha. No, that definitely makes sense. It sounds like it would take some of the effort off of the subject-matter experts who are creating these trainings so that they can … They, I’m assuming, would rather focus on the work of helping train people. Getting some of the manual formatting and copy and pasting off of their workload sounds pretty nice. What are the complications that it might introduce or the change management issues that might need to be tackled when you’re bringing structured content into a learning environment?

AP: It’s true anytime you bring in structure. When people are used to working in an environment where you are doing manual formatting, and you’re seeing what things look like as you kind of develop the content, the idea of developing content in a format agnostic way where you’re not thinking about what does this slide look like, or how is this assessment going to work in the learning management system, it’s very easy to get focused on the delivery angle because you want it to be good, and you want it to be done in a way that makes that learning experience useful for the people who are trying to learn whatever it is they’re trying to learn. You don’t want those impediments of bad formatting or a not great way that your assessments behave in your learning management system, but you kind of get to offload all of those concerns, which are very valid. I’m not saying they’re not valid. They are, but you want an automated process. Basically, you want computers to do that work for you. You want programming to apply that formatting so you can really focus on getting that information as solid as it can be, and you let technology handle the rest. You do set up the standards for how you deliver that content, whether it’s in print, online, in person, whatever. However you’re delivering your learning and training content, you set the standards. “This is how I need this to behave. This is how I need it to look. This is how I need it to interact.” Once you set those standards, then you turn around and have someone who has this programmatic skill set, like we do at Scriptorium, to come in and develop the transformations that take your content and deliver it in the ways you need it delivered so you, as, like you were saying, the subject-matter expert, the instruction designer, or whatever content creator we’re talking about here … You are not doing that for every single delivery type that you are putting out for your learners.

BS: And it’s not to say that the experience isn’t tailored because it still can be tailored. Even if you are significantly reusing your content, you’re not just taking the same text everywhere. You can add personalization layers to that content and tailor certain parts of the content specific to what that specific audience needs rather than having to retype it all every single time you want to make a change if you were in a copy-paste scenario. And that also would make it a lot more difficult to update all that content as you modify it for specific audiences over time because you may not find everywhere where a piece of information has been used and modified if you need to update it. It does take a little bit of … Well, it takes a lot of the work off of those developing the content because they don’t have to worry about exactly what it looks like for every single target that they’re producing. It does require a little bit of, I would say, faith in the system that it will work. It really comes down to how you’re architecting this in the first place to make sure you understand who your varied audiences are, what the look and feel needs to be, what the delivery points are, and making sure that you are authoring within the scope of those things. And once you get that down, as Alan mentioned, it becomes a push-button operation to produce all of your various outputs.

AP: I think, too, from a change management point of view, one thing that I have heard from lots of content creators in the learning space is the burden they have, for example, if a program or the company changes names, changes logos, changes branding, if you have that built in to the formatting in a way where you’re having to go into, say, a bunch of Microsoft Word or PowerPoint files and manually change those out, and I am sure I am talking to people out there in the ether who know exactly what I’m talking about, it is extremely painful. And when you have automated the application of formatting, what you can do is change those processes to update them to include the latest corporate colors, the latest taglines, the latest fonts, the latest logos, whatever has changed so you, as a human being, again, do not have to go in there and touch all of those files yourselves because that is a burden you don’t need when you were trying to quote do your real work, which is help people learn, not apply formatting to a zillion Microsoft Word documents. Nobody wants to do that, at least nobody I know anyway.

CC: No. That’s a very good example of how the structure can just take that part of the workload off of you so you can get to focus on what you want to do. But I like, Bill, how you put it that you have to trust the process because it is an adjustment to go from authoring your content in a specific PowerPoint or in a specific Word doc to authoring it in a way that it can be reused. But ultimately what I’m hearing both of you say is that, even though it’s a valid concern that you might worry about your ability to personalize and your ability to control the user experience, once structured content is implemented correctly, and everyone is adjusted to the system, it sounds to me like you’re saying that your opportunities for personalizing at scale are actually going to be bigger than when everyone’s doing it individually, and at least it introduces consistency across those personalized experiences. Do you think that’s fair to say, either of you? Do you think that’s a fair statement, or is that too optimistic-

AP: That is an incredibly loaded question the only answer to which is … No, you were correct. That is, structure does enable all the things that you just ask in that very leading, but good, question.

CC: It is very leading.

BS: It removes the visual context of where the content is going, but it doesn’t remove … In fact, it enhances the context of what the content is about.

AP: Right.

CC: That’s a good way to say it. I like that. Looking at structured content within the learning space itself, how does it … I know, Bill, you had mentioned that, within the techcomm space, it’s fairly uniform in how content is delivered and who it’s delivered to. Not that it’s always the same. How about in the learning space? How does that vary? And how does the structure approach vary?

BS: Well, this might contradict what I said before, but it’s a slightly different look on it in that, really, the learning clients that we’ve had … They kind of mirror a lot of the techcomm clients we had in that everyone is producing roughly … If you look at it from a high enough altitude, it all looks the same. They’re all producing manuals. They’re all producing e-learning. They’re all producing whatever. When you get down into the nuts and bolts, that’s when you start finding that every single implementation is going to look a little bit different. In techcomm, you might have completely different types of content that you need to be able to handle. The same thing is with the learning space. Every single group is going to have different needs, and they’re going to have very specialized needs based on the content that they’re producing and who they’re producing it for. The learning space, unlike techcomm where they’ve basically been going down the structured path for 20, 30 years … The learning space has really been a sea of black boxes where every single system has its own way of doing things. It does about 90%, 95% of the same stuff that every other system out there does, but there is something special, something canned, something within the system that allows it to do the one thing that no other system does. And all of these technologies historically have really been locked down tight where your content goes in, and it lives and thrives in that box that you’re developing it in. But if you need to take that content out and change systems and put it somewhere else, there’s a lot of rework that potentially needs to be done depending on how customized that system you were using was. And let’s face it. You can structure content. You can centralize it. You can componentize it all you want. It’s not going to change the fact that learning content is going to have these many varied endpoints for how it’s being delivered. Even though you are consolidating and structuring in a central repository to maximize your reuse, to not worry about the formatting, you may still have three or four different learning management systems that you are pushing that content into. Each one of those systems has different requirements. The type of content that gets consumed. What it does. How it reacts. What it expects. The order it needs that information in per lesson, per page. E-page. It gets a little more complicated in the delivery of the learning content because we need to be able to tailor to not only the needs of the particular client in the content that they’re producing but the needs of the systems that need to ingest it.

AP: One other thing I would mention here is the level of interactivity, I think, is higher with learning and training content than the techcomm world. Now, I realize there are documentation portals and things like that that do provide some levels of interactivity. However, I think you are going to see much more of that kind of thing on the learning and training side, especially in regard to assessments when you are trying to have people do little, basically, mini exercises to prove that they have learned what they need to learn and that they are graded, and then those scores are recorded. That is the kind of thing you don’t see in techcomm. That is a whole, very specific thing to the learning and training world. Therefore, the structure that you choose needs to accommodate that, and your delivery targets in particular need to accommodate that very high level of interactivity with, for example, like Bill was saying, a learning management system.

BS: You have quite a variety of needs out there from basic, true/false, multiple choice, or matching all the way down to simulations, doing interactive exercises, and so forth all within a learning management system. And you need to be able to account for that. And as I mentioned, not all of those systems function in the exact same way, so it needs to be tailored.

CC: For any listeners that are listening to this episode right now, and they are in the learning content space, and they’re interested in getting started with structured content, Alan, where would you recommend they start?

AP: Well, our website, scriptorium.com, has lots–very self-serving. Very self-serving. We have a lot of resources, and we will put them in the show notes so you can get to them. We also are the creator and maintainer of a site called learningdita.com that teaches people about one way to do structured content, which is DITA, which I mentioned earlier in the show. And there is a free Introduction to DITA course that you can take. Between some links that we’ll include in the show notes in regard to what is structured content, how it applies to the learning and training space, and learning DITA, those are all good starting points for people who are considering going on the structured content journey for their learning content.

CC: That’s great. And the only thing I’ll add to that is that, if you’re interested in learning more about learning content and structured content, this is something that we talk about a lot. I would recommend also subscribing to our Illuminations newsletter which, like Alan said, that’s also going to be linked in the show notes. But every month, we send out a recap of the topics we talked about, and learning content is very often in there because we talk about it a lot.

This final question is for both of you. Is there anything else that you want to leave our listeners with about structured content in the learning content space before we wrap up today?

BS: I’d say, if you’re looking at structured content, it’s not going to on its face be a savior solution. But if with enough thought, it can really make a difference in your content development workflow, and it can save you a lot of time in producing content that is targeted to very specific people and delivery points.

AP: For me, my final suggestion here is think about your pain points. What are the things that are keeping you up at night as you develop your learning and training content? What are the continual issues you are battling, especially your content creators? What are they battling? Is it they’re having to format for umpteen different platforms? Is it that they’re needing to personalize things for different locations? For different levels of service that you were training people about? What are the things that are causing you problems? Basically, compile a list of those. And then from there, figure out, could structured content, solve any of these problems? Don’t put the cart before the horse, is the best way to put it, really. Think about your pain points in your processes and then see if structure might be the thing to solve them.

CC: That’s great. And on that, Alan, Bill, thank you very much for being here and recording this with me today.

BS: Thank you.

AP: Absolutely. We like to talk about this stuff probably too much.

CC: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

• Name*

The post The benefits of structured content for learning & development content appeared first on Scriptorium.

In this episode, Alan Pringle, Gretyl Kinsey, and Allison Beatty discuss LearningDITA, a hub for training on the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). They dive into the story behind LearningDITA, explore our course topics, and more.

Gretyl Kinsey: Over time that user base grew and grew. And now it boggles my mind that it got all the way up to 16,000 users. I never expected it to grow to that size.

Alan Pringle: Well, we didn’t really either, nor did our infrastructure. Because as of late 2024, things started to go a little sideways, and it became clear our tech stack was not going to be able to sustain more students. It was very creaky. The site wasn’t performing well. So we made a decision that we needed to take the site offline, and we did, to basically redo it on a new platform.

Related links:

LinkedIn:

Transcript:

Introduction with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.

Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.

Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.

Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.

End of introduction

Alan Pringle: Hey, everyone, I am Alan Pringle, and today I am here with Gretyl Kinsey and Allison Beatty. Say hello, you two.

Gretyl Kinsey: Hello.

Allison Beatty: Hello.

AP: We are together here today because we want to talk about LearningDITA, our e-learning site for the DITA specification because we have just moved it to a new platform. So we want to give you a little background on what went on with that decision. So first of all, Gretyl, you and I were at Scriptorium when we kicked off this site, and I just went back and looked at blog posts. We announced it via blog post I wrote in July of 2015. So we have had this site up and running for 10 years, which absolutely blows my mind.

GK: It blows my mind too. It’s hard to believe that it’s been that long because it does seem like it got launched pretty recently in my memory, but it has been through a lot of changes and so has the entire landscape of content creation as well. So yeah, it’s really cool that now we can look back and say it has been 10 years of LearningDITA being on the web.

AP: For those who may not be familiar with the site, give us a little summary of what it is.

GK: Sure. So LearningDITA is a training resource on DITA XML and it’s developed by Scriptorium, and it covers a lot of the main fundamentals of DITA. So we have some courses on basic authoring and publishing. We also have a couple of courses on reuse and one course on the DITA learning and training specialization. So you get a good overview of a lot of different areas of DITA XML. And all of the courses are self-guided e-learning. So you can go through and take them at your own pace. You can go back and take the courses again if you want a memory refresher. And they all come with a lot of examples and exercises. So you get a download of sample files that you can work your way through. There’s some of that practice that’s guided, and then there’s others that you do on your own. And then there are also assessments throughout each course that help you test your knowledge. So you get a really nice hands-on approach to LearningDITA. So that’s why we called the site that in the first place. And it really helps to get those basics, those fundamentals in place if you are coming at it as a beginner who is unfamiliar with DITA or maybe you have some familiarity, but you want to just reinforce what you know.

AP: So we went along with this site and kept adding courses over the years. I think we got to nine, is that right? I think it’s nine.

GK: That’s right. So we really started this out, like I was mentioning earlier, that we needed something that was beginner-friendly, something for people who were unfamiliar with DITA because we saw a gap in the information that was available at the time 10 years ago. A lot of the DITA resources, documentation, guides and things like that out there were something that assumed some prior knowledge or prior expertise, and there wasn’t really anything that filled that gap. So we came up with these courses. And the nine courses that we have, the first one is just an introduction to DITA. So that was the first one that launched back in July of 2015. And then shortly after that, we added a few courses on topic authoring. So that covers the main topic types, concept, task reference and glossary entry. And then we just added more courses over time. So we’ve got one that covers the use of maps and book maps. We’ve got one that covers publishing basics. We have, like I mentioned, the two courses on reuse. So there’s a more introductory basic reuse course and then a more advanced reuse course, and then learning and training. So those are the nine courses that we have, and they’ve been up there pretty much the entire time. The earliest ones where that introduction, the authoring, and then we added the others as the demand increased over time.

AP: And that demand, I’m glad you mentioned that, really did increase because as of late 2024, we had over 16,000 students in the database for LearningDITA, which also completely blows my mind.

GK: Yeah, it does for me too, because I think in the early days we saw a lot more individuals using it, and then over time we would see more large groups of users sign up. So an entire class whose professor might’ve recommended taking the LearningDITA courses or sometimes an organization, whether it was one of our clients or just another organization, would have a lot of employees sign up all at once. And so yeah, over time that user base grew and grew. And now it does boggle my mind as well that it got all the way up to 16,000 users. I never expected it to grow to that size.

AP: Well, we didn’t really either, nor did our infrastructure. Because as of late last year, things started to go a little sideways and it became clear our tech stack was not going to be able to sustain more students. It was very creaky. The site wasn’t performing well. So we made a decision that we needed to take the site offline and we did to basically redo it on a new platform. And Allison, this is where I want you to come in because you are one of the, shall we say, victims on the Scriptorium side who got to dive into what our requirements were, what we needed to do. Essentially, I mean, we really became consultants for ourselves and turned our consultant eye at our problem to figure out what it was. And Allison, if you don’t mind, tell us a little bit about that process and where we landed.

AB: Yeah, so the platform was the first big choice that we knew we had to make, and things started out pretty fuzzy because we didn’t really know what we were doing and just had to figure out what was going to work to solve these pain points. And so as a starting place, we knew we needed a new LMS, learning management system. And so we did some research on what learning management systems were out there and thought about what we could use that would fit our needs. And we ended up choosing Moodle, which is an open source LMS that is very widely used within colleges and universities and higher education settings. And we knew it could be very powerful and probably suit our needs with some custom work. But the thing about Moodle is it’s known for having a high barrier to entry in terms of the installation, and that made us a little nervous. But the more we kept looking at LMS options, both open source and commercial, we realized that Moodle is so popular and industry standard almost for a reason and that it was worth taking on that challenge.

AP: And I even had someone in the learning space because I asked her advice, what LMS would you use? She pretty much said run away from Moodle because for a lot of the reasons that you just mentioned. But I think it’s worth noting, it does have… There are a lot of people using it, especially in educational settings, schools, universities. It’s also the open source angle was appealing because that way it didn’t look like we were picking “favorites” by picking a particular proprietary LMS.

AB: Yeah, definitely. And then the other piece of the puzzle there as far as how we’re going to display and host the learning content was the DITA transform for the content itself and how we were going to get the LearningDITA content into our LMS. And so we knew that Moodle is compatible with both SCORM and xAPI and we ended up deciding that we wanted to develop a DITA to SCORM transform because SCORM is something that we have discussed and worked on with other clients as we’ve been seeing this trend in learning and training content pickup.

I don’t know if Gretyl wants to talk a little bit about how she’s seen SCORM throughout various projects and why we decided it was something we wanted to pursue and learn more about ourselves.

AP: And what is it while you’re at it? That too.

AB: That’s a good question. I’ll just go ahead and talk a little about what it is without getting too deep technically. Basically it’s a standard for e-learning content and it provides communication that can do things like track grades within your LMS. In the LearningDITA, the previous site and the current site, you had to pass assessments to get to the next lesson. And so SCORM can handle things like tracking assessment completion and scores. It’s pretty flexible and widely used. It’s more or less just a standard, but it requires a pretty specific data structure for it to function because it’s expecting certain data structures that are defined in the standard for it to work in different environments. And Gretyl, would you like to talk a little bit about how we’ve seen the SCORM standard pop up through various client projects?

GK: Sure. So we have seen I think over especially these last 10 years since LearningDITA launched an increase or a bit of an uptick in clients who come to us with e-learning content specifically. Some of them, that’s the only content they have. For others, they are trying to get some sort of a process for developing both e-learning content and then other kinds like technical documentation, marketing content. But a lot of them end up going down this path where they realize DITA XML is going to be helpful for content creation, especially if they do have that cross-department collaboration or reuse that needs to happen. And SCORM has been something that we’ve seen crop up with a lot of these projects. Because like you mentioned, Allison, it offers all that flexibility around things like scoring the assessments, keeping that student data that’s needed. And we’ve also seen how it’s really good when you’ve got an organization that has to deliver e-learning content to multiple different LMSs. So let’s say they’ve got students in a lot of different geographical areas or different industries and they all use different LMSs. That SCORM package can be delivered into all of them and used. And so they get that flexibility. So we’ve seen this crop up in a lot of different client projects. And the more we saw it pop up in these different projects, the more we said this might be beneficial for us too. And we’ve seen all the different ways that these organizations have made use of SCORM packages and why not give it a try for our LearningDITA content. And which by the way, I just wanted to mention, I don’t think we explicitly said this, but all of the LearningDITA courses themselves are authored in DITA XML. So kind of meta layer there to think about. But because of that, we have to think about how are we going to publish this information, get these e-learning courses out onto the web. And so a DITA to SCORM transform, as Allison said, is the approach that we decided on.

AP: And those source files, by the way, are part of this open source project that’s out in GitHub. And we’ll put some links in the show notes about it. But you can look at the source files that we used and download them for free. They’re open source. You can look at them and even use them for your own purposes if you like.

GK: And one question I had there, so you mentioned that all of those files are free and LearningDITA itself, the website, the platform has always been free, but now we are introducing a new pricing model. And so Alan, I wanted to ask you about that, how that change came about, why we made that decision to go from an entirely free resource to something with a new pricing model?

AP: Yeah, that’s a hard one and it was not a fun discussion. It wasn’t. But basically considering we’ve got 10 years of work invested in this, we had both hundreds of hours invested in developing and maintaining the site and all the courses. We also have hosting costs involved. So it got to the point to where especially with those 16,000 students, things were just not sustainable. And the tech model, the tech stack was not working anymore. So we knew we had to do something and invest more time into the platform or frankly abandon it. And when you look at the choices, completely shut down the site and get rid of that resource or decide to charge very small amounts. The intro course will always be free. That was the decision that we made. And there will be coupon codes. There will be discounts for courses and other things. So we realize we are changing from the free model. Wish we didn’t have to do it. But looking at the reality of the time that we’ve invested in it and to keep it running in the future, that was a decision that we made to keep this running for the long haul.

GK: And I think, like we’ve said, we’ve seen so many changes in the content space, the industry itself over these years. And I think evolving and making sure that we are keeping track of the value that we add by having this resource makes sense to go to that pricing model.

AP: And I want to talk a little more about the Moodle part of this equation, because the way that it works is different than what we had before. And I think it’s worth noting the user experience is a little different. Because when you open up a course, it essentially opens up in a SCORM package viewer. Allison, could you talk just a little bit about how that experience is different?

AB: Yeah. So something that we noticed about Moodle is that it’s a very low-code, no-code type of platform. And so part of that SCORM decision was we wanted to be able to single source the content that lives in that repo or repository. We didn’t want to manually insert all that content. And so the way that SCORM ends up interacting with the Moodle site is that instead of having the content baked into webpages, it launches equivalent to an iframe, but it launches a second window where you take the course. And then when you close out that window, it ends your session. So don’t freak out if a second window pops up when you go to take your course. That’s the way that it is designed to work with the SCORM transform.

AP: And then Moodle records your activity, how well you’ve done with the quizzes, and all of that kind of information.

AB: And on the technical back end, all of that grade recording and assessment tracking is something that is handled because of the SCORM transform and how we built the Moodle site.

AP: And I think it is time for us to mention the people who really helped build that Moodle transform. Let’s call them out by name. Thank you to Jake Campbell, Simon Bate, and Melissa Kershes. Thanks to all of them for getting in there and helping us get that done.

GK: And I can just say after doing a lot of end user testing to make sure this works, I actually think it is easier to keep track of where you are than it was in our previous platform. I like that it pops things out into a new window. It really helps you, guide you along as you go through each part of the course. And it pops up with notifications about saving your progress if you need to stop and start a course at any point. And it does make it very clear where you are in the course and whether you have passed those assessments. And so the entire package does work really well. I think it’s really intuitive as an end user. And hopefully for all of you who go and take the courses on the new platform, you will see the same thing.

AP: I think it’s worth mentioning too, moving to this new platform, it’s going to give us opportunities to do more things in the future. We will be adding new content, especially as the DITA 2.0 standard comes out. So when that is released by the committee that controls the standard, we will do some updates to our courses. And I think we’re going to maybe do some micro learning perhaps, some live e-learning. We’ve got lots of choices here, so stay tuned for that.

And with that, Allison and Gretyl, I want to thank you very much for your work on the site and for talking with us today.

GK: Absolutely. Thank you.

AB: Thank you.

The post LearningDITA: What’s new and how it enhances your learning experience appeared first on Scriptorium.

In our last episode, you learned how a taxonomy helps you simplify search, create consistency, and deliver personalized learning experiences at scale. In part two of this two-part series, Gretyl Kinsey and Allison Beatty discuss how to start developing your futureproof taxonomy from assessing your content needs to lessons learned from past projects.

Gretyl Kinsey: The ultimate end goal of a taxonomy is to make information easier to find, particularly for your user base because that’s who you’re creating this content for. With learning material, the learner is who you’re creating your courses for. Make sure to keep that end goal in mind when you’re building your taxonomy.

Related links:

LinkedIn:

Transcript:

Introduction with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.

Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.

Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.

Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.

End of introduction

Allison Beatty: I am Allison Beatty.

Gretyl Kinsey: I’m Gretyl Kinsey.

AB: And in this episode, Gretyl and I continue our discussion about taxonomy.

GK: This is part two of a two-part podcast.

AB: So if you don’t have a taxonomy for your learning content, but you know need one, what are some things to keep in mind about developing one?

GK: Yeah, so there are all kinds of interesting lessons we’ve learned along the way from working with organizations who don’t have a taxonomy and need one. And I want to talk about some of the high-level things to keep in mind, and then we can dive in and think about some examples there. One thing I also want to just say upfront is that it is very common for learning content in particular to be developed in unstructured environments and tools like Microsoft Word or Excel. It’s also really common that if you are working within a learning management system or LMS for there to be a lack of overall consistency because the trade-off there is you want flexibility, right? You want to be able to design your courses in whatever way is best suited for that specific subject or that set of material. But that’s where you do have that trade-off between how consistent is the information and the way it’s organized versus how flexible is it to give your instructional designers that maximum creativity. And so when you’ve got those kinds of considerations, then that can make the information harder for your students to find or to use and even for your content creators. So we’ve seen organizations where they’ve said, “We’ve got all of our learning materials stuck in hundreds of different Word files or spreadsheets or in sometimes different LMS’ or sometimes different areas in the same LMS.” And when they have all of those contributors, like we talked about with multiple authors contributing, or sometimes lots and lots of subject matter experts part-time contributing, that really creates these siloed environments where you’ve got different little pieces of learning material all over the place and no one overarching organizational system. And so that’s typically the driving point that see where that organization will say, “We don’t have a taxonomy. We know that we need one.” But I think that is the first consideration is if you don’t have one and you know you need one, the first question to ask is why? Because so often it is those pain points that I mentioned, that lack of one cohesive system, one cohesive organization for your content, and sometimes also one cohesive repository or storage mechanism. So that’s typically where you’ll have an organization saying, “We don’t have a good way to kind of connect all of our content and have that interoperability that you were talking about earlier, and we need some kind of a taxonomy so that even if we do still have it created in a whole bunch of different ways by a bunch of different people, that when it gets served to the students who are going to be taking these courses, it’s consistent, it’s well-organized, it’s easy for people to find what they need.” So I think that’s the first consideration is that if you’ve got that demand for taxonomy developing, think about where that’s coming from and then use that as the starting point to actually create your taxonomy. And then I think one other thing that can help is to think about how your content is created. So if you do have those disparate environments or you’ve got a lot of unstructured material, then take that into account and think about building a taxonomy in a way that’s going to benefit rather than hinder your creation process. And that is especially important the more people that you have contributing to your learning material. It’s really helpful to try to gather information and metrics from all of your authors and contributors, as well as from your learners. So any kind of a feedback form that, if you’ve got some kind of an e-learning or training website where you can assess information that your learners tell you about, what was good or bad about the experience, what was difficult or what would make their lives easier, that’s really great information for you to have. But also from your contributors, your authors, your subject matter experts, your instructional designers, if they have a way to collect feedback or information on a regular basis that will help enhance the next round of course design, then all of that can contribute to taxonomy creation as well. When you start building a taxonomy from the ground up, you can look at all the metrics that you’ve been collecting and say, “Here’s what people are searching for. We should make sure that we have some categories that reflect that. Here are difficulties that our authors are encountering with being able to find certain information and keep it up to date or with being able to associate things with learning objectives. So let’s build out categories for that.” So really making sure that you use those metrics. And if you’re not collecting them already, it’s never too late to start. I think the biggest thing to keep in mind also is to plan ahead very carefully and to make sure that you’re thinking about the future, that you’re doing futureproofing before you actually build and implement your taxonomy. And I know we both can probably speak to examples of how that’s been done well versus not so well.

AB: Yeah, maintenance is so important.

GK: Yeah, and I think the more that you think about it upfront before you ever build or put a taxonomy in place, the easier that maintenance is going to be, right? Because we’ve seen a lot of situations where an organization will just start with a taxonomy, but maybe it’s not broad enough. So maybe it only starts in one department. Like they have it for just the technical docs, but they don’t have it for the learning material. And then down the road it’s a lot more difficult to go in and have to rework that taxonomy for new information that came out of the learning department. That if they had had that upfront, it could have served both training and technical docs at the same time. So thinking about that and doing that planning is one of the best ways to avoid having to do rework on a taxonomy.

AB: And I’m glad you brought up the gathering of feedback and insight from users before diving into building out a taxonomy. Because at the end of the day, you want it to be usable to the people who need that classification system. That is the most important part.

GK: Yeah, that’s absolutely the end goal.

AB: Usability.

GK: Yeah, and I think a big part of that, like I’ve mentioned, planning ahead carefully and futureproofing, is looking at metrics that you’ve gathered over time because that can help you to see whether something in those metrics or in that feedback is a one-off fluke or whether it’s an ongoing persistent trend or something that you need to always take into consideration from your end users. If you’ve got a lot of people saying the same things, a lot of people using the same search terms over time, that can really help you with your planning. And yeah, like you said, I think the ultimate end goal of a taxonomy is to make information easier to find, and in particular for your user base because that’s who you’re creating this content for. And with learning material, that’s who you’re creating your courses for. So you want to make sure that when you’re building that taxonomy, that that end goal is something you always keep in mind. How can we make this content easier for people to find and to use?

AB: Definitely. Something else that I am curious to get your take on is in this planning stage. So in my experience, I feel like there’s never nothing to start with. Even if there’s not any formalized standards or anything around classification of content, there’s like a colloquial system, right?

GK: Yes, very much so.

AB: Of how content creators or users think about an organized content, even if they’re not necessarily using a taxonomy.

GK: Yeah. A lot of times it’s very similar to when we just talked about content structure itself. That if you’re in something like Microsoft Word or Unstructured FrameMaker, even if there’s not an underlying structure, a set of tags under that content, there is still an implied structure. You can still look at something like a Word document and say, “Okay, it’s got headings at these various levels. It’s got paragraphs. It’s got notes,” and you can glean a structure from that even though that structure does not exist in a designated form, right? So taxonomy is the same way. You’ve got people using information and categorizing information, even if they don’t have formal categories or a written down or tagged taxonomy structure. There’s always still some a way that people are organizing that material so that they can find it as authors or so that their end users can find it as the audience. And so that’s also a really good place to draw from. If you don’t have that formal taxonomy in place, you do still have an implied taxonomy somewhere. And so that’s where, going back to what you said about gathering the metrics, that’s a lot of times how you can find it and start to root it out if you are looking for that starting point of here’s how we need to build this formal taxonomy. So I think that’s step one is after you’ve figured out why you need to have that formal taxonomy in place, what’s the driving factor behind it? Then start going and hunting down that information about your existing implied taxonomy and how people are currently finding and categorizing information, because that will help you to at least start drafting something. And then you can further plan and refine it as you take into account the various metrics from your user base, and then gather information across all the different content producing departments in your organization until you finally settle on what that taxonomy structure should look like.

AB: I know that the word taxonomy can sound complicated and scary and all that, but you’re never really starting with the fear of a blank page. Taxonomies are everywhere and in everything, even if they’re not formalized. Think about when you go to the grocery store and you know you need ketchup and you’re going to go to the condiment aisle to find that. There’s so much organization and hierarchy just in our day-to-day lives that exist already. That’s never a fear of a blank page with taxonomies. There’s just thinking of the future and being mindful that things may change and maintenance will happen.

GK: Exactly. I think that point that you made about even when you go to the grocery store, humans think in taxonomy, right? Humans naturally categorize things.

AB: And group things. Yeah.

GK: And so I think the main goal of having a taxonomy formalized is to take that out of people’s heads and actually get it into a real form that multiple people can all use together, and then that serves that ultimate end goal we talked about of making things easier for your users to find.

AB: Access. Definitely. I want to talk about some lessons learned based on taxonomies that you and I have worked with clients, and I’m thinking of how you’re never starting with a blank page. I’m thinking about one project in particular where we developed a learning content model and used Bloom’s Taxonomy as a jumping-off point for this learning model. That’s another option or another way to go about it is use the implied structure in combination with a structure that already exists and integrating that into your content model. And then on the other hand, I know we’ve also done taxonomies for learning where we’ve specialized a lot.

GK: And specialization is always interesting because we see that develop out of… If you are putting out information that is very specific, so for example, if you are putting out learning material or courses around… I’ll go back to the example from earlier. Here’s how to use this specific kind of software. Here’s a class that you can take to get certified for doing this kind of an activity and this kind of software. Then that’s when it makes sense to think about any kind of specialized structures that you might want to have that are specific to that software. And it can be the same in whatever kind of material that you’re presenting. If you’re saying, “Oh, we’re in the healthcare industry. We are in the finance industry. We’re in the technology industry,” whatever your industry is, there’s going to be specific information to that industry that you probably want to capture as part of your taxonomy. Those categories are going to be specific to that industry and to the product or material that you are producing or to the learning material, the courses that you’re creating. So that’s a really good thing to think about when it comes to that taxonomy development is if we are in any very specific industry where we need that industry-specific information in the taxonomy, then it’s going to be really important to specialize. And so if you’re working in DITA XML, specialization is creating custom elements from out of the box or existing ones or standard ones. And so whenever you think about a taxonomy that is driven by metadata in DITA XML, then that’s where you might start creating some custom metadata elements and attributes that can drive your taxonomy. And those custom names for those elements and attributes would be something that you do specialize in and that matches the requirements or the demands of your industry.

AB: Yeah, that’s spot on with the example I was talking about a while ago about how the Library of Congress uses Library of Congress subject headings, but the National Library of Medicine has their own classification system for cataloging. But under the hood, they’re both Dublin Core. They’re both specialized Dublin Core. You know what I mean?

GK: Yes.

AB: There’s different context and then… Yeah, totally. Oh, this was the question I was going to ask you. Is there a trade-off with heavy specialization in your taxonomy?

GK: I think the biggest trade-off is maintenance. So we were talking earlier about how when you’re doing that initial planning that you want to think about futureproofing and you want to think about how you can make it as easy to maintain as possible within reason, of course, because nothing is ever easy when it comes to content development.

AB: That’s true.

GK: But yeah, when it comes to heavy specialization, that’s the biggest thing to consider is that for any kind of specialized tagging, you have to have specialized knowledge, so people who understand the categories, who know how to build that specialization and how to maintain it. So you have to have those resources available, and you also have to think about when you need to inevitably add or change the material, how much more difficult is that going to be if you specialize tags. Maybe it’s going to actually enhance things. And so instead of making things more difficult, it might be a little bit easier if you are specializing because then you already have created custom categories before. And if you need to add one down the road, you’ve got a roadmap for that. But it really depends on your organization and the resources that you have available. And thinking specifically about learning content as well, I think one of the biggest areas where heavy specialization can be challenging is that it is typical to have so many part-time contributors and subject matter experts who are not going to be experts in the tagging system. They’re just going to be experts in the actual material that they’re contributing. And so if they have to learn how to use those tags to a certain extent, then sometimes the more customization or specialization that you do, the more difficult that can be for those contributors, and it can make it sometimes difficult to get them on board with having that taxonomy in the first place.

AB: Yeah, change management.

GK: So I think that’s the big trade-off. Yes, change management, maintenance, and thinking about the best balance for making sure that things are useful for your organization. That you’ve got the taxonomy in place that you need, but it’s also not going to be so difficult to maintain that it essentially fails and that your authors and contributors don’t want to keep it going.

AB: This is a big question, but who’s responsible for maintaining a taxonomy within an organization that develops learning content site.

GK: So I think there’s a difference here between who is responsible and who should be responsible.

AB: Oh, that’s so true.

GK: If we think about best practice, it really should just be I would say generally a small team who is designated for that role, who has an administrative role so that they can be in charge of governance over that taxonomy. Because if you don’t have that, if you don’t have the best practice or the optimal situation, then instead, what can happen is that either no one’s managing the taxonomy, which is obviously bad, because then it can just continue to spiral out of control, or it’s almost like a too many cooks in the kitchen a situation, where if you don’t have that designated leadership or governance role over taxonomy, and anyone can update it or make changes to it, then it loses all of its meaning, all of its consistency. I do think it’s important that it’s a small team and not one single person. Because if that person is sick or something, then you’re left high and dry. So you want to make sure you’ve got it’s a small enough team that it’s not going to have the too many cooks in the kitchen problem, but it’s also not just one person.

AB: Another reason that it’s not ideal to have just one person is diversity prevents bias in your taxonomy, right?

GK: Absolutely.

AB: If one person has a confirmation bias about a specific facet and they document it or build something that way, but no one in the organization… You know what I mean?

GK: Yeah. So that’s where that small team can provide checks and balances too.

AB: Totally.

GK: You can have things set up where maybe every person on that team has to approve changes that are made to the taxonomy, or when they’re initially designing it, they all are giving the final review and final approval on it, so that way you’re not having it just through one person and whatever biases that person might carry.

AB: And biases isn’t necessarily a negative connotation, but just that people see the world differently from person to person. And by world, I do mean learning content sometimes. Is there anything else that you wanted to cover?

GK: I think I just want to wrap things up by saying the big things to keep in mind, the main points that we talked about when you’re developing a taxonomy, whether it is for learning content or just more broadly, are to plan ahead, think ahead, do all of the planning upfront that you can, rather than just building things, so that that way you can avoid rework. Use the metrics of the information that you’ve gathered from both inside your organization and from your user base. And finally, keep that end goal in mind that this is all about making things easier for people to use, for people to find content and develop your taxonomy with that end goal in mind.

AB: Yeah, I agree with all of that. Well, thanks so much for talking with me, Gretyl.

GK: Of course. Thank you, Allison, for talking with me.

Outro with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

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