Scriptorium

In episode 71 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Barbara Green of ACS Technologies talk about getting started with DITA.

“We ran the conversion and got the content in DITA. It wasn’t structured the way it would be if you had started writing in DITA from the beginning. If I ever had another project, I would know to really take that into consideration.”

—Barbara Green

Related links:

Twitter handles:

Transcript: 

Gretyl Kinsey:     Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997 Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about getting started with DITA and taking the next steps forward with special guest Barbara Green of ACS Technologies. This is part one of a two-part podcast.

GK:     Hello and welcome to the podcast. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.

Barbara Green:     And I’m Barbara Green.

GK:     And today we’re going to talk about a case study with the project that Scriptorium did with ACS Technologies, started a few years ago and it’s still ongoing, about getting the company started with DITA. So first thing that I want to ask you, Barbara, is to just give us a brief overview of the company. Tell us what ACS Technologies does.

BG:     Okay, well, ACS Technologies has been in the business for about 40 years. We develop software solutions primarily for faith based organizations, and our corporate offices are in Florence, South Carolina, but we have distributed teams throughout the country and offices in Greenville and Phoenix as well.

GK:     All right, perfect. And when it came to moving into DITA, what were some of the reasons that you wanted to start looking into changing the way that you were developing content? What were the business drivers behind this decision?

BG:     Well, we were developing our flagship product at the time, which is called Realm, and it began to grow more complex even though we were still in the early phases. It wasn’t developed as a core product with modules that plugged in depending on the features our customers wanted, but instead features were turned off and on based on packages or experiences that customers required.

BG:     And so I guess about three, three and a half years ago, I realized we can’t keep documenting the way we’re doing. In the early stages of that development, writers could add notes here and there to help customers find their paths. But we knew this was not the user experience that we wanted to create and we also knew that the product offering was growing more complex and personalization was on the horizon. We also spent many hours formatting content.

BG:     So, right away we had four problems that were identified. We needed to target custom content, we needed to integrate content within the product, we needed better findability for sure. Search was a struggle. We had multiple output types and while we had tried very hard to move just to online, many of our customers still requested PDFs. We also were seeing content reused across various departments more and more and we really could not prove our value because we lacked a cohesive set of content metrics.

GK:     Yeah, and I remember when Scriptorium went in and helped assess all of these issues, those were the root cause of all of those were kind of coming from the fact that all of the content was being offered in a Wiki. So, all of the Realm help content was stuck in this silo that made it really difficult to achieve all of those things, especially things like search and reuse and personalization. And so I remember back when we were initially talking about this, that we were looking at all of these problems and DITA seemed like absolutely the logical solution to help solve all of them over time.

BG:     Yes, it did. When we had software products that were more modular in orientation, the Wiki worked okay. I’ll say that years ago the Wiki got us online where our help had not been online. So it had a value at the time. But we really outgrew it very fast.

GK:     Right. And I think that’s something that we’ve seen in a lot of different organizations where some solution that does help you at one time isn’t scalable in the way that DITA is. And so making that transition makes a lot of sense. So I want to get into talking some about how we actually went about getting everything up and running with DITA and the strategy that we put in place to make that happen.

GK:     And the approach that Scriptorium ended up taking with ACS Technologies was what we call a phased approach. So this was determined by a lot of different things including timelines, schedules, budgets, and it also gave us the opportunity to start small at a pilot level and then expand outward.

GK:     So, we set up content strategy in phases where each one built off of the previous one and we have pretty much stuck to those phases. The timeline of those has gotten a little off track from what we’d initially planned. Some phases happen more slowly, others have happened more quickly. But we initially outlined these phases and then just started tackling the plan in that order. And so I wanted to talk to you about how that’s gone and we can get into a little bit what those phases involved and how that played out in reality versus what we had initially planned.

BG:     Right. Yes, I think no one is more surprised than I that we’ve made it through four of the five phases.

GK:     Yes.

BG:     It’s like a dream come true, right?

GK:     Yeah, absolutely. And so, we really just started phase one. The big push there was just getting the content out of the Wiki and into Dita and so that involved a process of conversion. And so I wanted to just get your take on how that process went and what kinds of things that you wish you had known in hindsight.

BG:     Yeah. So, I guess the conversion itself after running several test iterations went very well considering the product we were converting from. The Wiki that we used puts a lot of junk code in the background. So, Lord bless the developer that had to write that for us. One of the big surprises there that we found is every time we had uploaded an image, there was a version of that image in the database. So, that was a lot of fun to try to figure out.

GK:     Oh, wow.

BG:     Yeah. But we ran the conversion and got the content in DITA. Now it wasn’t structured the way you would if you had started from the beginning writing in DITA and if I ever had another project, I would know better now to really take that into consideration. We’ve talked about, we don’t feel we made a bad decision converting content, but we have sat around the water cooler, so to speak, and talked about, “Hmm, would it have been easier to just start over?” Because we didn’t have a very large set of content at that point.

GK:     Yeah. And that’s something that I think all companies have to take into consideration. Is it easier to rewrite or restructure or reorganize your content on the front end before you convert or do it after you convert? And it’s a difficult question, especially when you’ve got such a small set of content. Because the good thing about that is it doesn’t take as much time either way compared to if you had hundreds of thousands of topics. But it’s still a big thing to consider to try and make sure that you take whatever approach is going to be the least amount of stress and time and effort on the people that have to do that work.

BG:     Right. And the driving factor for us to convert too was we had been given a timeline and so we felt like if we didn’t convert, there was no way we could meet that timeline. I guess one of my lessons just personally, as an information manager at the time, is push back on timelines.

GK:     Yeah. And I think that as content strategists here at Scriptorium, that’s an important thing too, is to be realistic about timelines, because we see that a lot where you’ll have executive pressure to get something done by a certain date, but then you often have to compromise. Do you get it done by this date and maybe it’s not done quite as well? Or in the same way that you would have done it if you had unlimited time? So, you have to find that sweet spot of what’s the right amount of time to do something correctly but still try to meet your deadlines or meet a schedule or not get things behind. And that’s always the challenge that I think companies face with something like this.

GK:     But as we know we did get through that phase. And so then phase two was basically an interim phase of using the content in Dita, managing it under source control with Git, and starting to deliver HTML output. Particularly a couple of different variants for different customers. And the main goal of that phase was just basically stay in it until you reached a critical point of needing a component content management system to manage things like workflow and publishing and especially publishing, all these different content variants.

GK:     And I think this was the phase that we stayed in a little bit longer than we had initially planned because I think we had planned for that to maybe be six months to a year and that ended up going on longer than we thought. So, I wanted to get your perspective on that phase of the project and how things went.

BG:     Yeah, so it did go on longer than we thought it would. It also went on probably longer than it should have from a technical standpoint, but again we’ve gotten through it. One of the lessons learned, and we’ll talk about this more later, is making sure that you have development resources in place.

BG:     Our designer lead at the time and our developers came up with a front end. It was a single page app for us to publish to and I think they refer to it now as a homegrown system. But our version control was in GitHub and that was a very steep learning curve that occurred at the end of the year. So, with the holidays and everything. It was not that writers can’t learn, they do. Writers everyday learn to use GitHub. But we did not have a pretty front end for GitHub.

BG:     We had to learn through command prompts and memorize command lines. I think we didn’t know any better. And so that was very technical. It was a steep learning curve and we were not all there all the time learning at the same rate. So we made a lot of mistakes with GitHub and we’d have to grab a developer and get them to help us figure out what we had done wrong.

BG:     Over time that evened out into the next year. But our homegrown system didn’t accommodate the complexity that we were adding on a very regular basis to our content. So, our company began to go through reorganization at that time. We had lots of change and change management. Technologies were changing, dev resources were stretched, writing resources were stretched.

BG:     And so sometimes we would make a change, commit it to Git, and we couldn’t publish. And we spent lots of time troubleshooting, would have to pull in development resources, and often those would get escalated. We would be putting SOS signals out to Scriptorium, what we had done wrong. So, it definitely had its hills and valleys. There were weeks that were extremely frustrating and then there were weeks that it went along pretty well. But it was a rough patch. I personally couldn’t wait to get into a CCMS.

GK:     Yeah. And I think what you just described with those peaks and valleys and with your homegrown system not being able to accommodate the complexity of the product and its content really embodies that critical point that I mentioned about when it’s the right time to move to a CCMS. And I think that one of the big challenges was that you reach that critical point but then still had to wait a little bit longer to get into a CCMS. And of course with that process, you always have to go through evaluating different options and figure out which is the right system for you, which is the best fit for your business goals and your content.

GK:     And so once we finally got the green light to do that, that’s when we moved into that phase. And so now I want to just get into talking about that. So phase three was getting into a CCMS and getting set up where you could have all of the workflow in place and where you could start to deliver more content variants, more of those personalized variants to different segments of your customer base.

BG:     Yeah, so we did go through a formal RFP process and that was really a great experience in hindsight. If anyone asked me the single most important piece of advice, I would say, don’t skip it, do it. So we picked our CCMS and for me that was my highest priority in my role, was to do whatever I needed to do to get that stood up, to get workflows in place, working with our vendor. All the little things that you have to do to make it ready for writers to move into. And we talked about moving day, what would be our moving day? We were ready to move into it, but we did have to wait on development resources to make some changes.

BG:     Our product, if a user’s in our product and they click the question mark, it takes them straight to the page and help that they need to view. And also our content was being … They needed to get to the right content for the package that they were using for the version.

BG:     And again, our complexity was growing. Scriptorium had recommended, we have no more than five versions or filters, variants. We were approaching … It would get to 20 and then 25 and I think we ended up at 36 or 37 variants. So, we had to wait for development to make that switch and then when they made that switch, what we were able to do then is we began authoring and version controlling workflow handled in our CCMS and they pulled our source files down and continued to run them through the DITA Open Toolkit to produce the various help pages. It did take a little bit of development work to get there.

GK:     Yeah. And I think that what you’ve mentioned about all those different variants to leads into where that phase with the CCMS bled early into the next phase that was planned, which was for phase four. We had recommended once you get to a certain number of variants, that’s too much to keep publishing all those different outputs. Whether you’re still in Git or in a CCMS, once you get that many variants we recommended that the best way to deliver content was through a dynamic delivery portal.

GK:     And what was really interesting was that that came for ACS, right on the heels of getting the CCMS. You got them both right back-to-back and it was an overlap where basically you chose your CCMS and then chose your portal right on the heels of that instead of having a longer phase in the CCMS. And so I want to talk to you about that overlap between those two phases and what led to that decision and how that’s gone so far.

BG:     Yes. That old phrase, be careful what you wish for, right? One of the best things that we did was our dev resources. We had some dedicated dev resources that did walk through the RFP process of the CCMS. And during that process, the concept of portals was introduced by more than one of the vendors. So there was a lot of excitement from development to get behind that for our sakes. And I really appreciated that.

BG:     And so that led to … Somebody started calculating the number of dev hours they were spending in the current front end we were publishing to and the writing hours that we were wasting troubleshooting the front end. The business case just got made much faster than I anticipated and we purchased the portal.

BG:     When I stand here today and think, “Wow, we stood up a CCMS and a portal in the same year.” I can’t even believe it. But we did. And it was a lot of work. But I’m glad in the long run that we did that. Now again, what we ran into is, I believe, that we had underestimated the technology that we needed to have in place in order for the portal to do the best job and I actually had anticipated design resources thanks to … Right now, I can’t remember her name, but someone had said, “Don’t underestimate design resources.” And so we had anticipated that and our UX team just did a fantastic job on the designs for our portal. It’s beautiful.

BG:     And so our design was in place but we just didn’t have everything. We didn’t have the dedicated resources we needed from development or the priority. We did eventually get to a place where those things have been put in place and our portal was up several months ago. Technically we could publish to it, but we were also still locked into a situation where we have to publish the old fashioned way, as we call it now.

BG:     And we will be doing user testing on it. We can already tell one of the big wins for us right now, builds take an hour and 10 minutes in the old system. They’re published within a minute, you can go out and see the new content that you wrote in the CCMS, pushed through APIs to the portal. It’s so fast. It’s such a time saver.

GK:     Yeah. And that makes a really big difference in terms of your time to delivery. So, that’s a really big accomplishment.

BG:     Yeah. It’s great. There’ll be some other tweaks and things that we want to make obviously, and we’re sort of now going, “Oh, could we do this? Could we do that?” But yes, it’s going to be great to turn that final switch and do away with the old system.

GK:     Yeah. And I think it’s really a good thing to show something like this, which is the ultimate point of your content strategy coming to fruition and you being able to deliver through that portal. Because that was … It’s not the final phase, but it’s a major delivery end point and I think achieving that goal in the timeline that you did, especially considering a lot of the challenges that you faced with reorganization in your company with resources being moved around and things being changed, it’s really I think quite uncommon to see a company stick to the plan that well and achieve the goals within that reasonable of a timeline.

GK:     I know that it’s very common for a lot of unexpected things to crop up. Sometimes you have to adapt your strategy and go in a different direction based on circumstances outside of your control. But I think it’s really impressive that ACS Technologies managed to really stick to the plan and has been able to prove the success of it phase by phase even with all of those external challenges.

BG:     Yeah, I think it is too. And I would definitely agree with you, caution anyone else that that is a big challenge to do both of those things in the same fiscal year.

GK:     And with that, I think we’re going to go ahead and wrap up part one. We will be back with part two in our next episode.

GK:     Thank you all for listening to the content strategy experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post Getting started with DITA (podcast, part 1) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 69 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Stephani Clark of Jorsek talk about using a scaled approach with DITA projects.

“The desktop publishing and single user tools are always going to have a much lower price tag than a DITA CCMS will, but there’s a trade off for what you’re getting.”

—Stephani Clark

March 2025 update: We have moved LearningDITA to a new platform. The Introduction to DITA course is still free, and you can sign up for courses at store.scriptorium.com.

Related links:

Twitter handles:

Transcript:

Bill Swallow:     Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode we talk with Stephani Clark of Jorsek about using a scaled approach with DITA projects.

BS:     Hi, everyone, I’m Bill Swallow.

Stephani Clark:     And hi, I’m Stephani Clark

BS:     And we’re going to talk a bit about a scaled approach to DITA projects. So Stephani, what would you say is the best way to get started with a DITA project without a huge investment upfront?

SC:     Well, I think there are lots of ways that you can get started with a DITA project without a huge investment up front. And I think there’s kind of a misconception that DITA is for these large enterprises. And if you’re anything smaller than that, then you probably can’t benefit from it. But the benefits are there regardless of what size organization, it’s just deciding how you’re going to invest if you wanted to move into a DITA environment. And so I think one thing to understand is that there’s always some investment, but I think that there is an opportunity to decide if that investment is going to be purely monetary or if you want to invest some time.

SC:     And there’s a lot of ways now to get started with DITA without the monetary investment that you can use best practices, reasonable tools, approaches to content conversion or publishing, self-education. There’s a lot of resources out there. And so I think that’s something that I want to kind of explore a little more in our conversation today is what can an organization do if they don’t want to go lay out a lot of money to implement DITA? So we can kind of look at each of these items I guess. But what are your thoughts on the best way to overall get started?

BS:     You mentioned that right off the bat that regardless of what your approach is going to be, there’s still going to be a cost associated with it. Do you want to speak a little bit to that?

SC:     Yeah. So let’s look at maybe an example which would be looking at content conversion. So oftentimes when you’re implementing DITA, one of the first steps that you have to take is looking at how are you going to move your content into the DITA structure and get it into a DITA environment. And a lot of companies will do like an engineered conversion and that’s great. I mean those come out really well typically, it’s engineered to your needs and your information model and that’s all fantastic. However, doing an engineered conversion can cost quite a bit of money. And some organizations look at that and see that as an immediate barrier to moving into DITA. But I think if you look at kind of that trade off, it’s going to cost something, it’s either time or money. You can look at easier, do it yourself approaches, whether that’s using a more generic conversion and doing the cleanup or even, I’ve seen companies with smaller sets of content do a lot of copying and pasting to move into a DITA environment.

SC:     So I think that would be maybe an example of, you know, you don’t have to go spend $10,000 on conversion or more, you could spend the hours to get the content cleaned up and in really good shape and get the same results.

BS:     Right. So there’s a mindfulness there between monetary budget and I guess time budget and the amount of resources you have available to get things done.

SC:     Yeah, you do have to have the resources. If you don’t want to spend the money, you need to take into account the time that your team or yourself are going to probably spend on some of the DITA implementation. But once you get rid of that huge price tag that some people see and get scared away by, and you look at it and kind of plan it, I think that that can be a really good approach for smaller teams or smaller organizations that want to start making that move.

BS:     So speaking of price tags, a lot of the tools out there generally come with some degree of sticker shock when you start looking at enterprise content management systems and so forth. Do you have thoughts around those?

SC:     Yeah, I think that is one of the big barriers as well. And one of the reasons a lot of organizations maybe don’t adopt DITA and decide, “Hey, we’re going to use these desktop publishing tools that are already available” or “I can produce a PDF out of Word. I don’t need this more elaborate system.” And so I think it depends on what system you’re looking for. Like the desktop publishing and single user tools are always going to have a much lower price tag than like a DITA CCMS will, but there’s the trade off of what you’re getting.

SC:     But I will say, I don’t want to make this too much about my organization, but one thing we’ve done at Jorsek is we just introduced this year some really low tier options. So people can get started for as little as $100 a month in a DITA CCMS. So there are tools out there that don’t have a six figure price tag that make it a lot more accessible to people and I’m sure there’s others out there as well that have options that are available at at kind of a lower price point

March 2025 update: We have moved LearningDITA to a new platform. The Introduction to DITA course is still free, and you can sign up for courses at store.scriptorium.com.

BS:     There’s always the option to use, to really go bare metal and use a source repository such as Git or something like that to at least get yourself started.

SC:     Absolutely. And a lot of organizations are doing that. We’re a DITA CCMS, we’ve seen a lot of prospects coming to us that are already in DITA, got themselves started completely on their own using Oxygen plus Git and then maybe in a few years you decide, “Hey we could probably benefit from a content management system” and it might make more sense at that point.

BS:     So we talked about tools, we talked about content conversion, what about the publishing side?

SC:     So I think publishing is another one of those kind of barriers to entry for DITA. And that is because most DITA publishing is done using the DITA open toolkit, which is an open source publishing engine. It gives you a ton of options. You can publish to any number of different formats, but the kind of caveat there is that there’s usually some initial setup required. So you have to develop a publishing plugin to apply you’re styling and all of your rules for how you want the output to look. The bonus of that is that later on, you have consistent output but the barrier is that yes, there’s an upfront investment, again, whether it’s time or money. If you’re doing it yourself or paying someone to develop it and so you have to look at how you can do that at a reasonable budget.

SC:     But one thing I’ll say is that DITA publishing, what I’ve seen, and Bill, maybe you’ve seen this as well, is that there’s a lot of open source options available to start from and that I’m seeing more options available that aren’t just DITA open toolkit that are maybe easier for people to use. Have you seen the same thing in the industry, Bill?

BS:     I’ve started seeing, yes, some of these, I would say more polished starting points popping up there. I mean the open toolkit is great in that it gives you some initial publishing targets that you can configure. But the catch is that you have to be able to configure them. So you know, if you’re doing PDF you have to know FO or you have to know cascading style sheets for print or for PDF, you need to be able to develop cascading style sheets for HTML. But a lot of tools start coming with some bare bones ones, with some more, I don’t want to call them visual editors, but they’re a good starting point for being able to lay out your output format and then be able to tweak things from there by going into the CSS and fixing things. So there are some options that are starting to creep out there, but they do still require a bit of tweaking to get it just right. Even if it’s just a matter of changing colors and fonts and dropping a logo in, it takes a little bit of time to get up and running, but certainly not as much as trying to configure a bare bones OT plugin on your own.

SC:     Yeah, I think you make a good point that not everyone has the skill set to do it. And so it is important to know that there are some good tools available out there that don’t require that advanced level of skill set. That even the average person could probably get in and do some basic CSS work. We’ve started using Prince XML somewhat, which is CSS for PDF and I know nothing about CSS and yet I can somehow manage to go in there and still like change colors and drop the logo and make it look pretty. So it’s a lower entry point I think then maybe some of the traditional DITA OT publishing options maybe.

BS:     Absolutely. So with regard to getting started, a lot of companies seem to think that it’s going to be a massive undertaking to get things rolling within a company. I know that we’ve seen a lot of companies start doing more of a proof of concept on that end to kind of get the ball rolling. And I was wondering if you’ve seen that as well and what types of, I guess, startup projects you see people implementing.

SC:     We have seen a lot of POCs too and I think a proof of concept, or POC, is a really fantastic way to get started. It helps you build your business case. It helps you validate any assumptions or ideas that you have and you can make it really focused around your core goals for maybe why you’re moving into DITA. So we have a few different POC options that we provide. So we have like two books, like you want to look at reuse and so you just get two pieces of content that are similar in the system and start working on it, to see how much you can reuse, how much easier it is to author and maintain and kind of prove out the points that you want to see. So I love a POC because it’s a great way to prove that a solution will work for you before you make any larger investments in it. What do you typically see with POCs that you guys have been working on?

BS:     Well, a lot of times we do see companies start looking at at least producing one complete deliverable of some kind. So they don’t go head first into converting everything over and focusing on making sure that everything is hooked up and working properly before they start outputting content. So they’ll pick a pet project usually. So if there’s a product development initiative going, especially if there’s a brand new product that’s coming out, usually they’ll align their proof of concept to that. This way, they’re not dealing with legacy content, so they don’t have to deal with conversion as much and they can get in and start authoring the correct way for DITA in the tools for their proof of concept and be able to design the primary. And when I say primary, I mean one, transform or publishing target for that particular deliverable. And most of the times we see that usually being some flavor of HTML.

BS:     This way it can be either served up on the web or provided in a lighter format with a product or what have you. But the key there is to not focus again on everything. If your proof of concept requires you to convert thousands of topics or thousands of documents or thousands of pages of content into DITA first, that’s going to delay getting that proof of concept out in front of people who need to see it to approve a larger investment. So we usually try to help companies identify a small manageable target that they can hit within a reasonable timeframe.

SC:     Yeah, I like that approach of starting from scratch and having a small reasonable project. I’ve also seen with POCs and one of the things I like about it is it’s a really good opportunity for at least like a core team of users to kind of gain experience with DITA, with the tools that they’re going to use and maybe learn some lessons early on in a low risk environment as opposed to trying to do like a full fledged implementation where there’s a lot more risk involved if you start making any mistakes or you have those learning points along the way.

BS:     Absolutely. And that actually brings up another good point and that’s to not try to inject too many bells and whistles into the design of your content upfront. And by that I mean introducing heavy amounts of DITA specialization, which is a customization of the model or using a lot of what I would say more advanced features because usually those require a bit more thought and a bit more set up before you can truly begin authoring your content. Things like using keys to change the context of your content and using a lot of conditional processing. I would shy away from using too much and focus on one goal.

BS:     If that goal is to produce, as you mentioned, two different manuals for a particular set of content, then focus only on that and using those conditions and not all the other bells and whistles that you might be able to use. Keep everything in mind that you want to use going forward, but focus on the key elements that are going to show the people who really will allow you to grow your implementation that “Hey, this thing is going to work for us.”

SC:     Yeah, I think that’s really great advice and it gets you started thinking about how your larger implementation might look and work and what you want to do, but again, keeping it focused for the POC on some simple goals. You kind of brought up one other point though, which is, when you’re getting into DITA, there’s all of these options. You know you can customize it to anything that you want it to be really. What do you suggest for people that are just starting to kind of learn about DITA, in terms of resources to educate themselves on some of these options?

BS:     That’s a good question. Actually. We do have LearningDITA.com, which is available if you head over there. It’s a 100% free resource for learning about DITA. Up there I believe there are close to maybe 10 or so courses that you can take and there are also several recordings available from past LearningDITA conferences. We do an online conference every February. That’s a great way to get started and get learning about it.

BS:     The other thing that I think is really important is to start taking into account everything you might need going forward. Even if you do have that DITA expertise, taking a strong look at your content and start thinking about how all the bits and pieces need to be able to work in this new environment. Because the goal of really moving to DITA is not so much changing tools and changing the format in which you’re offering, it’s changing everything about how you’re offering in order to deliver something better and to produce something faster. So look at where the inefficiencies are and start thinking about how you want to resolve those or at least identifying what you want to resolve before moving forward. Because the last thing you want to do when you have an investment in changing tools, regardless if you’re going to DITA or anything else, is reinventing the same problems in a new tool set.

SC:     Yeah, I think that’s a great starting point. I recommend LearningDITA to a lot of people and that’s how I got started in DITA surprisingly enough, was through your training courses. So great.

BS:     Glad to hear it’s working.

SC:     And for someone that’s just starting to look at developing a content strategy or what they may or may not need that DITA has to offer, do you have any suggestions for them to get started?

BS:     Well, of course the default answer is please contact us, but no, the best way to go about this is again to look at your content and also understand what the best practices are for authoring in DITA. Generally you want to keep things topic oriented and you want to identify your reusable pieces of information and make sure that you are separating those. Generally you want to do an audit over your entire content set and figure out what needs to be moved over and why it needs to be moved over and which pieces are going to be reused and how, and kind of getting your arms around everything that you had in your content before and what you wish you could have done better with it because chances are there’s a mechanism in DITA that will allow you to do something better with that content.

SC:     Yeah, that’s a great point. And I would just maybe double down on if you’re doing it yourself. I mean, if you’re not using experienced content strategists like Scriptorium folks, I would say always follow best practices. Don’t get too carried away. Try and be a little minimalist in doing just what you need to meet your goals and use the best practices for the industry. And there’s a lot of resources available, whether it’s DITA forums or other options.

BS:     Absolutely. I mean DITA affords you a lot of bells and whistles to do some really smart and interesting things with your content, but you have to be mindful to not try to use them all.

SC:     Yes, if you use them all, it can get a little confusing and complicated quite easily, so.

BS:     Absolutely.

SC:      Alrighty.

BS:     Alright, well thank you Stephani. I think this has been a great little talk.

SC:     Awesome. Thanks for having me Bill. Always nice chatting with you

BS:     And you.

BS:     And thank you for listening to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post DITA projects with a scaled approach appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 68 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Simon Bate talk about unusual outputs from DITA sources.

” With DITA, it’s incredibly flexible. We can generate almost any type of output that we want to with it.”

—Simon Bate

Related links:

Twitter handles:

Transcript:

Gretyl Kinsey:     Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about unusual outputs from DITA sources. Hello and welcome come to the podcast. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.

Simon Bate:     And I’m Simon Bate.

GK:     Today, we’re going to take a look at some different outputs from DITA that aren’t very common or widely used. I think the best place to kick off here is to talk about what is commonly used. What are the sort of more typical outputs that you see from those sources?

SB:     Yeah. We can actually divide this into two areas. One is the output formats and then the other is the output type itself. Among the usual DITA outputs, we have things like manuals, guides, essentially anything that’s paged. We’re predominantly talking about PDFs. Then there’s other outputs, which are more collections of HTML pages, whether it be websites or whatever. Then there are the formats themselves. Of course, the two groups that I’ve listed here, there’s a PDF output and HTML output.

GK:     Those are ones that are kind of delivered standard with the DITA open toolkit. One thing that we see a lot at Scriptorium is companies that ask us to come in and build customized versions of these outputs for their DITA content. We’ve had a lot of companies that want one or both of these output types and sometimes multiple versions. They might have one PDF transform that handles their manuals. They might have one that handles their data sheets or some other smaller file type, and then they might have HTML for all of their content as well so that they can deliver everything across the board in different ways.

SB:     Data sheets themselves are an interesting jumping off point for a discussion about unusual outputs because while I consider manuals and guides to be fairly standard output, data sheets often are an odd duck. Often you have a mapping where you have one DITA topic equals one data sheet. That’s not necessarily true, but that’s what we see a lot of the time. But data sheets because of the density of the information that’s in it require often a specialization or a lot of output class usage and with that comes a great deal of author training or buy in. Anybody writing a DITA topic that’s going to be converted to a data sheet has to know right from the start that that is one of the… The data sheet is a possible output for this content.

GK:     Absolutely. I think, like you said, that is a good jumping off point into talking about some more unusual or not so typical outputs that you might get from your DITA sources. I want to start off that discussion by talking about some of the benefits of these less typical outputs. What might make a company say, okay, we’ve got a real case here to go from DITA to something a little bit more unusual than PDF or HTML?

SB:     Well, often we find that the clients want to do this because they’re using their DITA already to create what we consider a usual output, but in addition for one reason or another they have a requirement for generating some other kind of output. Part of the desire is to use the same DITA sources to generate both the standard output and to go to some specialized or unusual output format.

GK:     Absolutely. I think some of the examples that we’re going to get into and talk about more in depth, one of them is something that we’ve actually covered quite a bit on the podcast, on our blog and even in our LearningDITA live presentations and that is going from DITA to InDesign. One thing that we’ll do is include in the show notes for this episode some links to all of the different content that we’ve produced around that. One of our consultants, Jake Campbell, has done a lot of work on DITA to InDesign and that’s definitely one of those sort of unusual output formats from DITA. But the use case there is that for the most part, the DITA content was going to those usual outputs like PDF or HTML that there were a few types of documents.

GK:     Maybe you’ve got data sheets or maybe you’ve got a marketing slick or something that needs to be a little bit more highly formatted, highly designed and customized before it’s actually sent to the printer or posted on the website or what have you. In that case, taking your DITA source into InDesign and doing some of those really specific tweaks to the formatting that you can’t get from something more standardized like a PDF transform is a really good way to do that and not compromise your design.

GK:     That’s kind of one of the possible use cases for going to a sort of less typical output format is if you for the most part want to have a standard templatized design for your PDF output, but maybe you’ve got this one set of data sheets or something that does need that extra finessing in InDesign, then you have that transform that takes your DITA sources to InDesign. Then that way you still have all of your DITA in a single source and you don’t have sort of disconnected content being done over here in InDesign and then all the rest of it in a different repository in DITA. You still have that shared repository single source. That’s a really big benefit there. I want to get into now talking about some examples of unusual outputs from DITA.

GK:     Simon, I know you’ve done a lot of work on transforms for these, and so I wanted to just ask about some of the different ones you’ve done and what that kind of process has involved.

SB:     Well, one of them that we can talk about right away is sort of usual and that is EPUB. EPUB, of course, this is standard. Now this is what, version of three of the standard. Essentially what it means is taking HTML output and then packaging it together with a number of other XML files, the document that describes the structure of your EPUB. In there, as well as with a lot of things based in HTML, most of the work is actually in building the files that describe the thing. We’ve already gotten the transforms prepared for doing the HTML transform. Usually it requires not much change for going to an EPUB. Sometimes some CSS work. But for the most part, the actual work is in doing, as I say, the packaging.

SB:     With EPUB, that gets to be one of the problems because I’ve found in working in EPUB it’s a very frustrating standard to work with.

GK:     You mentioned that EPUB is a little bit of a difficult output type to work with. What are some of the challenges that are involved with developing a DITA to EPUB output?

SB:     A lot of them are actually in the sequencing. There’s a particular XML file that describes the order in which things come. It’s been a little while since I’ve touched it, so I can’t remember exactly where the problems lay. But there were issues with particularly dealing with the front matter of the EPUB, trying to get a title page in, trying to make sure the table of contents fit in, and other pagination things around that. That was in particular the really hard part. Flowing the text, most of the text actually is very straight forward. Some of the problems come with things like titles of the content. For normal structure of content with various nested topics with titles in them, those will fall out okay.

SB:     But when you start introducing things like a topic head in a map, there’s not much provision within the EPUB standard for a title to exist without any content below it. You have a title, then you go straight to the title of the next thing down, that’s rather difficult to deal with an EPUB.

GK:     It sounds like there are difficulties with regard to how EPUB renders the DITA structure, but then one thing that I can remember from testing EPUB output as well is that there’s a bit of a challenge for making sure the EPUB displays consistently across different mobile devices as well. I know that that’s a big consideration if you’re thinking about EPUB output is how much control do you want over how it displays on an iPad versus a Kindle versus any other sort of e-reader or mobile device or tablet because it’s really, really difficult to ensure it looks the same and I would say probably impossible to make sure it looks the same.

SB:     Not just across different devices. There are also a number of different readers out there on some platforms. On Macintosh and on PC, there are a number of different readers. On some less restrictive tablets, say Android, there are a number of readers you can find. For Apple, there are a handful of readers. The Apple Reader itself has its own quirks. When you test it, you have to look out for all of those things. Kindle actually brings up a whole different set of problems because the Kindle format is not quite the same as the EPUB 3 standard or EPUB 2 even. You have to make additional changes, additional modifications to go to Kindle.

GK:     Yeah. I think those are all really important things to think about. Sort of with all of these unusual outputs that we’re talking about, there are sort of different risks and different considerations to make sure that you think about before you start building those outputs.

SB:     That’s right. It’s not just the transform. It’s the testing. For some of these formats, that can consume great amount of resources.

GK:     Absolutely. What’s another unusual output that you’ve worked on?

SB:     I think through this discussion we’ll be diving deeper and deeper into weirder and weirder outputs. The next one again can be expected to be a normal output in some sense and that is LMS or learning management systems. Often people want to go either from a normal DITA that is topic, concept, task, and reference or even the Learning and Training Specialization into a content that’s consumed by a learning management system. Of course, there are dozens and dozens of learning management systems. There’s a wealth of experience to be had there and we haven’t even touched much of it at all really. One thing that’s used a lot in learning management systems is the SCORM standard.

SB:     The SCORM essentially allows you to build a package, which is transportable supposedly across learning management systems. Although our experience with SCORM is the implementation or actually putting the content out into SCORM, actually you have to have the learning management system or the JavaScript that’s driving it in mind while you’re building the SCORM.

GK:     Yeah. One use case that I wanted to bring up with regard to learning content going into a learning management system is actually LearningDITA.com.

SB:     That’s right.

GK:     That is, as most of you probably know, Scriptorium’s free e-learning resource for DITA training. We have actually or I should say Simon has developed the process that takes content from DITA into the LMS that we use for that.

March 2025 update: We have moved LearningDITA to a new platform. The Introduction to DITA course is still free, and you can sign up for courses at store.scriptorium.com.

SB:     That’s correct. For LearningDITA, we used the Learning and Training Specialization for all the sources. In fact, if you want to, you can go into GIT and access Learning and Training sources yourselves and see what we did with it. Now, moving it into the learning management system was an interesting thing because first we had to find a learning management system. We found one that’s actually a plugin for WordPress. WordPress itself brings up its own issues. The transforms themselves, we had to do several things. One is we had to figure out how the learning management system fit into WordPress and what the files looked like for that.

SB:     Now, when you’re looking for learning management systems, if you’re going to be doing anything like this, one important consideration when you’re looking at learning management system is to think about the import, the import limitations or whatever facilities there are on import for the LMS. It turned out for us what we needed to do was to craft some files in a particular form and then be able to import them into WordPress. A lot of the work there really was reverse engineering. We took a look at WordPress import and export files and found the important parts, the pieces that we needed to preserve, and what we could pull in from metadata from the topics, what we actually had to specify when we were doing the import.

SB:     Then we created the transform to take our DITA and transform it to the XML, which we can then import into WordPress. Now, in addition to the actual topics themselves, the learning management system managed the questions. I’m sure many of you have been in LearningDITA and you’ve experienced the quizzes at the end of each of the sections and those quizzes are managed by the learning management system. There’s an entirely separate file format that we had to come up with for that. We had to, again, reverse engineer how the learning management system needed its question.

SB:     Then there’s also a complex process that we go through to first import the topics themselves into a WordPress and then a separate process for importing the questions into the learning management system and then tying the whole thing up and tying it up with a bow.

GK:     If you’ve got a situation where you have content creators, let’s say in the training department they’re working in DITA and they need to create output that goes to a learning management system and let’s say you’ve also got your technical content is sharing that same DITA source and maybe some other different departments, they’ve all got content in that same DITA repository, what are some of the considerations that the training team would need to keep in mind when it comes to choosing an LMS so that that output can be as efficient as possible?

SB:     That’s kind of hard. I think a lot of it gets back to my initial statement that the import facility has to be there. Much of the issue with learning management system itself is just mapping from the DITA into what you can move into the learning management system. With DITA, it’s incredibly flexible. We can generate almost any type of output that we want to with it. I can’t think of any limitations actually in the authoring because almost everything has to be done in the transform itself. Now, once you’ve selected the learning management system, that selection process may come with certain limitations, certain things that are possible to do in learning management systems, some things that are not. That then is going to feed back into what the writers can do or what your content creators can do.

GK:     Yeah, and that’s why it’s so important I think to keep up that communication amongst everybody that’s going to be using your DITA sources and contributing to it and making sure that what one team does doesn’t affect something that another team’s going to do in a negative way and that everything’s working together as sort of this DITA ecosystem. Speaking of training materials and training content, you’ve also developed another output type, which is DITA to slides. I wanted to talk about that a little bit.

SB:     Yeah. That actually falls into two different groups. There was the initial attempt that I made a number of years ago. As part of my work here, I do a lot of training. I thought, well, the training content itself ought to be in DITA. That’s fine for putting together the sheets that I work from when I’m doing training, but then we’d also want those same materials to be presented in slides on the screen while I’m doing the training. It occurred to me that I could write a transform. HTML seemed to be the obvious choice. It was a fairly flexible and it could be used almost anywhere. We can take this content and transform it, and I can generate my slides and I can generate my handouts and other training materials all from the same content.

SB:     There were some things that I had to do and this actually will get into the second aspect of doing a training or slide material and that is there has to be a system somehow of indicating what you do want to have on the slides and what you don’t want to have on slides. With my first slide transform, what I was able to do is make certain rules about where things appeared in bulleted lists, whether it was in a paragraph within the list item or not, and then add some output classes to say, this is not for the slides, this is not for the printed output. Then using those rules, I could generate materials for both. The second effort onto doing slides is a little bit more complex. This is at a client request.

SB:     They had a bunch of training materials and they needed to have it not just as handouts, but they wanted to use PowerPoint. We will talk about going to Word a little later, but we’ve had some previous experience in trying to go to Word or Office packages. This time around it occurred to me there were two things, and one is my experience was in dealing with almost anything in Office, hierarchy is mostly… Hierarchy is ignored. You have to throw out the hierarchies. That is you have to flatten your structure. But the other thing was that in our other effort, we went directly to the XML, the Office XML format. That turned out to be a really, really hard thing to do.

SB:     This time around it occurred to me, well, Microsoft Office has a great VBS, that is Visual Basic Library, for loading things into PowerPoint files. What I did was created something that’s a two step process. The first process is to take the DITA and to flatten the structure. While I’m flattening, I can do a lot of pre-processing, I can identify things. The output of the pre-process is essentially built with slides in mind. As I’m building this out, I can build out decks of slides from the content and tag things accordingly. This output format by the way is not XML, and I’ll get into that in a little bit later. With the output format I can then put all the content that’s going to go out and then I take that output format and run a Visual Basic Script on that output file, on that flat file.

SB:     The Visual Basic then actually finds the PowerPoint template, opens the template as a new document, and then starts to load content into that template slide by slide based on the content of the flat file. Because it’s based on the content of the flat file and because I found parsing limitations very, very restrictive in Visual Basic, I just used a plain text file that has some simple delimiters. It would be really nice, it would be much, much nicer if I could have used XML, but unfortunately I couldn’t. I looked into a number of different ways of using XML in Visual Basic and it’s just not possible. I can parse the file with my simple rules in Visual Basic and load it all into the slides.

SB:     One of the other things that I found as I was working in Visual Basic was that there are actual differences between how Visual Basic behaves in windows and how it behaves in Macintosh. I do a lot of my development work in Macintosh, but the client was in Windows and we knew that was going to be an important target for them. We started testing in Windows and found that things that I had developed in Macintosh just did not work under Windows. Interestingly while I was trying to develop some other things in the process itself, I found the lesson back the other way. I was looking, did Google searches, trying to see how in Visual Basic I could create a file selection dialogue let’s say to find the file that we’re going to be loading into the template.

SB:     I could find lots of things about how to do it on windows. I thought, well, it should work just the same on Macintosh. It turned out it didn’t. On Macintosh, actually I had to write a whole separate routine for locating the file and loading that file into the script.

GK:     Yeah, and I think that really gets back to some of the points that we made earlier when we were talking about EPUB and testing across different platforms and different readers, and then the same thing with going to something like SCORM and testing across different LMS’. It’s going to be different across different systems, operating systems as well. That’s something to keep in mind if you have to build one of these types of outputs to consider are you just using Windows or just using Macintosh or do you maybe have a use case for both? That’s all going to play an important role in kind of how much time and how many resources are going to be involved in developing an output like this. Earlier you mentioned that you had done some work for not just PowerPoint, but for Word as well.

GK:     Tell us a little bit about that and kind of how a DITA to Word transform works.

SB:     Right. To recap what I was saying initially was that we had gone from DITA straight to the Word DOCX XML format, which turned out to be very, very difficult to work with. It’s very, very difficult to test, very difficult to get things right. It expects things in a very particular order, and it expects all the content to be flattened out. We were successful. We managed to complete the project going to Word. But if we were to do it again, we would certainly use the Office libraries and again use Visual Basic. The nice thing is now that we’ve got a format that we can use for flattening the file, the text file that I’ve developed for PowerPoint will actually work very well for Word. In the future if we need to go to Word, we’re all set and ready to go with that.

GK:     That’s really great because I think it is pretty… I don’t know if common is the right word, but I think it’s pretty smart if you have got a lot of people using Microsoft Office products that you might want to have an output that goes to Word and an output that goes to PowerPoint, that both kind of used that Visual Basic starting point. I think that makes a lot of sense if that’s kind of a need at your company that you know that you’ve got a lot of people that need to take that DITA content into various Microsoft Office programs, that having that Visual Basic beginning point is really a solid plan.

SB:     There’s actually a third Office product, which leads actually into the next area of things that I was going to discuss, and that is Excel. Because Excel, of course, spreadsheet is nothing more than a database in a matrix. We’ve done a number of things converting our DITA content to database formats of one kind or another. But some of the other formats that we’ve gone to for database, they’re all fairly much the same and because they’re all text formats, fairly easy to go to. That includes comma separated value files. There we’ve often had people who say, well, we need a table converted to a comma separated value files so that then we can load it into a database or we can load it into Excel. We’ve also done a number of things using JSON as our output format.

SB:     JSON is very nice because it’s a nicely structured format. It’s a little bit more forgiving than say comma separated values are particularly when you’ve got content that might have commas in it. Also, JSON is readily interpreted by a number of tools, including JavaScript. In face, JSON was based around JavaScript and for that reason is very, very useful format to create data in. Almost all of these when we need to go to a database, usually we’re starting with DITA content in tables. It may be a pricing table that’s in a data sheet and DITA also needs to go into some database or other. Often it’s lists of standards, lists of product availability, what are the serial numbers associated with the product with particular specifications and those types of very catalog like things.

GK:     We’ve talked a lot about taking DITA content into some of these Microsoft-based products like PowerPoint and Word and Excel, but what about going in a different and I guess more visual direction and taking DITA into SVGs or Scalable Vector Graphics?

SB:     That’s actually an interesting thing and for me a very fun thing to do. I like playing with graphics. I like playing with SVG. SVG itself is nice because it’s an XML format, so we’re going from DITA, which is XML, to another XML format, which is always a whole lot easier than trying to go to something else. We’ve gone from DITA to SVG for a number of different output types. Some of them are things like diagrams of registers in chips. We have content in a table, and we can take that tabular content, which specifies a bit offset position, width for the field, and what’s the content of that register, watch the register’s name or actually the field’s name, and then lay those things out into an image that looks vaguely descriptive of the way that register appears.

SB:     This was incredibly useful to one of our clients because they had thousands and thousands of these things. The information was extracted first from a database and then moved into XML in DITA and then we pulled it out and were able to format this.

GK:     Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of cases too where you have parts diagrams where different pieces have to be labeled. For localization purposes, they wanted the text to be in one layer and the image to be in another. That’s where SVGs were really, really helpful. We’ve seen that as a major use case for going from DITA to SVG. We’ve also seen things like with training content, if you’ve got a hotspot style question or something where you’re matching up pieces of text to pieces of an image, then that’s where SVGs can be really helpful as well to again have that separation where your text is in one layer, your image is in another. That works for both that and for localization purposes. There’s a whole lot of benefit that you can get out of having SVGs as an output format.

SB:     That’s correct. It works not just in the SVG, but actually in the DITA sources themselves because we have one client where they have some massive tables that describe in detail how you put together a particular part number that describes a particular thing. Again, there are fields where there are values, so an A represents a yellow one and a B represents a green one, things like that. We can take that information from the DITA content and create a diagram that shows again how a person making an order would put together the part number for their appropriate piece of equipment. One of the things we can do at the same time is we can generate a list on the side of what are the actual names of these things.

SB:     Now, this information comes from DITA and the DITA can start out in English as the primary language, but also the DITA then can be translated. We can take in that translated DITA and then convert it into just the same table, but only in German or Swedish or Spanish or whatever we want to choose at that time.

GK:     We’ve talked about SVGs as something where you’re going from DITA which is one XML format to another. I know that one thing that I wanted to address is going from XML to something else instead of necessarily DITA to something, are there any cases where you’ve just gone from XML to another format or maybe XML to XML in a similar way that you’ve done with SVGs?

SB:     Yes. Getting back to some of our earlier examples, we have gone from DITA to XML when dealing with training materials because again, we’re dealing with content in an LMS. The LMS’ input isn’t necessarily going to be DITA. In fact, it usually isn’t DITA, but often the LMS will take its input content in an XML file. We have to go to the XML file to do that.

GK:    I want to kind of attempt to wrap things up with a final I guess not just question, but set of questions or considerations around unusual outputs and that is just what advice would you give if a company is thinking about maybe they’ve already got PDF or HTML or something that’s more typical, but then they’re thinking about adding maybe DITA to PowerPoint or DITA to InDesign or something that’s a little bit less common? What advice would you give them regarding the time and resources involved and some of the challenges that they might come up against that they might not have encountered when they did their more typical outputs?

SB:     Well, there’s a great deal of crystal ball time, of course. The real problems you’re going to find are when you get to a brick wall. You work on something and then you find that actually there’s no way to do it or it’s going to require something different. Often that something different in DITA translates back into either using an output class or creating a specialization. If you can, look at the formats, look at where you’re going and what are some of the requirements of that format and are there going to be things that may be difficult to come to from DITA. You can do some of that work early on, but a lot of that experience, a lot of that learning is going to actually occur when you’re actually trying to go into whatever format you’re going to.

SB:     I would say in general pad your estimates, build in a lot of extra time to allow for dead ends, allow for where you had to try… You thought your implementation was going to go in one direction, but you found out eventually that you have to do something different for that.

GK:     Yeah. I would agree 100%. I think that going to something that’s a less typical output does require a whole lot more time and resources for testing, for not just testing, but testing the limits of what’s possible. It’s important to think about that and not say, oh, you know, it took such many hours to develop PDF, so it’ll be about the same for InDesign. That’s absolutely not the case at all. You really have to think about what are you trying to do? What are the possible limitations that you’re going to run into? What are the compromises that you’re willing to make when you do run into a limitation because it’s pretty much inevitable, and how much budget or time resources do you have to dedicate to developing that output?

GK:     Those are all really important things to think about when you’re still in the planning stage before you get too deep into it.

SB:     That brings to mind another thing is part of your work is going to be training your authors because there’s often going to be things, whether it’s an output class or a specialization, where the authors are going to have to know about particular decisions you had to make, things they have to do, things they have to do a particular way in order to get it to work. You’d like it to be just perfect that you can author anything in DITA and convert it into whatever your target format is, but the truth is you will find limitations and you will have to work around those limitations, but then you have to communicate how do you work around those limitations to your writers.

GK:     I think that gets to a point too about kind of what are the importance of your different outputs, what’s the priority for you. Because if you have a very, very strong business need to go from let’s say DITA to Word and that’s kind of a much more atypical output than DITA to PDF or something, but that’s something that’s very, very important for you, then that does have a lot of impact on maybe how you’re writing and structuring your DITA content. It cuts both ways and you can’t just take one particular method or standard of writing your DITA content and then say this is going to work across the board for PDF and HTML and Word, PowerPoint, InDesign, whatever. You have to think about which outputs are the most important to us and then what needs to be in our DITA content model to support that.

SB:     Yeah. On top of that, I would say the last thing on testing or trying to come up with your estimates, and we’ve hit on this a number of times already in here, is just that there are differences across platforms, there are differences across tools. If you’re going to be using a number of different ones, you’re going to be using several different platforms, you have to make sure that’s part of your testing plan. You have to also plan for that in your time to know that you’ll have to add extra time to build in those accommodations for those other platforms.

GK:     Absolutely. I think kind of to wrap things up, our final parting words of advice would be something along the lines of these unusual outputs can do a lot of really cool and interesting things for you and they might satisfy some really important business requirements, but it comes with the caution of plan ahead. Really, really think about the considerations as you would do with anything content wise before you go ahead with those types of outputs.

SB:     Yeah.

GK:     Well, thank you so much, Simon, for joining me today. And thank you for listening to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post Unusual DITA outputs appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 67 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Kaitlyn Heath and Sarah O’Keefe continue their discussion on measuring content value based on accounting principles.

“Language evolves. Your content actually needs maintenance, just like your house.”

—Sarah O’Keefe

Related links:

Twitter handles:

Transcript:

Kaitlyn Heath:     Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In part two of the content accounting podcast, we focus on how to apply the concept of a balance sheet to content. Hi, I’m Kaitlyn Heath.

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

KH:     And today we’re continuing our conversation about balance sheets and content accounting. So, tell us what a balance sheet is, as applied to content accounting.

SO:     So a balance sheet, at least for me, was the thing in accounting that took really the longest to understand because they make my head hurt. But basically a balance sheet, if you take something, let’s start with a house because before we move on to content…

KH:     Sounds good.

SO:     Yes. So, if you have a house, you own a house, it’s worth $1 million but you have a mortgage on the house for $900,000. And so you have an asset that’s worth $1 million but you have a mortgage, a liability, which is $900,000, which then implies that your equity in the house is $100,000.

KH:     Okay.

SO:     So, the balance sheet is called that because it always has to balance. Your assets always have to balance or equal your liabilities, your debts plus your equity.

KH:     Okay.

SO:     That’s the concept of a balance sheet. So, when you do this in regular accounting, you have your bank accounts under assets, you have your loans under liabilities, and then the equity is the difference between the two, basically. And it all kind of works out.

SO:     Now, we think about that from a content point of view. Right? Okay. Well if you have a content balance sheet, what’s your asset?

KH:     The content.

SO:     The content. Except is it really? What if your content is really bad?

KH:     Okay. So maybe that’s a liability.

SO:     So maybe it’s a liability. So broadly, yes, you have your asset, which is your content. We hope it has a positive value.

KH:     Right.

SO:     And then you have your liabilities, whatever those may be, we’ll talk about that. And then sort of the difference between the two is your overall content equity.

KH:     Alright.

SO:     Alright, so on the balance sheet you’re going to… Oh, and by the way, an asset is defined as something that has long-term value to the business. So I would argue that for example, a tweet…

KH:     Is not long-term.

SO:     Probably not an asset, right?

KH:     Right.

SO:     But maybe your process or your system of extracting tweets and putting… You schedule them, you put them somewhere, you have a whole strategy for how you do that. That might be a long-term asset, just not necessarily the individual tweets. And then of course, if a single tweet goes viral, then all bets are off. So let’s just set that aside. Rarely an issue for those of us that live on the technical content side, the viral tweets. So we’ll just move on.

SO:     Content, product information, product overviews, product descriptions, technical documentation, knowledge-base articles. All those things are content, white papers, and they have value, we hope. You have the actual systems that you use to produce the content, a content management system, a delivery system, a content portal, the branding you’ve implemented on the system, the work that you’ve done to make your website look nice or behave properly. You have supporting assets like glossaries. You wrote a definition of a particular term where you put a lot of work into that, you use it in a lot of places, it’s an asset. Taxonomies are an asset or could be. Content models, you have a standardized way of writing knowledge base articles. You have a standardized way of writing white papers. You have a standardized way of writing how-to information. Those are all potentially assets.

SO:     And then on the localization side, most of those things but also translation memory, your translation management system, whatever that kind of pipeline looks like. Translation memory is the big one, right? All those pairs where you have the original, let’s say, English sentence and the target sentence in German, you can reuse it, it’s awesome. So those are all assets.

KH:     Okay.

SO:     Okay? But assets tend to depreciate. So if you think about your house, you have to do maintenance on it or it’ll eventually fall down.

KH:     Yes.

SO:     Okay. Well, it turns out the same thing is true for content, which is kind of horrifying and we don’t think about it that way. But think about, in the olden days, when we used to explain to people, if you go look at old technical documentation, there’ll be 20 pages up front that explain how to use a mouse.

KH:     Right.

SO:     This is how to single-click, this is how to double-click, this is how to right-click. Because the assumption was people didn’t know how to do it. You had to include it in your documents. Well, these days, you produce something like that, people are going to look at it and go, “Oh, hello, 1990s.” And that’s bad. So, your content has to be refreshed and updated periodically or you run into trouble, especially in countries or in languages that are newer to technology. Language evolves. So, the term that was used for computer 10 years ago might not be the term you use any more.

KH:     Interesting.

SO:     Or you see a lot of reference to cellular devices and now everybody talks about mobile phones, that kind of thing. So, you have to be careful because your terminology can actually become outdated over time.

KH:     Your content might need maintenance.

SO:     Your content actually needs maintenance, just like your house.

KH:     Right.

SO:     So that’s something to consider, right? That it might depreciate. If you want to make content valuable, it needs to be accurate.

KH:     Right?

SO:     It should not be wrong. Wrong is bad. It should be relevant. Again, cellular phones and how to double-click, I mean, it might be accurate but it’s kind of like, Ugh.

KH:     A little bit useless.

SO:     Little bit useless. Targeted to the right audience, useful to that audience. So you’ve thought about your audience and you’re actually writing stuff for them that makes sense to them. Now, you want to be careful with this because there’s an awful lot of like, “Ooh, let’s pander to a particular audience and we’re going to be all hip and cool and whatever.” It never works, don’t do that.

KH:     That’s potentially isolating.

SO:     Oh, it’s terrible. It’s like, “Oh, look, we’re going to sell to millennials.” It’s like, “But you sound like idiots.” Okay, so, useful to the target audience, doesn’t make them laugh at you.

SO:     Purpose. It has a purpose and it accomplishes that purpose. This KB article is going to explain how to do a thing. And when you get to the end of the article, you’ve actually done the thing.

KH:     Ideal.

SO:     Yeah. I mean, if you get to the end of the article and you’re like, “I don’t know what I was supposed to do.”

KH:     That’s not good content.

SO:     I wrote an article on how to do it. So, what are you complaining about? And you’re like, “Your article makes no sense. It’s right but I couldn’t do it.”

SO:     Longevity, if you write a white paper or if you write, again, a how-to, those are typically going to have more longevity than a tweet.

KH:     A tweet.

SO:     Tweet-tweet. And if you write it in a way that’s localization friendly, that’s helpful because it’s a… If you don’t… It’s more expensive to translate it. So, there’s downstream impact, right?

SO:     And then you want to think a little bit about, can you reuse it? The canonical example of this is a product description.

KH:     Right.

SO:     You write it once, you use it everywhere where you’re talking about that product. But in addition to that, glossary terms? You really don’t need to define standard deviation more than once.

KH:     Right.

SO:     You define it once, you use it everywhere in your company, assuming you’re doing things related to math and statistics, in which case, I’m really sorry.

SO:     Variants, we see this a lot in technical content where you have two very closely related products. You can write a how-to but the how-to is 95% the same for product A and B. There’s just one little step that’s different. Okay. Split out that step. Put it in some sort of a variant label. And that way, you can produce both product A and product B from the same content. So you reuse it.

KH:     And this might be applicable to the audience topic earlier, if you might have two audiences.

SO:     You could have two audiences.

KH:     You can do the millennials separately.

SO:     Okay. You can write for the millennials and I will write for the not millennials. Yeah, so but no. But you’re right, you can potentially write for different audiences but kind of embed the same audience in a single document.

KH:     Right.

SO:     Or maybe your beginner-level audience gets additional contextual information and your advanced level audience gets just… These are your steps but you could expand them and get more information.

SO:     Multichannel output is the other one and localization. Those are all kind of the multipliers that you might be able to address to make your content more valuable. So, a tightly written piece of content targeted at multiple audiences with that information labeled, potentially with variants that is ready for localization, long-term, useful piece of content is very valuable.

KH:     Okay. So then what’s the next part of the balance sheet?

SO:     So now we have liability. We had fun with assets. We’re like, “Yay. Assets, our content is so great.” But then we have liabilities. And there’s a bunch of stuff here. But really, all of this boils down to the concept, and I so wish I’d come up with this but it wasn’t me, of content debt. In the same way that you can have technical debt, which essentially is, “Hey, we need to do this but we haven’t gotten around to it.” You can have content debt. We should be doing this but we haven’t. Your content is hard to use, bad experience. If it’s inaccessible, that means there’s an entire audience you’re not reaching because they can’t consume your content. This podcast is audio but we also provide a transcript. And the transcript is screen reader-accessible, right? So we’re trying to cover a couple of different ways of accessing this information and not saying, “If you can’t listen to the audio, that’s it.”

KH:     Right.

SO:     Now, and there’s a lot of people that like looking at the transcript who can potentially hear, they just don’t want to spend…

KH:     They don’t want to spend.

SO:     20 or 30 or 50 minutes on this podcast. So, bad experience, right? The information is unattractive. It’s hard to consume on the page because it’s hard to understand because the layout is terrible. You’re using terrible colors that don’t have nice contrast. The font is tiny and not readable by anybody over the age of 35, that kind of thing.

SO:     Okay. Information is wrong or just out of date. It used to be right but then there was a product update, you didn’t get around to it. That’s canonical content debt.

SO:     Wrong audience. It’s too difficult to understand or it’s actually wrong. And shout out to Char James-Tanny who had a great example of this where, there was information that she was given, medical information that she was given that said, “These are the things that you need to do.” And she read it and she said, “This is wrong for me.” She knew they had given her sort of the generic version and she needed the specific version. And because she had educated herself on what was going on, she knew that, “Nope, Nope, this is not what I should be doing and in fact, these things will end very badly for me.”

KH:     Oh, that’s a terrible time to have the wrong information.

SO:     And it was kind of a high-stakes situation. She knew better but they just gave her the generic information instead of giving her the, “Oh, you’re this kind of patient so we’re going to give you very specific information.” So that one.

SO:     Voice and tone, it’s probably not good to be cute about something that’s life-threatening. Depending on your audience and their demographics, you might want to think pretty carefully about your voice and tone. Also, I worry a lot about people who are, let’s say we have English content, non-native English speakers who are reading something that is so cutesy and has all this like, “Hey y’all, what’s up.”

KH:     Impossible to translate.

SO:     Impossible to translate and maybe not easy to understand if your grasp of English is not perfect.

KH:     Okay, right.

SO:     So that’s something to consider but also, if you’re documenting a game, fine. If you’re documenting a medical device, not fine.

KH:     Okay.

SO:     Right?

KH:     Right.

SO:     I mean, you don’t have to be totally stuffy. Well actually, you probably do for the medical device but it’s just not appropriate to be funny in the context of “here’s how to use the defibrillator.”

KH:     I’ve seen some pretty funny pictures.

SO:     Come on. Right? Then there’s some other obvious stuff like it’s offensive, it’s problematic, it’s in the wrong format. I’m looking at it on my phone and your 27 megabyte PDF is useless to me, because you laid it out in an 11 by 17 tabloid and I’m trying to look at it on a tiny screen and now I hate you.

KH:     That has happened to all of us. That is not fun.

SO:     This morning. And then finally, translation. Well, it’s not been translated. It’s not available in my preferred language. That’s bad. Or you translated it but your translation is crappy. And I’m looking at it saying, “Well, obviously, you’re not serious about being in this market because you can’t even use my language properly.”

KH:     Absolutely.

SO:     So, those are all content debt or liabilities, right?

KH:     Right.

SO:     So you’re going to add this all up. You’re going to add up your balance sheet, your assets, your systems, and then you’re going to subtract out your liabilities and then you’re going to really, really, really hope that you get a positive equity number.

KH:     So, how do we quantify these liabilities? And assets?

SO:     That’s a really good question. And the answer is, I don’t know. We took a stab at it in this white paper. We put some stuff in. I think it’s useful to think about what’s the worst thing that could happen. So, if you’re documenting a game and you leave something out, then what’s the worst thing? If people get frustrated, they go on the forum, they argue and they yell, and your game gets a bad rating.

KH:     Okay.

SO:     If you’re documenting a product that can affect health and safety, life…

KH:     Probably talking about lawsuits.

SO:     Or people dying, people getting injured, or people being killed by the product because they used it incorrectly. Because either you told them to, the instructions were wrong, or you told them the right thing to do but they didn’t find your instructions. So they did it the wrong way because they didn’t find what you were looking for. So I suppose, at least here in the U.S., you could quantify this on the basis of how big is the lawsuit going to be? But that can lead you into trouble because what happens then is people say, “Oh, well, we’ll just set aside $5 million for lawsuits and not fix the thing.”

KH:     Oh, yeah.

SO:     We don’t really advocate that at all. So something to consider there. But I think that’s really, literally the million-dollar question is, how do we quantify the liability of bad content, of missing content, of badly translated content? I think you can do some workaround. Let’s say you’re trying to sell into China and you decide you need Chinese content in order to reach your Chinese audience. Well, first of all, you know that if you don’t translate into Chinese, the percentage of people in China who speak enough English to use your product, that’s a quantifiable number. How many people in China speak English or can read English well enough to use your product?

KH:     So, we can talk about that in terms of revenue.

SO:     And are willing to use a product that’s only in English. So, that’s a percentage.

KH:     Right.

SO:     And then you can say, “Okay, step two, what if I translate my content into Chinese but I do it really badly?” Presumably, you get a higher number than the English only kind of group.

KH:     Right.

SO:     But it seems like if you wanted to maximize your potential revenue, you would do a really good Chinese translation. And you would think about what is my potential reasonable market share with a good translation and how much am I going to get if I do nothing? So the spread between those two is your liability or your value.

KH:     Sure. And I can think of one other way that we know to qualify, or quantify rather, missing content or incorrect content and that’s tech support costs.

SO:      Ah, yes. So they call tech support, which costs you something like 30 to $50 per call.

KH:     Right.

SO:     And if you had provided the content with good search…

KH:     Right?

SO:     Right.

KH:     Critical.

SO:     Which means make a good taxonomy, which means have a good search engine, then maybe they wouldn’t have called, maybe. So I’m really interested in getting some feedback on all of this because we put this document together and we said, “Okay, well, we’re going to put a stake in the ground and this is what we’ve come up with.” But for those of you listening to this, I’d be really interested in hearing about what you’ve done with content accounting and what kinds of things you’ve done to try and quantify your content overall and is this a framework that makes sense to you?

KH:     Absolutely. Okay, well thank you, Sarah.

SO:     Thank you.

KH:     Thank you for listening to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. For more information, visit Scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post Content accounting: Measuring content value (podcast, part 2) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 66 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Kaitlyn Heath and Sarah O’Keefe discuss measuring content value based on accounting principles.

Related links:

Twitter handles:

Transcript:

Kaitlyn Heath:     Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In part one of the content accounting podcast, we talk about measuring content value based on accounting principles. Hi, I’m Kaitlyn Heath.

Sarah O’Keefe:     And I’m Sarah O’Keefe.

KH:     And today we’re going to look at measuring your company’s content value. So I want to start by identifying what type of content we’re talking about when we’re talking about content value.

SO:     Well in my mind we’re talking about customer facing content, whether it’s technical product content, high-value content, like technical reports or membership information that you present to your customers and or marketing and sales content.

KH:     So what type of value does this content generally have for your company?

SO:     Well, that is the question.

KH:     That is the question.

SO:     And it actually… it turns out to be a really hard question because there have been actually a lot of attempts at this. How do we calculate content value? And you’ll see a lot of stuff around, “Oh well we got this many impressions,” or “Our tweet got this many retweets,” or “We got this many hits on our website,” or “This many people click the yes this piece of technical information in my knowledge base was helpful,” right? But value, what’s the value of that content? We have some ideas about metrics.

KH:     Right, so user feedback type of stuff.

SO:     Yeah, or sheer volume, the volume of people that are looking at something. And so-

KH:     But does that necessarily translate to value?

SO:     …right. We don’t really know. And so that was… I wrote this white paper talking about the concept of content accounting and I’m not the first one to kind of touch on this. There’ve been a couple of other papers out there where people have tried to kind of address content value, but in this specific white paper, what I did was I tried to take accounting itself as a framework for thinking about content. So for those of you that are not accountants, which I suppose is…

KH:     Not me.

SO:     …perhaps a lot of our listening audience, you’re probably familiar with the idea of a profit and loss statement and maybe less familiar with the concept of a balance sheet. But those are kind of the two basic documents that you see in accounting used to calculate the value of things, the value of a company the… What the performance of your company really. So I thought, “Well, all right, can we do content based accounting? Can we do accounting that uses a profit and loss, a P&L, and also a balance sheet but looks at content related aspects to try and figure out how to value information.”

KH:     Right, so what might that look like? What does this profit and loss sheet look like for content accounting?

SO:     So a P&L for content accounting. If you’re somebody like Netflix, then it’s pretty straight forward, right? Because as Netflix, you know that you have your streaming income and you know that your subscribers are paying you $8 or $10 or 15 or whatever they’ve bumped it to these days for access to your content, right? Because your content is directly your product. So in a very simplified way your income is your streaming money or the money people are paying you for your content. And if you think about a book publisher or something, same thing, people pay the money to get their hands on books or movies or other kinds of content. On the L, profit and loss, on the L side, on the expense side, you have the cost of creating or perhaps licensing that content. How much does it cost to make a Netflix series? How much does it cost to license a series from an existing TV network?

SO:     How much does it cost to get an author to write a technical book about computer subjects that you’re then selling in the bookstore online or whatever. How much does it cost to produce an eLearning course that you then sell people? So if you’re a publishing company, if you’re a content company, then you know that this is all pretty straight forward, right? Because you have your cost of producing content and you have your income from content.

KH:     Absolutely. So then how does this change when we start talking about marketing content and then technical content?

SO:     So now it gets obnoxious. So you set aside the content companies and you start thinking about, “Okay, well I’m a software company and I produce content that is important to my customers,” or “I make consumer electronics,” or “I make anything else in the world that’s not directly selling a book or a movie or a piece of content, a piece of intellectual property to your customers.” What you have now is you have a product like piece of software or a piece of roof rack, a car, whatever. Alright, how do you pick which car to buy, right? You probably do some research and you say, “Hey, I like this one. Well I can’t afford it, moving on.” You sort of go through this process of I want a vehicle that has these features or you know, “Hey, I could get to my office by moped, ’cause it’s pretty close except there’s a really narrow road so I’d probably die, so maybe not that.”

SO:     But you kind of work through what you need from the product that you’re going to buy and then you go looking for the product that meets those aspects. And that’s where the customer facing content from the company starts to come in. If you’re in the market to buy something, you’re looking for information on which product meets my requirements. Is it fuel efficient enough? Is it electric or not, as the case may be. Does it have enough cargo space for your dogs and cats and gerbils and kittens and giraffe or whatever that you have as a pet?

SO:     Those are the kinds of things that you need to think about. What features do you need in that? And the marketing material can be kind of persuasive and aspirational. People like you buy these kinds of cars and, “Ooh, don’t you want to be one of the cool kids that has this kind of a car?” I’m oversimplifying marketing, but to a certain extent marketing is about persuasion and saying this is the one you want to choose and here’s why, features and benefits. Your technical content though, if I know that I need to haul around a 150 pound dog, I’m get very interested in…

KH:     You might be looking for specifications that are in the technical documentation.

SO:     I might want a bigger car. Yes. So you’re looking for how much cargo space is there? Is there a roof rack? Not for the dog. We don’t do that in this state. But you look for those kinds of things. What are the exact specifications because you might decide, “Well I’m not even going to consider this car unless it’s like a hybrid.” Okay, well you can rule out a whole pile of stuff based on it not being a hybrid. And maybe you know a little bit more about that, and you’re pretty specific about what you want. You want batteries that are more easily replaceable or have been built in a way that’s more ecologically sound. So you can think-

KH:     That stuff’s not usually in the marketing content.

SO:     It’s usually not… Exactly, right? So you end up in the technical content. The research says that when buying, now this is consumer electronics, not cars, but when buying consumer electronics, something like 80% of people will look at the technical content before they buy. Because they’re looking for some little spec that’s in there. Okay, so back to your question, how do you quantify that?

KH:     How do you quantify that?

SO:     What is the value of a piece of content that says this is the cargo space and these are the specs for the battery that then leads somebody to say, “Oh wait, I want that car.”

KH:     Yeah, how can we measure that?

SO:     How do you measure that?

KH:    How do you measure that?

SO:     So that was the question I tried to tackle with perhaps varying degrees of success. And what I basically landed on was that you have these five aspects of income that content contributes to, and there’s a lovely pyramid drawing in the white paper, right?

KH:     Which we’ll link to.

SO:     Which we’ll link to. Item one which we haven’t actually talked about yet, is compliance. If you produce a product that is regulated, you must comply with the regulations or you don’t get to sell it. If you’re doing pharmaceuticals, you have to meet certain standards about drug labeling. If you’re selling a car, you have to meet certain standards around safety and discussing the safety equipment that you’re required to have in various markets. So compliance is one of these things. It’s very hard to quantify except that if you don’t do it…

KH:     You can’t sell your product.

SO:     You get zero revenue. So in a way it’s like that old ad from the credit card company, it’s priceless, right? Okay. So that’s one. Now the second one, kind of moving up the pyramid is cost avoidance. How do you make things cheaper and more efficient? If you look at your compliance content as this horrific cost of doing business? Well, how do I do compliance as efficiently, as inexpensively, as fast as possible?

KH:     So what are some costs that you might be avoiding?

SO:     Usually what we’re looking at here is efficiency. So don’t duplicate and triplicate your content and then have to change it in three places. Don’t make dumb mistakes because you copied and pasted out of the database and missed a number and then your numbers are wrong and now you’re in trouble with the FDA or the somebody, some regulatory body. So cost avoidance usually… And the interesting thing is this is where the focus has been for the last 10 or 15 years. Let’s automate the formatting. Let’s do a lot of reuse. Let’s automate our localization as much as we can and create these really efficient workflows that are better than sort of doing things by hand and that are more scalable.

SO:     But cost avoidance, you have to be really careful because you don’t want to cost avoidance yourself out of a job or a mission, right? And so there’s a bunch of other stuff that you need to look at. So we have compliance and cost avoidance, which are kind of baseline, prereq, foundational, whatever. Revenue growth. If your content is really good, people might choose your stuff over the one that they looked at and they’re like, “I don’t know what these people are writing about, but I don’t understand it.”

KH:     And I think that’s something that isn’t often talked about with technical documentation necessarily, about gaining revenue from your technical documentation.

SO:     If you do a search on a particular feature that you’re looking for and you find it in product A but not competitor product B, you’re probably going to buy product A.

KH:     Absolutely.

SO:     Which implies that you need to pay attention to SEO and those kinds of things. So revenue growth, arguably a really great piece of marketing could drive your revenue because people read it or they see the ad or they read the white paper and they say, “Wow, this product sounds great. I should look into it some more. And then they end up buying it,” and conversely, really bad marketing and put it out there and you pay to get it out there to everybody. And they read it and they’re like, “I don’t think so.” So reach is not everything. Just reaching a lot of people isn’t necessarily going to help you with your sales if your message isn’t the right message. So revenue growth.

SO:     Then we move up to competitive advantage. And this is sort of the idea of… Let’s say you have two products that are pretty comparable, but my product has this one extra feature that your product doesn’t have. You have some other feature. But what I want to do is I want to highlight my product’s extra feature and make sure that that is everywhere. And everybody knows about this extra special feature because why would you ever buy a product that doesn’t have my special feature? And so if you do a really good job with content and a really good job with providing technical information, people might understand more about your product and be willing to pay for that cool feature that they didn’t know they needed.

KH:     And that sort of ties in nicely to the apex of the pyramid here.

SO:     Yeah. So the top of it is branding. And you think about companies that have done a really good job with branding, companies that are known for having really great design, really great industrial design or software design, UX, UI experience. People are willing to pay a premium to get those products. Some people are willing to pay a premium to get those products, but your branding helps sell the product, right? It helps you get that sort of halo of goodness and people grab your product.

KH:     Absolutely. So then what type of expenses are we talking about here?

SO:     So on the expense side, you’re looking at the cost of producing the information largely. So what does that look like? You’ve got some staff that need to produce the information and you’ve got systems, whether it’s workflow or anything like that. And you’ve got localization in order to get everything rolled out to your markets, wherever those may be. So basically you’ve got the staff that actually creates authors, delivers the content. You’ve got the staff that does things like social media amplification, distribution, that kind of thing. You’ve got the software itself that you’re using to kind of produce the thing and then you’ve got some others, some ancillary things, they tend to be smaller potentially like overhead facilities, that kind of thing.

KH:     Right. Okay. And then so when talking about expenses, how do we compare those expenses to the benefits that you’re getting in your content? So for example, how can we say, this piece of software that we’re buying, how is that going to then benefit our content and how is that going to add to the value of our content?

SO:     So if you’re making an argument to invest in a piece of software or really anything, you have to prove that we’re going to spend X dollars and we’re going to get Y value and preferably Y value is greater than X dollars. That’s how you do a business case. I know the accountants right now are crying and I’m really sorry.

KH:     It’s not me.

SO:     Not you. But basically we’re going to invest X, we’re going to get Y where Y is greater than X. We can squeeze a lot out of efficiency and done that because it’s easy. It’s the low hanging fruit to a certain extent. But you also have to look at things like, well, if I put this information in a better system, in a better set of files, in a content management system as opposed to just managing a pile of files somewhere on my laptop, what does that buy me? I’m going to be able to produce the content better, be more accurate, do all these things, maybe produce it faster. I can be more consistent with my corporate identity branding. I can rebrand when the company rebrands weekly, monthly, whatever. Or you get acquired, it’s not your fault, but you get acquired and then they’re like, “Hey, you have to use our new branding.” And it’s like, “Ah, rebrand again.”

SO:     So those are the kinds of things that you kind of look at. If I invest some time in writing a better product description, right? I mean I can write a really bad one in five minutes or I can take two hours and write one that’s actually really good. And maybe I’ve thought a little bit about search engines and keywords and those kinds of things. Well how much more valuable is that two hour description than the five minute description?

KH:     And so I think that goes back to how are we measuring the benefits?

SO:     How are we measuring the benefits? Right and so you have to… Essentially, you have to be able to prove that somewhere on that pyramid you’re adding value, whether it’s through revenue growth or branding or way down in efficiency, cost avoidance, compliance. If it’s something like writing a better product description, then you’re probably focused on revenue growth, right? Because you’re saying I’m going to write a better description. More people will read it, and then more people will buy.

KH:     So that pretty much wraps up the profit and loss statement, right? Okay. So we’re just about out of time.

SO:     Who knew you could talk about P&L’s for this long.

KH:     Right. But the other important part of this is…

SO:     The balance sheet.

KH:     The balance sheet, right? Okay. So we’ll talk about that on the next podcast.

SO:     In part two. Come back for more accounting concepts.

KH:     Lovely. Well thank you Sarah.

SO:     Thank you.

KH:     Thank you for listening to the Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post Content accounting: Measuring content value (podcast, part 1) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 65 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Bill Swallow talk about the need for a localization strategy.

“There may be things you’re writing in your source content that you don’t want literally translated. In many cases, there are stark cultural differences between one location and another. Writing something at all may be inappropriate for another audience.”

—Bill Swallow

Related links:

Twitter handles:

Transcript:

Elizabeth Patterson:     Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about the need for a localization strategy. Hi, I’m Elizabeth Patterson.

Bill Swallow:     And I’m Bill Swallow.

EP:     And today we are going to talk about the need for a localization strategy. So I’m going to start with a really general question here, Bill. Why might companies need a localization strategy?

BS:     Well, before we dive into why a company might need a localization strategy, I think it’s important to dispel one of the more common myths out there. Despite a growing need for multiple languages and content going out to multiple regions, translation is still seen as a bit of a commodity or a commoditized service. In that sense, you would write content, throw it over the wall, sending it to the translators, waiting, and then you get it back and you’re all good. If only it were that simple. You spent a lot of time and effort and money developing your source content and the last thing that you really want to do is just throw it over the wall and hope that someone’s going to understand what you are doing and why, translate it appropriately, and send it back to you in a format that’s usable.

BS:     Ideally, you want to have some kind of prep behind that, making sure that the translators know what your intent was with the content, whether it’s technical information, marketing and so forth, how they should be translating it, what their specific audience is, not just the language but who are the people who are going to be reading this in that language. Where are they located? Because that also has a high impact on the success rate of your translated content. But if you just throw it over the wall and expect a translator to understand all of these things, you’re really doing yourself a disservice and you’re not taking advantage of all the value that you’ve put into developing the content from the beginning.

EP:     Right. So I guess my question here is, say you are considering a localization strategy, but you’ve got some more time before that’s actually going to happen and you need something translated, so you need something done quickly. What are some options if you need something done quickly while you’re working on putting a localization strategy in place?

BS:     Probably the best option is to at least meet with your translator ahead of time, give them information that gives them the context that they need in order to understand the purpose of the content. If you don’t have a localization strategy in place yet, it may not necessarily be written in the best way for them to translate, but they should be able to understand with that context you provided how best to translate that content and send it back. Now, that’s just speaking in terms of voice, tone, audience appropriateness, that type of thing. So the translator at least has that information, but there’s a whole layer of other things that really ideally should be done before you send something out for translation.

EP:     So how might you prepare for that translation then, and what might your localization strategy look like?

BS:     Sure. There are a lot of factors that go into developing a localization strategy. The first thing is knowing exactly where your content is going, what languages do the people speak, where in the world the content is going, so what are the cultural implications of sending content that way. That way, you can kind of start collecting a body of knowledge that you can share with the translators and say, “These are the people that we ideally want to be targeting with this information. We understand that there might be cultural concerns above and beyond just the language concerns and the local idioms and whatnot that you need to be mindful of,” and work with the translator at that point to develop a plan for that content. There may be things that you’re writing in your source content that you might not want to have literally translated or even remotely translated in some other term. In many cases, there are stark cultural differences between one location and another, so writing something at all may be inappropriate for another audience.

EP:     Right.

BS:     And then there’s the whole technical side of things. How is your content written? What tools are you using to develop this content? Are you leveraging and maximizing the efficiencies in those tools that can then help the translation process move along more quickly.

EP:     And even in addition to writing, I mean, you have to think a lot about the images and things that you’re using within your documentation because that can have cultural implications as well.

BS:     Oh, images are a huge one. There’s the subject matter of the image. I do remember, I used to work in translation, and I remember receiving feedback from a particular translator about at that point, my other company’s client had sent over an image that had a woman holding a baby. And for that particular language they had to change the direction. So in order to make the title flip and everything, they just flipped the image, so they transposed it from right to left to left to right. So suddenly, you have this mirror image of a woman holding a baby and the wedding ring that was on her finger is now on the wrong hand as far as the published thing goes, and having an unwed mother in that particular locale was pretty much a taboo subject, so things like that you need to be mindful of. I mean, it’s something that you normally wouldn’t think of, but fortunately the translator caught it when they saw the image before it went out to the public.

BS:     In other cases, with images, if you’re using any kind of call-outs or things like that on the image, it’s important to remember that if the text is embedded in the image file itself, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to translate and could be impossible to translate that particular file. The translator would have to recreate it and impose the translated text either on top of the source language text or create a brand new image with that translated text in there. And then of course, anytime you change that text, the same process needs to happen. So that’s a lot of rework that really you can avoid generally by using a different system. A lot of people choose to use numbered call-outs where they just have numbers in the image and then they put the text in text below the image. That way, you’re not translating the image at all. It’s just a pass through at that point.

BS:     There are other considerations with imagery, such as colors. Colors have very different meanings in different cultures that you need to be aware of. Same thing with hand gestures. If you’re using hand gestures in photos or in icons, those can be problematic as well because not everyone … Well to be blunt, not everyone uses the same rude gesture.

EP:     Right. That’s definitely true. I remember when I was going through my graduate school program in technical communication, part of what we would look at in one of our lessons, especially when we were doing visual communication and design, we looked at images and colors and gestures that had different meanings in different countries and that was just really eye-opening to me, because I felt like I was aware of those things, but yet I learned so much more about that. And so when we talk about this localization strategy and how you can’t just throw it at a translator because there’s so much more to it than that, it makes a lot of sense cause there’s all sorts of things that you really have to be aware of, and it varies based on the industry, too.

BS:     Oh, absolutely. And it’s not to say that you can’t use these things, but you have to be mindful that they’re going to have a different meaning in a different culture, so you need to plan ahead and have an alternate set for that particular group. Now, if it’s something that’s built into the product, let’s say you have an icon in the product with a particular … for whatever reason you have a hand doing a gesture, you may want to rethink that in the original product design and change that to something that’s more universal. That way you don’t have to change the product UI and the screenshots and any documentation that goes along with it. You can just use the same information or the same icon throughout the entire process from the product to the documentation.

EP:     Right. So I think this kind of leads us into my next question. What are some common roadblocks that companies might run into when employing the localization strategy? Obviously, some of these challenges with imagery and gestures and that sort of thing can pose a roadblock, but what else my companies run into and how can companies best prepare for these?

BS:     The biggest one is having the sudden realization that you didn’t do your homework upfront, and that’s a tough one to get around. But really the only way to do it is to start. And at that point, usually that discovery comes at a very inconvenient time. So it comes at a time when either things are just about to go out for translation and someone raises an issue or worse, the translator comes back and says, “I can’t translate this,” or, “I can’t position this for the audience that you’re intending.” And even worse still you hear from a customer in that location that says, “What does this mean? I don’t understand,” or, “How dare you use this image?” That is probably the worst case scenario.

BS:     But some of the roadblocks there, again, is first of all understanding that you’re going to need one and the timing of that and being able to allocate resources to building that plan, to kind of walk back the reason why you’re translating and what you’re translating and being able to incorporate those changes that would facilitate translation. A big part of translation, especially in the software world, involves internationalization, which is basically the separation of all of the UI text and icons and so forth that are used within the user interface and having them in a place outside of the code that can be modified, so that way you’re not sending code files to your translators and expecting them to weed through all of the code to get to the strings that need to be translated. You have all of those strings and imagery and everything else in a separate set of files that can be modified and then brought back into the application. That’s critical.

BS:     And by the same token, you can internationalize a lot of your documentation and other content infrastructure as well through the use of templates. If you’re using any form of XML, you can certainly do that, using separate strings files and separate resource files, but basically being mindful of anything that’s going to be used and reused over and over and over again. Get it out of the meat of what you’re sending the translator and build it into some kind of automated workflow where it’s applied to the translation after the fact rather than having the translator translate the same label every single time they see it. That way they replace it once or they translate it once, you replace it everywhere.

EP:     Right, because it really doesn’t make sense to pay for them to translate the same thing over and over again.

BS:     Right. I mean, there’s definitely a cost there, particularly with a lot of the different … If you’re writing information that has a lot of warnings in it, chances are those warnings appear more than once. It doesn’t make sense to write it more than once and it doesn’t make sense to translate it more than once if it says the same exact thing every time. So being able to externalize that from the content and then be able to drop back in saves a ton of money and it saves a lot of time on translation as well.

EP:     Right. Speaking of saving money, how exactly can localization and employing a localization strategy help a company to maximize their return on investment? Because I think that’s an important thing to mention because in any company management is going to want to see the money. How are we saving the money? How are we making the money?

BS:     Mm-hmm. And really, you just hit on the two key points. There’s two factors in the return on investment in any kind of content or localization strategy. One, there is cost savings and there’s additional sales, so being able to grow money and save money. With localization strategy on the save money side, you can spend the time upfront to do things, quote unquote, “the right way”, to minimize the total amount of unique words that need to be translated by a translator.

BS:     Secondly, and I should say more additionally to that, being able to leverage your translation memory from one translation to the next, obviously for the same language, but being able to leverage that to make sure that you are using the same wording and phrasing when you add new content and that when you modify existing content that you’re very careful about only modifying what absolutely needs to be changed and not making subjective changes to the content to say, “I really think that we should have written this phrase this way. It’s not wrong the way it is, but I like it better this other way.” If you can avoid edits like that, unless they’re absolutely necessary or they add additional value to the content, leave it alone because otherwise you’re just adding cost to the translation process.

BS:     And as far as being able to grow money, a localization strategy should keep in mind not only the languages you need to translate into and the locations that you’re sending content to, but where you’re going to be sending content and translating content in five years, let’s say, so in the future and being able to plan for that upfront and be able to really target who’s going to be getting this content and why and planning your process accordingly.

BS:     By doing all of these things, you’ll start to streamline your content development process and your translation process, which will significantly reduce the amount of total time it takes to your content. That means faster time to market, which almost, you can’t put a price on that because you can enter a market quicker. Let’s say you’re going against a competitor in a particular market. Neither one of you has targeted that market before. If you have all your ducks in a row up front, chances are you’ll be able to beat them to the marketplace.

EP:     Right. And so localization or employing a localization strategy is really essential for your business to be successful if they want to grow.

BS:     Exactly.

EP:     Right. Well, I think that that’s a good place to end, so thank you, Bill.

BS:     Thank you.

EP:     And thank you for listening to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. For more information, visit Scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post The need for a localization strategy (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 64 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Alan Pringle talk about content strategies that have a limited or smaller scope.

“When you are limited it may slow you down, but at least you’re moving forward. It’s baby steps. It’s increments. It’s important to realize, yes it’s limiting, but you can take that and make it an advantage.”

—Alan Pringle

Related links:

Twitter handles:

Transcript:

Gretyl Kinsey:     Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 64 we talk about content strategies with limited scope. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I am Gretyl Kinsey.

Alan Pringle:     And I am Alan Pringle.

GK:     And today we’re going to be talking about content strategies that have a limited or smaller scope. So what we mean by this is a content strategy that sort of addresses just one piece of the overall content puzzle. It may look something like working around an established tool chain or tool set or set of processes and just making improvements in one specific area instead of addressing the entire process. It may also look like doing a smaller scale project such as a pilot or proof of concept. So Alan, do you have anything to add to that or maybe some examples?

AP:     A lot of times you already may have a tool in place, for example, and that tool has been licensed and purchased and there is no getting around it, so you have to figure out how to optimize use for that tool and then work the rest of the strategy around that tool. That’s one case I can think of immediately.

GK:     Yes, and I also want to talk a little bit about how this is different from sort of what Scriptorium I think more typically does, which is an end-to-end content strategy.

AP:     Right. It is more limited in scope as you’ve already mentioned, and you’re talking about many more moving pieces and parts when you’re doing end-to-end. In this case, you may be focusing on one type of content, one tool and it’s basic ecosystem for lack of a better word. Or there is one particular problem that you need to solve and look at and you’ve already mentioned a pilot project. A lot of times you need to prove … Listen, this particular process, tool chain, whatever could work, but we really need to kind of get some support for it by showing that it actually can work in one instance or for one particular department. So that’s one way to do it. Basically it’s a way to build consensus and to get more people to buy into your content strategy.

GK:     Absolutely. And oftentimes we see that as kind of the first step to an end-to-end content strategy, especially in that case where you’re doing a pilot or proof of concept. So you’ll start small and then kind of keeping those other requirements for a larger scale content strategy in mind, you do the smaller piece first, get that approval and that buy in and then kind of expand outward from there.

AP:     Yeah, and one thing about doing the smaller, there’s fewer people generally involved, it can be a slightly, I hate to say easier, because implementing any content strategy is not that simple, but you do have fewer people to deal with and in some cases that can be a pretty big asset to get one little thing done basically.

GK:     Yes. One other big difference that I want to kind of emphasize between a sort of small scale or limited scope content strategy versus an end-to-end content strategy is the idea of looking at the big picture and looking at future goals. That’s something that you see a lot more with an end-to-end content strategy, because you’re not just addressing sort of one problem. You’re looking at the entire content life cycle and saying how do we improve this not only in the short term but in the long term. And so it encompasses really looking at the big picture, looking at all of the different departments, the different types of content, the different tools and processes that can affect that strategy.

GK:     But when you are doing this kind of more limited scope type of strategy, you’re more likely to just focus on one sort of more immediate or short term goal. I think it’s important to still keep the big picture in mind so that you don’t lock yourself in, but there’s kind of … That’s kind of one of the big differences in scope or in scale between those two types of strategies.

AP:     I do think with a bigger strategy, you’re often looking at future proofing. You are trying to come up with a system that will not lock you out of future requirements. That is always an important goal whenever you’re changing anything, and that’s not just content strategy. Anything in a company, you do need to be thinking long term. On the flip side of that though, as you just mentioned, with the smaller, more limited scope type of content strategy issues, that may not be at the foremost of your mind or your requirements while you work on it.

GK:     Absolutely, and I think that brings us into talking about some examples of these types of engagements. So one is one that you already mentioned, Alan, I want to expand on that a little, and that’s one where there’s already one tool or one piece of a tool chain in place that’s locked down for whatever reason. It may be just due to licensing, it may be due to the fact that it works well, but other pieces of the tool chain don’t. So I think when you are in a situation like that and you’re kind of working around an established tool instead of kind of having free reign to do whatever you want, one thing that can help us looking at why that tool was chosen, does it truly work? Does it really serve the business goals that were kind of evaluated before it was put in place? And just keeping that tool non-negotiable. And if the answers to all of those questions are yes and you are kind of locked-in to working around that tool, what kinds of things would you recommend to make sure that things kind of go as well as they can or as smoothly as they can with content strategy?

AP:     Well first, take a look and see if you’re using that tool in the optimal way. It can be very hard, especially if it’s a tool that you’ve worked with for a very long time, to take a step back and look at it very objectively and say, yes, we are using this tool correctly. We are using all of the things that make it more efficient. Often in the case of content creation, you’re talking about using templates, you’re talking about using macros or other kinds of things that speed up repetitive tasks. Take a look at those kinds of angles. And take … Kind of put on your consultant glasses if you will, your consultant hat, take a look and say, “Are we really using this the best that it can be used?” And I wouldn’t be surprised that there are some cases where you realize you were not using that tool to its full potential.

GK:     Absolutely. I think we’ve seen that plenty of times, where a company buys a tool, maybe they were motivated by that tool seller’s marketing and they kind of didn’t really evaluate carefully all the things the tool could do for them, and we’ve come in and said, “The tool offers all of these features, why are you not using them?” So that can kind of be a good starting point for that sort of a more limited scope strategy is to look at what you’ve already got, use it more effectively and then from there kind of look outward and say, everything else that connects to that tool or that kind of interacts with that tool, what kinds of improvements can be made there as well.

AP:     Right, because if you were not using that particular tool well on its own, there’s a good chance when you try to connect it to something else, it’s not going to be any better. Maybe even worse.

GK:     Absolutely. So another example of a limited scope or limited scale content strategy is one where you’re working with a small or limited selection of content. And this kind of gets into what we mentioned earlier about using a pilot project. So, some examples of that might be if you just have one department that has content that you want to start with, maybe just one type of content. So maybe you just do data sheets first and then eventually you move on to user manuals and training guides …

AP:     Training or whatever. Exactly.

GK:     Maybe marketing materials. Maybe if you are focusing on localization strategy, you start with one language or kind of one group of languages. So that … Those are some sort of examples of sort of that limited scope with a small subset of your content instead of addressing all of it at once.

AP:     And I still see that kind of as a litmus test. Basically, is this really going to work in the real world? And while you may want to jump in completely all the way into the pool, you may not be able to simply because budgets may be constraining you. This may be a big part of the reason why you have a limited scope. Or there may be some management organizational issues where there is only one group that is really willing and able to get into that right now. And you have to make the best of what you’ve got basically, and if that means constraining it down to the different things that you just talked about, so be it. But the good thing about succeeding in one of these smaller projects is that it provides you with a real proof of concept. Look, this worked for this group. Let’s figure out ways to adapt it for these other groups. And then as you do that, that’s when you really start talking about the reuse and sharing across the enterprise.

GK:     Yeah, absolutely. And I think I’ve seen this in quite a few projects where they’ve started very small, with maybe one collection of documents and proved that creating those documents in a different way or delivering them, publishing in a different way can really help improve their overall time for creating content, can improve efficiency, can improve the content quality. And then they show that to other groups and other departments and they say, “Oh we should be doing this too. We should be connected to what you’re doing.” So it really is a good way to kind of get started with a content strategy that can later sort of expand outward and become one of those more full scale end-to-end ones.

AP:     Absolutely, and a big part of this, and we’ve already touched on this, is culture. It’s not always a financial issue. There may be one group that is impossibly more open to change, so you need to take advantage of that. Now, this smaller type scale, it cuts both ways. It’s really important to think, as you’ve already mentioned, at an enterprise, across the organization level. The future proofing. Years down the road, what are things going to be? Those are all really important things and you’ve got to keep them in mind. The flip side of that is that these smaller things are much more doable. They’re much more realistic and you can pick the group that’s willing to jump in and do that and to prove that it can be done. So when you are limited, yes, it may slow you down from doing the cross organization enterprise thing, but at least you’re moving forward.

AP:     It’s baby steps. It’s increments. So I think that’s important to realize, yes it’s limiting, but you can take that and make it an advantage actually.

GK:     Yes, and I think having a starting point is really important, because if you try to go too big at the beginning and you try to maybe start at the enterprise level without doing this kind of proof of concept first, a lot of times it may not even get off the ground because of these things that you mentioned. Change management is a huge issue that we see and kind of risk management as well. I know that risk tends to be a big factor in a lot of organizations not wanting to start and take that first step, but if you can even get buy-in from one small part of the organization, one department or even one writer or two, or one manager within the organization that says this is a good idea, let’s pursue it, then I think taking that first step is really the most important thing to get the ball rolling.

AP:     Yeah, and you mentioned risk management and that is a really big part of any kind of work in content strategy, or any kind of corporate change. On the risk management side though I would say as a thing you want to pick for your small scale pilot, whatever you want to call it, you don’t want to make it so easy that it shows no impact, but you also don’t want to bite off more than you can chew.

GK:     Yes.

AP:     So there is this balancing act that you have to think about and that kind of ties in what we’ve talked about, the culture, the finances, the politics, all of those things should come into play when you’re picking this thing that you want to do, but you don’t want to make it so easy that it doesn’t really show any result, but you also don’t want to pick something that’s so big and so expansive that it’s risky.

GK:     Yeah. In that case, it’s really not a pilot anymore. It’s kind of getting into the realm of a larger scale engagement and so it’s very much a fine line as far as choosing what subset of content that you want to work with or maybe what department and making sure that it’s manageable and that it’s kind of the the right type of content as well to show that it’s going to be the strategy you need.

AP:     There’s also the issue when you start working in these bigger engagements that people get what’s called analysis paralysis.

GK:     Yes.

AP:     They get so hung up by all the things that have to be done, all the choices that have to be made, they basically freeze in place and nothing gets done.

GK:     Yeah. And I think that the more risks that’s involved, the more that could happen. If there is a very major change that’s involved in the strategy, then that’s something that really happens very easily. Another type of limited scope engagement I want to touch on is the idea of developing or sort of refining one piece of a larger content strategy. And so for us at Scriptorium, that’s looked like things such as maybe a company bringing us in just to build a content model or bringing us in to work on a training plan. Develop a localization strategy. So just sort of one piece of the larger puzzle instead of doing the entire thing. So I wanted to talk about how you work around that and maybe there are some cases where there are different people working on an end-to-end strategy together, but each person is doing a different part of it. How do you make something like that work?

AP:     You talk to each other.

GK:     Yes.

AP:     It’s that simple. You have to. It is very tempting when you’re doing these smaller scale things to just go head down and not talk beyond the group. You’ve got to strike … Again, that balancing act. You still have to talk to people outside to see about the potential connections, overlaps and you also do not want to repeat work people have already done and you do not want to stomp on any accomplishments they already have. You need to pay attention and kind of put out feelers to figure out what’s going on around you and how what you’re doing can flow into and out of that.

GK:     Yeah. And I think having that communication be as open as possible is good, because if you don’t talk to each other, then what can happen is that the overall strategy can kind of get locked down in a way where … So for example, if one group is brought in to develop, let’s say a training plan and they’re putting together any materials that are needed for that, but then they look at some other piece of the strategy and they say, “Hold on. Maybe this could be done in a better way before it’s too late.” If you don’t have that sort of open channel of communication, then that means that that area where an improvement could have happened, nobody brings it up and it doesn’t happen and then all of the other groups that are affected by that decision are sort of locked into it. So I think that keeping the channels of communication open and also everyone kind of keeping an open mind if somebody sees or points out a problem that you don’t immediately just kind of take offense to it and put up a wall when somebody brings up, “Hey, maybe you could improve this piece over here.” I think it’s really important to think of the overall strategy as a moving entity and to keep an open mind and open communication around how to improve it.

AP:     You cannot use this idea of doing a pilot or smaller scale thing as an excuse to lock reality out.

GK:     Yes.

AP:     It’s very tempting to go heads down and ignore everything going around you. And there is something to be said for that in some cases, but when you were going to treat this as a piece of a larger enterprise strategy, you really cannot do that. Yes, you have to focus and get that work done, but you still have to realize that there are tentacles that connect everything. So don’t preclude those possibilities when you’re coming up with your strategies. And don’t have every little department doing their own thing and then try to just throw everything together and assume it’s going to work, because I guarantee you it will not.

GK:     Absolutely. And this is where I think having some kind of a plan for governance in place is important. Even if you’ve got different people or different groups working on different parts of a strategy based on their expertise, which I think is very smart, it’s still good to have some kind of a plan for how you’re going to manage each of those pieces working together and sort of your overall governance of the strategy to make sure that nothing gets stuck. We’ve seen plenty of cases where the more groups or people that have to work together, the easier it can be for things to stall out or for arguments to pop up, and if there’s not a plan in place for how to solve some of those issues or how to work through them, then it just kind of delays the strategy even more.

AP:     Yeah. Once again, communication, and it sounds so tired and such … A chestnut, but it’s true. You have to talk amongst yourselves.

GK:     Yeah. It sounds like a basic common sense thing, but you would be surprised how often that doesn’t happen and how difficult it is to make sure it happens. So if it …

AP:     Oh, I can vouch for the fact, it often does not happen.

GK:     Yeah. So if you think about that from the get go and you really prioritize that communication, I think that’s a really good way to make sure that these types of strategies, where you’ve got different pieces happening with different groups actually succeed.

AP:     I agree.

GK:     I want to kind of close out by talking about some advantages and disadvantages of taking this limited scope approach. So, and we’ve already touched on these but I think it’s a good way to kind of just wrap everything up.

AP:     Wrap it up.

GK:     So the advantages we’ve talked about, it may reduce your risk, especially if that limited scope is something like a small scale or pilot project that can be used to prove success in one area. And in that same vein, it reduces, maybe the budget at first and shows if you’ve got budgetary constraints start small. And another advantage that’s kind of interesting is that if you are limited by maybe a tool lock-in type of thing, it can also make it sort of easier to rule out tools and processes that connect to it. If you are being brought in and let’s say you’ve got your publishing end of things already figured out, but you need new authoring tools. If you already have one piece of the puzzle in place, then it kind of helps you rule out things that are not going to work with that piece when you’re looking at new options for authoring tools. As opposed to, if someone comes in and says redo the entire thing, then you have a lot more kinds of options to look at and in some ways that can be overwhelming.

AP:      And sometimes the reality can be very difficult when you are locked in. You just have to make it work. And once again, it goes back to what we talked about at the front of this, be sure that you’re using those tools as effectively as you can be.

GK:     Yeah. That one kind of cuts both into the advantages and the disadvantages because if you are kind of working in that limited scope, then you might not be able to suggest an improvement to a tool that’s kind of locked down or an alternative. So those kinds of things are really important to keep in mind. That does go back to what we’ve said about making sure that what you do have, you’re using it as efficiently and effectively as possible. And one other kind of disadvantage is that if you are working in a limited scope and you don’t keep in mind the big picture or the future requirements and you don’t keep communication open, then it can lead to sort of more lock-in down the road or to a strategy getting in places maybe not the best. So that again goes back to our advice about make sure you keep all of that in mind. Make sure that you talk to each other and that you future proof your strategy no matter how small that it starts.

AP:     Yeah, resist the temptation to put on blinders to focus just on the small part you’re working on. That’s a dangerous thing to do.

GK:     Yes, even if you are only doing something with one piece of content or you’re only doing one part of the strategy, don’t forget all of the other pieces and make sure that what you’re doing is not going to have to be redone somewhere down the road. That is going to really overall help the strategy that you’ve got in place.

AP:     Yeah. It needs to be adaptable. It needs to be extensible.

GK:     So do you have any other final words of advice?

AP:     It cuts both ways. It can be to your advantage to start smaller, but as we have already said, don’t let it constrain you in a way where you’re going to make things difficult for yourselves a few years down the road.

GK:     Absolutely. So we’re going to go ahead and wrap things up here. Thank you so much Alan, for being on the podcast with me.

AP:     Thank you.

GK:     And thank you for listening to the Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post Small scope content strategies (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 63 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Chip Gettinger of SDL chat about subject matter experts and their role as authors and as reviewers of content.

“One of the most important things about working with SMEs is to meet them where they are. It’s important to understand where they’re coming from and their perspective. Understand what issues matter to them.”

—Chip Gettinger

Related links:

Twitter handles:

Transcript:

Sarah O’Keefe:     Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997 Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 63 we talk about subject matter experts, and their role as authors, and as reviewers of content. Hi everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe, and I’m delighted to be here with Chip Gettinger of SDL.

Chip Gettinger:     Hi Sarah, hi everybody. It’s great to be on the podcast today, looking forward to it.

SO:     Yes, we are delighted to have you here, glad we get a chance to chat because we don’t as much as we might want to. Chip is over at SDL, where he manages the global solutions team focused on structured content management, working directly with customers and partners. And for someone like me maybe more importantly, has been in this industry for a while, and knows everybody, and perhaps everything. For those of you that have also been in the industry for a while, you should know that he was an actual typesetter, so he comes by his interest in content honestly.

CG:     Yes Sarah, I remember the days fondly of teaching typesetting picas and points to my students, it was really fun.

SO:     Alright, well now that we’ve lost all the millennials we can move on to our actual topic. So, a little bit about subject matter experts and their relationship to content. I guess traditionally, a subject matter expert would be somebody who, who’s what? What is a subject matter expert?

CG:     It’s a great question Sarah, and I think it does vary by industry, but let’s start with high tech manufacturing organizations. I think one of the first things I see frequently are software, hardware developers, engineers. These are experts in the company, who are developing products, writing software, developing hardware, and they have so much knowledge, and so much expertise. But, they’re really driving the production, the development of the products. And this information is so critical that they have about how those products work, how they operate, and how they can get that information out.

SO:     So you’re talking about somebody who’s an expert in the product, but not necessarily somebody who is an expert writer?

CG:     Correct, correct. Unfortunately we’ve all read content that’s written by somebody who really is not a good writer. Our professional writers, the industry has grown up over many decades of skills and so forth, working very closely with SMEs to ween out that information. And then, professionally write it and present it typically for customers, or internal use for their organizations and products.

SO:     Yeah, so I mean traditionally is kind of a loaded term. But, it seems like what we have had with the rise of professional technical writing, typically is that your subject matter expert reviews content, right? So, I as the writer create the content, and then I send it to you, the product domain subject matter expert and say, “Did I get it right?”

CG:     Absolutely. Those workflows are still very much in use today, and actually quite, quite beneficial for organizations. What we’re also starting to see however, is real pressure on time to market. Organizations are investing in technology that perhaps they could capture information, and I see this especially, let’s say I was seeing this, semiconductor manufacturing industries. We have very technical products, and you have SMEs that can write about, let’s say a chip layout, or a manufacturing device. And then, that information can get captured, it doesn’t have to go through a writer to get that information.

SO:     In the same way that we’re losing in a lot of ways, the gatekeepers to publishing, and you and I have both talked about that a lot.

CG:     Yes.

SO:     Now the writers are no longer the SME’s gatekeepers in some of these scenarios.

CG:     In some of them there are, and in some organizations we’re finding that SMEs, there never really has been a centralized documentation team that has had professional writers. What I’ve been working on is, how do we help those organizations understand we need to have things like consistent content, we need to do things like reuse. And other aspects that are important for organizations, but perhaps are on an audience of people less technically skilled at being able to do some of that.

SO:     So we have what I would describe as sort of the rise of subject matter experts, or having them more integrated in content authoring, or having them contribute more to content authoring. And as you said, there’s some benefits to that. Are there risks, are there downsides?

CG:     There are risks and downsides. I mean, we’ve already talked about content quality, terminology consistency, you probably have had podcasts around that, and there’s risk about that. An emerging area that I really like is where technical doc teams work with SMEs who are doing the authoring. So, when you have a centralized content management system where SMEs can perhaps write structured content, and contribute that, and then put it in a draft review mode. And then, the professional writers can come in and use some of the tools they can to ensure consistency, perhaps create some reuse around terminology and so forth. But, it shortens their time, the professional writers time, it took to get that information out because they were able to capture it right from the SME.

SO:     What’s the implication of this on structured content? I mean, you and I live in a world where we’re structuring content, and we’re enforcing content structure, and there’s a lot of pretty heavy technologies sitting in and around that. What’s the implication when I’m dealing with a person who’s a physician or something, but not necessarily interested in developing that level of expertise in content?

CG:     It’s a great question, and really I look to you Sarah, and the skills your team brings around content strategy, and information architecture. I think gone are the days when we information architect to the experts who understand all the tagging, and metadata, and attributes, and so forth. The content strategy now gets driven by perhaps, how can we simplify this? And secondly, how can we perhaps use some automation downstream to do things that maybe professional writers would have done before?

CG:     An example of that might be for example, indexing and auto tagging. I’ve seen technology now that’s starting to embrace AI to do some of that. It doesn’t replace the quality of the writing, but what we’re starting to see is some automation, and better tools. And then secondly, all we have to do is look at wikis, and other example products. Many organizations, especially a lot of the SMEs are using wikis to capture content. But, you know what? Its internal customer … Or, I’m sorry. Its internal content only, it’s not customer facing.

SO:     Is it reasonable given the tool sets that we have now to expect subject matter experts to write in XML, is that a thing that’s happening, for them to create structured content?

CG:     Yes, and at SDL we have several customers doing that now. I will say it’s been early stages, and the most successful customers have picked their projects very carefully. I will say one example is Cloud based products, tend to be easier, more newer products. A second area we have is in medical information, on healthcare information. We’re seeing early stages, where a lot of this information needs to be structured to fit into regulatory type information. And we’re seeing some early stage kind of good work going on there for making SMEs work contribute, but be in structure.

SO:     Yeah, and so since you’re doing an excellent job avoiding the actual plug for SDL tools, I think it’s worth nothing that SDL, and others-

CG:     Yeah.

SO:     … Do have tool sets where the professional writer might be using one set of tools, the subject matter expert is using a different and more lightweight set of tools, but they’re working on the same content.

CG:     Exactly.

SO:     I’ve had some very bad experiences with wikis, and the inability to manage or pull content out of wikis. So, hearing wiki always strikes fear in my heart if it’s supposed to be customer facing content, because-

CG:     Yes.

SO:     … That really is a terrible, terrible challenge. I will also say that it’s been our experience that you can look at subject matter experts along a couple of different kinds of axes. One is their level of expertise, and by that I mean if we’re talking about literal rocket scientists and there’s only a few of them in the world, that presents a challenge. If you’re talking about somebody who has some product expertise, but there are lots of people like him or her, that’s kind of okay. But, the more specialized the knowledge, and the more unique that person is, the worse off we are in terms of getting them to cooperate, right?

CG:     Right.

SO:     We don’t have a lot of leverage. The other axis that can be very, very problematic is whether or not they are in fact an employee of the organization for which they are SMEing. In other words, when you’re dealing with volunteers, all bets are off, you know?

CG:     Yeah.

SO:     If it’s an employee within the organization you can appeal to their sense of, the organization needs you to help us with this.

CG:     Exactly, exactly.

SO:     But, if they’re a volunteer, that is just not very fun. Where do you see this going? I mean, is the pendulum going to swing from lots of professional writers, all the way over to just SMEs, or where are we going to land with this?

CG:     You know Sarah, I think about that myself. If I look at traditional structure content industries, it’s happening. This is one of those changes that we need to accept and think about. If I look at our most successful customers, are ones that think about the products that they can document and so forth. And, another example might be if your company has a suite of solutions that comprise different products, it could be several SMEs. And so, you still need to have professional writers who can collate and combine all the various aspects to your product.

CG:     But secondly, I think for our industry there’s an exciting opportunity of new users that are going to come on, that are in regulated industries who traditionally have used unstructured tools, don’t know really much about structured authoring. So, I feel that there’s a larger audience out there that we could capture and get in, if we make it moderately easy for them.

SO:     Right, because I mean the great advantage of structured content is that you’re not going to forget, right? You’re not going to forget to put in that mandatory chunk of content, because the structure itself will say, “Uh, chip? This requires an abstract, and you haven’t done one.”

CG:     Exactly, exactly. And, the other aspects that are required for digital deliveries, you know? We for years, have promoted single sourcing concepts. And Sarah, you said something great about a centralized, you know, having a centralized CMS manage this. And, the variety of tools that could be used depending on your skill sets, or level of education. I’m a professional writer, I’ll use the power tools versus an SME that might use lighter weight tools, but we’re all single sourcing off the same content.

SO:     What are some of the best practices? I mean if you’re talking to an organization and they’re going to have SMEs contributing content, and potentially interacting with some sort of structured content, what’s the advice that you give people? What are some of the best practices, what are some of the things that they should do or not do to make sure that this thing succeeds?

CG:     I think Sarah, one of the most important things about working with SMEs is meet them where they are. A lot of times these are organizations that you don’t have direct responsibility, and many companies, they can go off and do their own thing. I think it’s important to understand where they’re coming from and their perspective, and really get to know your SMEs, you know? Understand what issues matter to them. I feel it’s also important for, let’s say us, our professional writers, to educate them about customer needs. And by the way, the customers could be fairly technical in all the other aspects, so really getting to know them. And, some of the techniques I’ve seen Scriptorium use are things like conducting interviews, you know? And also, identifying the superstars of the organization.

CG:     We always know that there’s going to be the laggards, and the superstars. Identify those people that say, “Oh, this looks kind of interesting,” and so forth. And then, that gives the less confident people nudges and saying, “Okay, if so and sos going to do this, maybe I should get, move forward.” And then finally, measure and reward.

CG:     If you have brown bag lunches, or better off, if you have social groups that you can socialize this, a new progress in your company, measure and give rewards out to people that are successful.

SO:     What are the worst practices, or put another way, what are the risk factors? You go into a customer or a potential customer and they start saying, “Well, we’re going to do this, and this, and this.” What are those things that strike fear in your heart when it comes to SME content and reviewing?

CG:     Yeah, boy, great question. I think what strikes fear in my heart is lack of a strategy, you know? A real strategy around how we’re going to do this, and a big part of that of course is the content strategy information architecture. I think secondly, there does need to be some training. Now, it can’t be days and weeks, it needs to be measured in hours perhaps. But, there needs to be some structure. And finally, I also like to see, I think of it as mentoring. I’ve really been … and, a lot of organizations do this, where they’ll team, let’s say a newer person in the organization, with someone more experienced and so forth. So, having sort of social networks, having places they can post questions, share information, and so forth. The SMEs become part of the process, but ultimately somebody is helping to control and make sure that it’s going to work for them without chaos ruling.

SO:     Yeah, I mean that seems like a good list because I think I would agree that we’ve seen a lot of that as well. Which, I almost feel like we could just, we could just rename this podcast to, “You have to do change management.” You know?

CG:     Yeah, yeah.

SO:     The end. Every podcast, every document we put out basically says, “If you don’t do change management, nothing else matters. This project will fail.”

CG:     Right?

SO:     That’s what I’m hearing from you, right?

CG:     Yeah.

SO:     You have to think about what you’re doing before you do it.

CG:     And suddenly Sarah, we have a larger audience with people interested, and participating with us. What I also see, one of the negative things is I’ve seen tech doc groups get ignored. And, engineering and other development groups just go off and do their own thing, and they can publish it out to the web, and they can do all that. If you don’t meet them in the middle, if you don’t really interact with them, they’ll bypass you if it’s too onerous or too difficult. And, back to your earlier conversations about tools, I think some of the early mistakes are making the tools too complicated. Now, the idea is to keep the content structure quality there without having to have the SME jump through hoops to make it work.

SO:     Yeah, and I think it’s certainly fair to say that 10 years ago we didn’t really have tools that allowed us to achieve both things, right? That allowed us to have structured, flexible content that we could manipulate, and an authoring environment that was easy enough for a person who was not focused entirely on writing.

CG:     Yeah, and Sarah I think a conversation you and I’ve had in the past is, we’re seeing organizations adopting second or third generation CMSs.

CG:     They’re moving from, let’s say document based content into component based. And we’re seeing this, I’m seeing this across industries, not just your traditional tech companies, and so forth.

CG:     The exciting thing for me I think is our industry in structured content, content strategies. As we mature, we have an opportunity to get our best practices, our governance, and all that out to a larger audience of people. We just suddenly can’t measure it in years, we’re going to have to measure it in weeks and months now.

SO:     So as a final question since SDL is mostly focused on localization, right? As a global company. Are there any particular concerns, or considerations that you have in dealing with SMEs in an environment that’s heavily localized, or perhaps multilingual. Have you run into anything along those lines?

CG:     Yes. I’m working with a customer right now who has traditionally published English only content, and a number of their customers are based in Asia. What they found is, the number of English speaking engineers are being hired away, they’re being recruited away. So, they’re going to have to start doing their first translation projects to Vietnamese, simplified Chinese, Japanese, and so forth. The concern I have then is back to the basics of, we know that for example, if you have people writing in English and it’s not their primary language, we need to have tools available. Quality checks and so forth, to check terminology, phrasing, and so forth.

CG:     The second fear I have is that terminology leaks in that’s very cultural, you know? An American term that doesn’t make any sense to a Brit, or somebody in Australia, or other types of things. Again, professional authors have a knowledge of that, SMEs may not know what they’re writing about has that. That has a direct impact on translation. As you know, translation has greatly simplified the centralization of translation memories for language, but it also requires consistency. One of the benefits of moving into this structured authoring for SMEs, at least the structure of the content can be more uniform, which will reduce translation costs. But boy, we have to make sure the content written matches as well.

SO:     And interestingly, we’re also seeing that this, let’s call it prioritization of subject matter experts, is leading to multilingual source authoring. So, our entire engineering team is in Korea, so we’re going to source the documents in Korean.

CG:     Yes.

SO:     Now, they’ll then translate and do some other things, but the logic becomes that we’re going to get better quality content if we start in the engineers preferred language, and then we’ll worry about translation downstream. But we are, I think as the subject matter experts potentially become more and more critical to the content process, that’s actually going to drive a need to do … because companies are global, and they have engineering and product development operations all over the world. So now all of a sudden we’re talking about the need to support the engineers in Germany, the engineers in Korea, the engineers in China, wherever they may be, in their preferred language.

CG:     Right, and that’s the exciting thing about my job at SDL. I really get to work with global organizations, and I’ve got team members in Europe, Asia, and here in North America. I think that the exciting customers I work with, our CMS, or tools can support those kind of environments. They’re not easy to manage, I’m not going to pretend. But, it’s possible to be authoring in multiple languages, and it does take really strong governance.

CG:     One of the exciting things I see also is, I mentioned earlier, is the teaming up. You may have a new person in Eastern Europe coming on, and they pair them up with somebody in North America, in California, who’s more of an expert. And, there’s real skills being transferred, and you can do things with video, and recordings that don’t get rid of the time difference, and so forth.

CG:     I think all of those kinds of things are really exciting for me, working with global organizations on managing this. And then finally, if I look again back in the regulated industries, financial, medical, pharmaceutical, that’s the real growth area for this. That’s the area I think I’m learning a lot about some of their challenges, it kind of feels almost like 20 years ago Sarah, when we first really started getting into structured content.

SO:     And, I think that might be a good place to leave it. There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening. Chip, thank you for this, it was really interesting, I learned a few things. We will look forward to seeing you downstream at whatever conference we might next bump into each other at, and there will be chocolate. With that, thank you for listening to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. For more information, visit Scriptorium.com, or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post Subject matter experts as authors and reviewers (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 62 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bill Swallow continue their discussion from episode 61 and talk about best practices for planning.

“You need to be mindful about how what you’re doing is going to impact other groups. You can’t just assume they’re going to play ball when you start rolling out a new strategy. Make sure they’re not only on board in theory, but that they are pretty much committed to the success of the project because they should have a stake in it in some form as well.”

— Bill Swallow

Related links:

Twitter handles:

Transcript: 

Gretyl Kinsey:     Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997 Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In Episode 62 we continue our discussion from Episode 61 around planning.

GK:     Hello and welcome, I’m Gretyl Kinsey here with Bill Swallow again and we are picking back up where we left off in the previous episode with content strategy planning. So now that we’ve talked about all of the pitfalls that you can encounter when it comes to not planning, how do you do it correctly, what really should go into the planning when it comes to putting together a content strategy and then also figuring out how you’re going to execute that.

Bill Swallow:     I think the first and foremost one is being able to tie everything back to your business goals and that one means that you need to chase down what the goals really are. I know that a lot of companies have charters, mission statements, vision statements and so forth, but you really need to dig into, okay, so given these statements that are out there, what are the goals from the business side as far as how we’re going to make that mission a reality, make that vision come true. Being able to grab those and keep those in sight and make sure that everything that you’re doing ultimately aligns to meeting that business goal that you’re trying to achieve.

GK:     Absolutely. I think everything has to hinge on those business goals or else, like we talked about earlier, things can easily get sidetracked and things can end up not following the strategy that you’ve set forward to achieve. I think it’s really important when you’re coming up with your strategy and planning out the implementation side of it to think about how your strategy is going to get you both short term and longterm wins and address business goals that are more immediate versus ones that are more out there in the future, but something that’s still really important. So an example of that might be maybe you have some really pressing delivery need that’s a short term goal. So that might look like coming up with a certain output transformation scenario or what have you to meet that immediate need.

GK:     But then maybe you’ve got a longterm plan to deliver content into other markets to a larger customer base and so that might involve something like localization. So it’s important to think about what are the short term business goals that we have maybe within the next six months to a year, versus ones that are for like five years down the road. There can even be some sort of mid goals like two to three years down the road, but it’s important to think about not just what’s going to happen immediately when you put this plan in place, but what’s going to happen down the road too, so that your strategy can encompass all of that.

BS:     Right. And it helps to have this stuff, to make it all public knowledge, to make sure it, I’m not saying mass public, but within your company make sure that it’s common knowledge that these are some of the wins you’re looking for in the short term and long term. Address them and treat them as milestones within your project plan. So this way you know that within six weeks, let’s say you’re supposed to have a new localization management system chosen and have a test environment set up so that you could start playing with it and seeing how your content needs to feed into it or how it needs to be modified to handle some of the content decisions that you’ve made.

GK:     Absolutely. One other piece that I want to bring up and talk about a little bit is budgeting and figuring out what your return on investment is when you’re coming up with your strategy. This is something that I think a lot of times whenever I’ve initially talked to companies, that’s something that we’ve had to come in as outsiders and bring that perspective. Because I think a lot of times whoever’s driving the change, unless they are an executive, that’s not their number one goal. Their number one goal is usually something like how do we make our working lives easier by changing this process or fixing this one thing, but I think that looking at the larger picture of the budget is really important. So I wanted to get your take on that as well.

BS:     Oh yeah. You have three different areas of budgeting to really wrap your head around. One is of course is the money to make sure that you have the money that you’re going to need to get this thing done. And a lot of people make a mistake where they look only at the raw costs of tools and technologies and they don’t consider all the soft costs. So it could be oh, here’s X amount of dollars for a new system. Here’s a Y amount of dollars for a new offering tools and Z for these new publishing tools that we need to use to get the published content out to our customers or to our readers. That’s great. But then you have all of the costs associated with any external vendors that you need to solicit for support.

BS:     You may have other costs that come in the form of any kind of licensing that you weren’t aware of at the time, or any other just hard costs. Maybe everything looked good on paper, but IT came back and said, well we need to buy a new server for this and since it’s for your initiative, you need to cover the cost of this new purchase. These are all like little hidden costs that can pop up. In addition to that, you also have to budget for your time. That’s not only the project timeline, but it’s the time of every single person devoting effort to the project. That third piece of budgeting of course is the effort or the actual resource allocation to be able to say, we need essentially to use up 80 person weeks to get this piece done or to get this implementation done. Now how are we going to find 80 person weeks when we’re all busy?

GK:     Yes.

BS:     There’s budgeting like that. So you’d have your time, you have your availability of resources, and then of course you have your money.

GK:     Yes. And I think that that’s something that like you said the time and the resources pieces of that budget often get overlooked or they don’t get really accounted for. It can be difficult if you haven’t been tracking the way you’ve been using your time and resources. It can be difficult to even estimate how much might be involved in that project. But it’s really important to consider that and put that into your plan as much as possible and as accurately as possible so that you don’t run into nasty surprises when it comes to actually putting that new strategy in place.

BS:     Mm-hmm. No one likes those nasty surprises.

GK:     Oh, not at all. That kind of leads me into the next point, which is that your content strategy alone isn’t the full scope of a plan because you also, once you’ve got that strategy in place, you also need a plan for as you implement each part of it, how that process is going to go. The logistics of that strategy and making sure that everything goes as smoothly as it possibly can. So what kinds of things do you need to think about there?

BS:     Oh, there’s plenty. That’s really the move from moving from a strategic point of view to a tactical point of view. Because strategy is all well and good, but it’s not going to get anything done. It might be able to identify and even reserve the funds that you need, the people that you need and what have you. But now that you have all that, that’s where your strategy pretty much ends. I mean it serves as a roadmap during all of this other tactical work that needs to get done. But your strategy is there to get everything rolling, to get approval and to say, yes, we’re going to do this. This is how we’re going to do it. This is all the things that we need. And now that we have it, now we have to actually do the stuff.

BS:     Those things can be a myriad of activities, large and small. Could be content conversion that you’re looking at. It could be looking into all of the new systems that you need to assess and you have to pick a new CCMS maybe, maybe you have to pick a new asset management system, what have you. You have to be able to look at them and evaluate them and then go through the entire purchasing arrangement for it and then set up a test environment to poke at it. There are lots of moving pieces for each and every one of these little bits of these little tiny fragments of the strategy that need to be implemented in order for you to then move onto the next few pieces.

GK:     Absolutely. I think that having a plan in place for keeping all of those different pieces moving in a way that makes sense and where one piece is not going to be holding something else up or getting in the way of something is really, really important. I think that’s a challenging thing to coordinate, but it’s really essential to try to control that on the front end as much as possible instead of just taking off and approaching these pieces willy nilly without really thinking what makes sense to do first? What’s the best sequence? How does this fit into a schedule? All of that sort of thing. Because otherwise, like we talked about up front, if you don’t plan out how all these different moving pieces and parts are going to come together, then they can easily just stall out.

BS:     Right. Yeah, you need to look at prioritization at that point and say, okay, what are the three big things that need to happen to keep this moving forward? It might be identify and purchase new systems. That would be one of them. Another one could be training or document conversion. Yet a third one could be offering tools, being able to find the right tools that integrate with the systems that you’re looking to implement and being able to look at all of these little pieces and say, okay, which ones are going to get us the biggest bang for the buck and make sure that we have what we need to focus on the next few pieces and it’s going to be different for every single implementation.

BS:     There’s no right or wrong as to which one you do first. The only wrong is that it’s the wrong choice for you. So you need to look at… you need to start looking at that and saying okay, in order for us to move forward, we may have X and Y but we don’t have Z and Z is a deal breaker. So we have to focus on Z first.

GK:     So all this prioritization I think speaks back to what we talked about just a few minutes ago when it comes to that short-term versus long-term business goals. Because that is really a way that you can say, here’s what’s most important and most essential to get those short-term goals that have to happen off the ground and get them up and moving and then think about what’s more long-term. You don’t want to start with something that’s really more essential for a long-term goal while ignoring the things that are more relevant for your short-term goals.

BS:     Exactly. Yeah. That really speaks to the scheduling aspect of being able to put together that timeline and identify not only what the big pieces are that need to happen, but also, okay, so in order for these big pieces to happen, what’s the order in which they need to happen? Then you can start looking at each one and say, start scoping each one individually. This one might take 12 weeks to do. This other one can happen concurrently and it might take only eight weeks to do, another one must be done after these other stages, so we know that’s going to take about another 16 weeks to do this piece. But it can’t get done until this 12 week piece is done. Being able to put together that schedule and that roadmap.

GK:     Absolutely. I think that’s where it really becomes important to have deadlines and a schedule set and to try to stick to that as best as possible. Then if things slip off schedule to, like we said earlier, really have that open communication so that you can let other people who may be affected know, hey this didn’t quite go how we thought it would instead of taking 12 weeks, maybe now it’s going to take 15 or maybe we finish this one piece early so then that can get something else moving. But I think it’s really important if you don’t set deadlines for yourself and have those goals in place, then a lot of times things will just drag on forever. I think that speaks back to what we had talked about previously with the resource allocation aspect as well.

GK:     You really need to not only have those deadlines in place but know who’s going to work on each piece, when they’re going to be available. How that factors in to other projects that they may be working on. It’s a lot of moving pieces and parts for the content strategy itself, but also for all the people who are going to be working on it with their other work. So that’s where that planning really, really becomes essential.

GK:     One other piece I want to just briefly mention, because I think this tends to get ignored a lot, is building in time for quality assurance. So things like taking the time for a content inventory or audit before you build a content model or convert your content if you’re going into structure. Things like setting up test environments, allowing time for user feedback. That’s where I’ve seen a lot of projects get hung up just because when they were doing their resource allocation or their planning, people just oftentimes don’t think about how much time really is involved in quality assurance and making sure that it’s done in a way that doesn’t leave anything out or that’s not rushed. So I think that’s one thing that I really wanted to bring up as an important part to include in your planning.

BS:     Oh, absolutely. You have to make sure that everyone who is responsible for doing that level of testing or quality assurance that they are aware that something is coming and not just wait until whatever the thing is you’re working on is done to throw it at them and say, okay, we did a thing, now go test it. That is definitely the wrong approach. Making sure that your testers are involved or at least knowledgeable of what you’re doing along the way so they know what to expect when it comes time for them to start kicking the tires.

GK:     Absolutely. So are there any other considerations or things that people need to think about when they’re planning out their content strategy and how they’re going to execute it?

BS:     I think the only other thing to really mention is that you need to be mindful about how what you’re doing is going to impact other groups. You can’t just assume that they’re going to play ball when you start rolling out a new strategy. Making sure that they’re not only on board in theory, but that they are pretty much committed to the success of the project because they should have a stake in it in some form as well.

BS:     If it’s a a training group that the tech comm… Let’s say the technical communication group is implementing a strategy, they should be reaching out to their trainers, their tech support people, their salespeople, their marketing people to say, “Hey, we have this thing that we’re doing. It’s going to impact you all in some way and you can benefit from it. So let’s come together and make sure that this is going to be a solution that works for everybody.”

GK:     Absolutely. I think that’s especially important if you’re already dealing with a less than ideal situation between groups. If you, for example, I’ve seen one case where there was a large amount of reuse between a tech pubs department and a training department, but it was all copy paste. So when the tech pubs department decided to pursue a content strategy to just help them publish more efficiently, one of the things that they had to consider as well was that reuse factor with the training group and really get them on board and get them thinking about okay a year or two down the road when everything is in a new system and everything is structured and is much more shareable than it was before, how is that going to affect not just our group in our publishing abilities but our reuse among these different groups in the company?

GK:     Then it ended up where the largest amount of reuse was between tech pubs and training. But then there were also groups like marketing who were just copying and pasting content from the technical manuals without telling anyone. So that’s really, like you said, it’s important to think about how all of these groups work together. If they’re working together in a way that’s efficient and ideal right now versus how things need to be several years down the road.

GK:     I think all of that is an absolutely essential consideration and that really needs to be baked heavily into the planning phase of your content strategy and into all of the information you come up with about here’s how we’re going to execute and implement all of that.

BS:     Couldn’t agree more.

GK:     All right, well with that, I think we are going to wrap things up, so thank you Bill.

BS:     Thank you.

GK:     Thank you all for listening to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post Content strategy pitfalls: best practices (podcast, part 2) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 61 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bill Swallow return to our content strategy pitfalls series with a discussion about planning.

“Another thing that is really helpful is doing a pilot project or proof of concept, because that can help you look at a small but essential piece of your strategy and see how that works, and what goes wrong or what goes in an unexpected direction during that pilot.”

— Gretyl Kinsey

Related links:

Twitter handles:

Transcript: 

Gretyl Kinsey:     Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997 Scriptorium has helped companies manage structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 61, we return to our content strategy pitfalls series with a discussion around planning.

GK:     Hello and welcome. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.

Bill Swallow:     And I’m Bill Swallow.

GK:     Today, we’re going to talk about what happens if you don’t plan a content strategy and you don’t plan for implementing new systems. I think both of us have seen this happen quite a bit, so I think let’s just go ahead and start off with the question of what happens when you don’t plan properly?

BS:     All the bad things happen.

GK:     Yes.

BS:     Yeah. One of the things that I’ve seen and I’ve heard pain points for talking to other people is when they look at a content strategy and they plan it without considering all of the pieces that need to come together in order to reach the end goal, so they look at where they are and they look at where they need to be, and they put that end result as the highest priority. But they don’t consider all the little pieces in between.

GK:     Yeah, I’ve definitely seen that happen, as well. I’ve also seen it happen where the end result that they had in mind had nothing to do with their business goals and just had everything to do with, “Oh, we saw this really awesome tool that we think would be a good change.” Or, “We may be have this one goal that we’re focusing on,” but it’s not really taking into account how that is going to help save time and save costs, and it’s not really an overall picture. It’s just sort of something, one little piece that they’re focusing on, and that affects the entire planning process or lack thereof.

BS:     Right. Because it then shuts out a lot of other opportunities and it shuts out a lot of other places that need to be addressed.

GK:     Yes. I think one really common case I’ve seen of this is where content strategy kind of just encompasses one department or one type of content and doesn’t really look at the organization’s content as a whole, and doesn’t kind of look at the future end goal of getting all of that content aligned and making sure that the company’s branding is a major part of that and that everyone is kind of consistent across their messaging. I think that that’s one big planning gap that I’ve seen happen a lot of times. A lot of it boils down to just different groups kind of working in silos and not collaborating with each other. And so when that happens, then of course they don’t plan together and make sure that they’re coming up with one kind of overarching strategy.

BS:     Right. You did mention also focusing around a particular tool, and that’s a fairly myopic view in general, but when you start targeting a tool, either by relying on its own capabilities, you tend to forget to look at all of the other pieces that need to come together to support that or other places where that content needs to be used. Or if you’re looking at a particular goal of getting everything into a new CCMS, or a new CMS for that matter, that ends up being strictly an implementation problem, and not necessarily a strategic look at how the content needs to come together in order to do that.

BS:     So, a lot of the strategies are a lot of the tasks that fall out of the strategy that you’re putting together generally focus on that one single goal in disregard a lot of tangential pieces, that other people might be relying on your content that they no longer will be getting it in the format that they expect, or it might limit the sharing of content, or it might lead to oversharing of content. In which case, you then might have the same problem for example, of duplicate content or redundant content being produced by other groups just by leveraging your content without actually following some kind of systematic reuse.

GK:     Absolutely. Like I said, that’s something that I have seen happen so many times. Sometimes we’ve been brought into a situation as consultants where that was what happened and then they have had to bring in an outsider like us to fix it. That’s definitely something I think to really consider in the planning phase so that you can avoid that and avoid getting stuck in that hole and then having to kind of crawl your way back out.

BS:     That’s a good analogy.

GK:     What are some other examples that you’ve seen of what happens when you don’t plan or when you kind of fail to do so correctly?

BS:     Well speaking of crawling, you end up having portions of projects that ended up just being in this bit of a churn cycle, so to speak, where a lot of efforts being made to do a particular piece of the overall strategy, but nothing else is coming together. Then when things do come together, then a lot of rework needs to happen on that same piece. I guess in one way, you can boil it down to not hardening any particular portion of your strategic approach until you know all the pieces are going to fall together. Because if a change does happen somewhere down the line, you have to back up and then start redoing a lot of the same work over and over again. Likewise, if you don’t get buy-in from particular groups or with using particular technologies in a certain way, you might have to then revisit how you’ve approached your entire content model, which is no small feat, and it’s not easy to do when 85% of your implementation is complete and then you have to start and basically redo a huge portion of that.

GK:     Yes. A couple of examples where I’ve seen this happen. There is one case where metadata was something that got caught in a churn, because prior to kind of moving things over into a structure environment, there was a situation where nobody had really thought about metadata and how it would be used with structured content. And so, that almost became so much of a focus, and it was a new focus that had not been considered before. People got caught up in the churn of constantly going back and forth and saying, “What metadata do we need? How are we going to use it?” It basically just drew all of their focus away from the other pieces of the project so that nothing was really moving forward. I think that’s a good example of this kind of churn cycle that can happen.

GK:     I’ve also seen it happen with conversion processes sometimes or with the development of output transforms. Basically like you said, any one piece, if it kind of gets all of the focus or most of the focus and you’re really working so hard on making it super perfect, then oftentimes what happens is other considerations happen, other things come into play. Then what you thought was so perfect is actually not perfect after all, but maybe you’ve already used all of your resources. Maybe you had budgeted a certain amount of time or money to work on that piece and you’ve already blown through all of that before you had a chance to see how it fit into your larger strategy. Then you’re kind of in a really bad place at that point because what you had developed to perfection is no longer perfect, but then maybe you’re stuck without the means of taking it where it needs to be.

BS:     Right. And you know, that speaks a lot too also being able to keep your eyes on the prize, so to speak, and it’s nice to have that end goal in in view. But you can’t necessarily ignore it once you start working on a particular piece of your implementation or a particular piece of your strategic drill down into figuring out what the tasks are to complete something and start working on some of the ground level bits of your implementation. If you keep your eyes or if you keep a focus away from the end goal and all the pieces that need to come together to make that happen, a lot can change. Other departments and so forth can have their own projects going on, which could impact some of the infrastructure you planned on interfacing with or using directly, and that can have a huge impact on all the work that you’re doing. Which might be good work, but it would have to be reworked in order to work with whatever new approach or new systems these other groups have decided to implement while waiting for you.

GK:     Yes, absolutely. What other examples have you encountered of this?

BS:     Another, I guess a good basic one, is the problem of stagnation, where you have a charter to go ahead and implement something, to develop a strategy to get teams aligned and so forth. Then for whatever reason, things come to a crawl. So maybe executive leadership has a different high priority that they’re chasing, and suddenly your group’s needs or your project’s needs suddenly don’t get the focus that it needs to move forward.

BS:     It’s really difficult to kind of get out of that stuck mentality of not being able to move forward, because you’re not getting the budget that you need, because you’re not getting access to the people that you need to talk to. It can almost be frustrating. So, it’s important to be able to make sure that you have a means of communicating up to someone who can make an executive decision to say, “We know that we have a focus on these three other things, but this is still a priority project, so let’s make sure we have some time and resources allocated to keeping this moving forward.” Your content strategy might not be the be all end all project that the company is worried about, but then you can at least make sure that you have some ability to keep it moving forward and not letting it stagnate.

GK:     Absolutely, and I think that what you’ve said about allocating resources is one of the biggest issues that can lead to the stagnation, and can also lead to another example, which is something that we’ve called hurry up and wait mode. A lot of projects sort of end up in that cycle of stagnation and churn as well. I think a lot of it boils down to the allocation of resources, like you said. If you don’t plan for that up front and you just kind of make a project, something that people work on as they can rather than setting aside a certain amount of time that people are going to work on it, then what often happens is it just never gets done.

GK:     Something else always comes up that’s more important or more pressing. And if you haven’t thought about what resources do we want to put toward this, then it’s never going to happen. I think that’s also true if you don’t really have hard deadlines or a schedule in your plan that you’re working toward. Those two things, not having a set schedule and not having resources allocated, often can just stop a project in its tracks and delay it months, if not years at the time.

BS:     Mm-hmm. I guess what would you say to a situation where you’re doing everything right as far as you know, and you know you’re doing everything that you’re supposed to be doing to move your strategy along, but things just aren’t going to plan?

GK:     Well, I think the first thing I would say to that is that this is almost guaranteed to happen, so it’s really important to have backup plans when you make your initial plan. You know, there’s always going to be that ideal of how you think your strategy should go, but there are always external factors that come up that you will not be able to anticipate. But you can at least kind of think about if this sort of thing happens, here is how we would handle it on the front end. Then that way when those things do come up, you’re not just completely taken off track and you kind of have a bit of a game plan in mind for how you’re going to handle those things and it doesn’t just completely derail everything

BS:     Right. Yeah, having those backup plans is essential, and also being able to look at projects and be able to say, “Okay, what, what can we isolate?” You know, “What is something that isn’t tied specifically to a dependency down the road?” It might be initial conversion of your content. It might be doing a content audit to at least get your arms around, “Okay, well what do we have to do to deal with? Even if we don’t have the resources to do anything with it, what are we looking at here? What’s the total scope? What are the types of things that need to be changed? What types of files need to be massaged a bit so that it makes conversion easier?” Something small on that scale can still keep the project going as you wait for other pieces to start moving.

GK:     Yeah, I agree. One thing that I’ve seen really help companies, especially where the resources or the budget might be very stretched, is to kind of reduce that risk and plan things, and like you said, in those smaller chunks or in kind of more reasonable pieces and phases. I know that there’s one project that I worked on where they decided to do their implementation in these kind of small phases where they said, “We know that we can do each piece at a time and not feel like we’re biting off more than we can chew.”

GK:     Whereas if they had tried to just go ahead and implement every single part of our strategy at once, they know that they would have gotten caught up in that sort of churn that can happen whenever things go off the rails and don’t go according to plan. By sort of taking that into account and knowing how things typically worked, they thought that the smarter thing to do would be to just kind of take it in reasonable, approachable pieces, and sort of do one thing at a time that they knew they could kind of get their arms around and keep their arms around as they were going through it.

GK:     Another thing that I think is really helpful along those lines is the idea of doing a pilot project or proof of concept, because that can really help you look at sort of a small but essential piece of your strategy and see how that works, and then look at what does go wrong or what goes kind of in an unexpected direction during that pilot. Then use that to kind of help plan out your larger implementation more thoroughly, but without having invested everything up front. You can kind of see if something is going to go not quite according to plan, what kinds of things those might be by doing a pilot, and then you can say, “Oh, okay. Here’s how we need to course correct before we go forward to the rest of this and sort of expand it further.”

BS:     Yeah, those small proofs of concept can come in really handy, too, when you’re, for lack of a better approach, if you have particular groups that you’re waiting to work with, but for whatever reason they’re stalling their engagement, those little proofs of concepts, it can be that little spark that keeps the project going or the spark that kindles some action on their side. It’s a lot easier to show someone this is what I’m thinking and this is how it works, and you can play with it and try to break it or do whatever you need to to kind of see where we’re going with this. Sometimes that approach is a lot easier than trying to get people in a room to talk theoretically about how something will be implemented. If they have something that they can play with, and use, and provide feedback on, it can sometimes move that project forward quicker.

GK:     Absolutely. One case where I saw this actually work quite well was in a situation where there had been a really large merger and sort of series of mergers, where this company had kind of grown from having just the one content department to suddenly they had brought in these other companies that had their own documentation teams. They decided when they were doing this rebranding effort to kind of bring everything together, to just start with the one documentation team that was sort of pushing the project and that was the most motivated. They said, “We’re just going to convert this department’s manuals into XML, prove that this works, and then we can use that to convince all of these other groups that have their own sets of documentation, you know, this actually does work, and it’s safe for you to do this, and there’s not the huge risk that you think there is.”

GK:     Whereas I think if they had tried to just go ahead and convert everything all at once up front, it would have been chaos. Because they had all of these groups that they had just basically been bought out and they already had a lot of stress they were under as a result of that, and they were kind of learning all of the new things that they had to learn by now having been acquired by this larger company. And so focusing on a major content overhaul at the same time I think would have been too much. But because they had this one group that wanted to go ahead and do it and just start small, that proof of concept was enough to start getting the other groups on board and having them one by one come through and say, “Okay, now we can do this piece of the content and go ahead and convert that.” Then that way, they were able to sort of tackle a rebranding piece by piece in a way that was not overwhelming.

BS:     Another piece that goes along with that is just having regular, or sometimes even frequent, either meetings or at least communications going out to other groups that say, “Here is where we are. Here’s where things stand. Here are the next steps.” A lot of times, that really helps to one, keep people interested in what you’re doing, and also reminds them that they’re on the hook to share something at some point along the way.

GK:     Yes, absolutely, and I think that if you don’t have those open lines of communication, then that’s another way that things can really go off the rails and destroy whatever original plan that you had for your strategy. I think that’s extremely important. It kind of depends on your company culture, but whether it is face-to-face meetings that are more effective or if you’re a distributed team, whether it’s having web meetings or even if there is a forum that you all post on. Whatever system works best for your company, I think it’s really important to have that in place and have some sort of regularity to it so that you are all kept accountable.

BS:     Exactly.

GK:     We’re going to wrap things up here, but look out for our next podcast episode where we continue our discussion of content strategy pitfalls around planning, this time talking about some best practices of how you should do your planning. Thank you, Bill.

BS:     Thank you.

GK:     And thank you all for listening to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. For more information, visit Scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post Content strategy pitfalls: planning (podcast, part 1) appeared first on Scriptorium.