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In episode 60 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Gretyl Kinsey discuss content reuse, how it specifically applies to DITA,  and how it can benefit your organization.

“So often we see companies wasting a lot of time copying and pasting. This idea of reuse saves time and money, and then it also helps to maintain that consistency across your organization.”

— Elizabeth Patterson

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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 Episode 60 we look at content reuse and how it can benefit your organization.

EP:     Hi, I’m Elizabeth Patterson.

Gretyl Kinsey:     And I’m Gretyl Kinsey.

EP:     I think we should start by defining reuse. We bring it up a lot as a benefit for structured offering and for migrating your content to DITA. What does reuse really mean, Gretyl?

GK:     At its core, reuse is all about writing content one time and then reusing it in multiple places. That’s opposed to something like keeping a bunch of different copies of the same exact information or even similar information. What that does by having just one piece of reusable content is it establishes a single source of truth. That means that your content is going to be more consistent if you just have it in that one place and it lets you do things like take your existing content and use parts of that to create new documentation. You can kind of create multiple documents that reference or reuse the same piece of content over and over.

GK:     An example that we can touch on a little bit, one common one, is something like safety warnings, and cautions, and things like that. You see that very commonly in technical documentation. Just kind of right off the bat is one very quick and easy way that you can see something that’s reusable. But it also might be things like a how to guide, a getting started guide, things like that that you see the same content over and over. That means that it’s probably something you should be reusing instead of copying, pasting, that sort of thing.

EP:     Right. And so often I think that we see companies wasting a lot of time copying and pasting. This idea of reuse saves time and money, and then it also helps to maintain that consistency across organizations because you might have content in different locations, and it might be from different times, and you might be pulling from different times. If you don’t have all of that together and you’re not reusing it efficiently, you might have inconsistent information.

GK:     Absolutely. We’ve seen lots of cases where two different writers are basically writing the same content because there’s not that communication and they’ve kind of written the same information in two slightly different ways. That introduces that inconsistency. And as you said, if there’s not really a good method of version control in place then if you go to reference some information, you just copy it out of an older version of your documentation. Then you’ve gotten something incorrect in your documents now.

EP:     Right.

GK:     It’s really important to have that single source of reusable truth.

EP:     So we’ve defined reusable content. What exactly does reusable content look like? Could you share some examples with us?

GK:     Sure. One of the ones I mentioned just a second ago was stuff like safety warnings, but I want to talk about different types of reuse that you can have and then some examples that would go with each. You can have reuse at the document level. This would be an entire publication, and this would look like maybe if you deliver packages of content with different products, but maybe with every single one they get the same kind of, “Here’s how to get started” sheet that goes with it. Or they get a little quick start guide booklet, but then the actual documentation is different product by product. But that one document is the same. That’s something that will be reused across those content sets.

GK:     When it comes specifically to DITA, you can have reuse at the topic level. A DITA topic can be referenced in different DITA maps. This might look like a common introductory topic that’s used in a lot of different publications, kind of like I mentioned before, a how to sort of thing. It might be a list of common terms, or warnings, or cautions that you’re going to see. But basically it’s an entire topic that would be reused at different points.

GK:     You can also have reuse at the element level, so that would be things like paragraphs, lists, notes, images, anything like that, tables. Something where an entire element can be reused in multiple DITA topics. That again goes back to that example I gave with safety warnings, that’s a very typical use case of that. Whatever that admonition is that contains your warning, your caution, whatever, might appear in multiple different places.

GK:     You can also have reuse at the phrase level. For example, your company name or if there’s another kind of specific branded term, that just one word or phrase can be reused. There is a caution to keep in mind there, which is if you are localizing, you have to think about how reusing using one word or phrase would affect translations.

EP:     Right.

GK:     That’s why we don’t recommend just doing it all over the place. It’s really more if it is for a proper name or something that’s part of your branding. Your company name or something that you want to just make sure you never misspell, you only write it in the one place.

GK:     DITA has mechanisms that support all these different types of reuse. If you’re looking at reuse at the document or the topic level, that might look like you have a main DITA map and you have a reference to another map that’s reusing that document. Or you may have a reference to a topic and that same reference appears in different maps. That would be reuse at the topic level.

GK:     At the element level it might look something like using a content reference, or conref, to pull in that one reusable table, or warning, or note, or whatever that’s your one element you’re reusing.

GK:     Then for phrase level, your company name, that might be supported by a key.

GK:     DITA has all of these really great building mechanisms to support all of these different types of reuse and there are some ways that you can sort of identify what content is reusable so that you can tell which of these mechanisms that might be best for it. Of course, one way is that you might sort of know off the top of your head, “I copy and paste this information all the time. I know it’s reusable.” But if you’ve got a lot of content, or a lot of different people working on it, or maybe a lot of legacy stuff built up, and that knowledge is not just right there, there are also tools that can scan your content and tell you, “Here’s where you’ve got an exact match appearing 20 or 30 times throughout your documentation set.” Or, “Here’s where you’ve got a very close or partial match” and that’s where you can find if different writers have been writing the same thing in different ways over and over.

GK:     With technologies like that, then it can pinpoint here is how much reuse potential that we have and then the types of reuse that might be in the content. You can take a look at that and then determine how that is going to affect putting reuse in place and what your reuse strategy is going to be when you move over to DITA.

EP:     You gave a really good, clear picture or visual picture of what content reuse looks like. I want to cycle back around to talk a little bit more about the benefits of reuse. I mentioned a couple earlier, I talked about saving time and saving money, which are both huge, and then also maintaining that consistency across your company. Do you have anything else to add to that?

GK:     Sure. One thing I want to talk about is localization. That’s because those time and money savings that you get really get even bigger and multiply if you have localization as part of your content workflow. That’s because if you think about how translation works, if you are translating one piece of reusable content, you’re paying for that translation the one time and then reusing it. But if you are not doing proper reuse and you’ve got that content basically copied and pasted all over the place, then you’re having to translate that same piece of content however many times you’ve got it all over.

GK:     If you really maximize on your reuse potential and let’s say you analyze your content and you find out 25% of it is reusable, or even up to 40 or 50%, which is pretty typical, is reusable, then all of a sudden you’re looking at cutting way down on your localization costs. Especially if you look at a situation where the more languages that you’re translating into, the more those savings can really, really add up. That’s one of the big drivers that we have seen when it comes to developing content strategy is needing to get that benefit of reuse to help make localization more cost efficient. That’s a really big one.

GK:     As you mentioned on the consistency angle, one thing I want to talk about there was that reuse can help make content more consistent, not just across a documentation set, but across an entire company. This would be a case where maybe you start with your, let’s say tech pubs department, and you get all of the content there consistent, then what about expanding outward to other groups in the organization. Maybe your training group, your marketing group, if there are any other content producing departments in your organization. I think it’s really important for a brand overall to have that consistency across all of those different groups.

EP:     Definitely.

GK:     There are a lot of times cases where there is reusable content, so a marketing website, or marketing slick that’s handed out at a convention, or something like that. If your product is very technical, or if it’s software, or even some types of hardware where people need to know what the technical specifications are, that might be a case where you would go into the technical documentation and reuse that content in your marketing materials. With training there’s a lot of reuse potential in organizations because as you bring in new employees and you need to train them on the product, there’s a lot of the product documentation right there that could form the backbone of a training course. Then you might just start with that information and then add how to’s, and quizzes, and things like that. Really, a lot of the content that you need is already in your documentation.

GK:     I think that when it comes to helping make sure that consistency is there and really helps your entire brand look more consistent, more put together, that’s a big place for reuse to come into play.

EP:     Right. Because if your brand isn’t consistent, people are going to question your company.

GK:     Exactly. It doesn’t really make the customer feel very secure in your product when they see one thing on the marketing side when they’re ordering, and then when their product arrives the documentation looks like it came from a completely different company.

EP:     Right.

GK:     That’s really something important to consider. That’s another place where you may not think about the immediate financial benefits, but if you’ve got a more consistent brand messaging across all of your content, then that could really help you draw in more customers. Conversely, if you don’t have that consistency, it could lose customers and you may not even think about that that might be why.

EP:     Right, absolutely. Let’s take a look at some specific use cases for content reuse.

GK:     Sure. One that’s really, really interesting to me that we’ve worked on is reuse to deliver targeted content. We’ve done this for a few different companies. What this looks like is when you’ve got all of your customers needing one main set of content, but then there’s also custom content that’s based on things, like what version of the product the customer owns. Maybe what user role they have or what location they’re in. There could be all kinds of factors like that where based on that information they would need to get some additional content that is just for them. In this case, you’ve got a scenario where most of the content is reusable and then it’s just these little customizations. That’s an interesting thing to think about how you had set that up and deliver it.

GK:     We’ve addressed this in a couple of different ways for different organizations. This might look like maybe using different DITA maps for different subsets or groups of customers. It may also look like using one main DITA map with different filters applied for different customers. In the one case you’ve got these different maps and they’re all kind of pulling from the same source of topics. And another case you’ve got just the one main map and then information is included or excluded based on the particular customer’s information. That’s a couple of different ways you can do it.

GK:     Then if you’re looking at reuse at the element level, it’s also possible to have common topics and then appending that customer specific content via mechanisms like conref push.

GK:     There are a lot of different ways that you can approach this type of reuse. That’s one scenario that I’ve seen that’s not the typical, “We need to save costs on localization.” Or, “We need to save costs on formatting.” Delivering the sort of targeted custom content to different groups of customers, but still having some material that’s the same across the board is a really interesting reuse case that we’ve seen a few times.

GK:     Another one is reuse for rebranding. This might be a scenario where you’ve got a new company logo, or maybe you’ve got a new company name, or a tagline, or whatever and that needs to be referenced in all of your documents. If you are in some sort of unstructured environment where reuse is maybe either impossible or just very, very difficult, you might be looking at a situation where someone would have to go in by hand and copy in that new logo, or name, or whatever into every single document, which is a huge waste of time and-

EP:     And very inconvenient.

GK:     Yes. And people don’t want to do that. This is a case where we’ve seen this be a really big driver for moving to DITA for some companies because they don’t want to have to go through the pain of all of that manual copying and pasting. They just want to have that one reusable logo, or maybe a DITA key that’s referenced with the company name, and just have that be used in all their documents. Then if it ever changes again, if they go through another rebranding in two years, they just have to change out their logo in the name and then all the documents automatically update and they don’t have to go through and painstakingly change their branding individually across all of those documents.

EP:     Right. Which would save a lot of time.

GK:     Absolutely.

EP:     If any of our listeners are interested in learning more about reuse and DITA, you can visit LearningDITA.com. We actually have two reuse courses. One covers the basics and then one goes into more advanced reuse mechanisms.

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.

GK:     Yes. I know that we talked through some of those on here. I mentioned using keys, conrefs, conref push, all that stuff, all of that is covered in really nice detailed how to information in that second advanced reuse course on LearningDITA. Then the first course just goes into the basics of how reuse work. If you want a nice expansion and some hands on practice with reuse, then that’s a good place to go.

EP:     Absolutely. We also have a lot on our blog on reuse and we’ll link some of that in the show notes. So with that, I think we’re going to go ahead and wrap up. Thank you, Gretyl.

GK:     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 Reuse in DITA and beyond (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 59 of the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and Kaitlyn Heath discuss how you can apply the Learning and Training specialization to your content.

I think the conditional processing is a huge benefit as well. You can have a lot more interactivity built in without that human interference.

— Kaitlyn Heath

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Transcript: 

Alan Pringle:     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 59, we look at the DITA learning and training specialization.

AP:     Hello, everyone. I’m Alan Pringle. Today I have Kaitlyn Heath here with me.

Kaitlyn Heath:     Hi.

AP:     Hey there. Let’s talk today a little bit about the learning and training specialization that is part of the DITA XML standard. Let’s start the conversation first with defining exactly what that specialization is. Tell us a little bit about it overall.

KH:     The learning and training specialization is designed for instructional content. You can put things like your learning plan. You can do your entire course. Then you can also have things like your assessments or your questions and however you design those.

AP:     Because it’s part of the bigger DITA ecosystem, how does it fit in with that?

KH:     It’s designed to fit in and be able to be reused along with your other DITA content. You’re doing things like you would normally do in DITA, like using small topics and putting individual questions in their own topics, and then you’re able to reuse those in different kinds of maps that are designed specifically for learning and training or your standard DITA maps.

AP:     If you can use a standard DITA map, does that mean that you can mix, say, a standard DITA topic with the learning and training content?

KH:     Yes, of course you can. You can use all of your normal DITA content, let’s say even your specialized DITA content, within these new learning and training specialization topics, but you will have to use the specific elements in most of those cases that are designed specifically to fit within them.

AP:     There is a really big mix and match kind of scenario here.

KH:     Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s exactly how it was designed to work.

AP:     Yeah, so if you have a task, for example, that someone in your tech comm department has written, for example, and you’re in the training department and you need to reference that, you could just pull that into your stuff.

KH:     Exactly. You might need to use the specific learning and training element, but then you would be able to reference that .DITA topic. In the learning and training specialization, learning content topics, which is where the bulk of your instructional material is going to go, you are allowed to embed other DITA topics within them as well. If you are writing a task that is mostly going to go in your instructional content but you want to be able to reference that ID later, you can embed that topic directly within your learning content topic.

AP:     I’ve tinkered a little bit with the learning and training specialization, and I have to say I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of elements because there’s a lot.

KH:     There are a lot of elements, especially in things like the learning plan topic type. You’re not meant to use all of them. You’re meant to use and pick the ones that you need to use.

KH:     For example, in our LearningDITA.com courses, we eliminate a lot of the topic types that we don’t need, so we really only are using learning content topic types and then learning assessment topic types. We decided we don’t have enough content for a learning plan, and we don’t want an entire topic for a learning introduction or a learning summary, so we decided to just include those specific elements within our learning content topic type and then reference those in a normal DITA map.

AP:     Can you kind of go over briefly the hierarchy of… I guess is learning object the right word here, because there’s so many layers? It’s like an onion almost.

KH:     I think so. Learning objects are an element and a map type that are-

AP:     Oh, that’s confusing.

KH:     It’s a little bit confusing.

AP:     Yeah.

KH:     You can have this one main learning object element within a learning object map. The way that that’s designed to work is that you have one main learning object within your learning object map, and that is where you will define the smaller units or sections in your learning content. Then, from there, you will include your learning plan, learning overview, learning content, learning summary, learning assessments, if you would like, in that map. Then, on a higher level, maybe you would have units or chapters that would be included in your learning group map or your learning groups.

KH:     It gets a little confusing because there are a lot of different ways that you can nest these. It seems to be intended that you will have units and learning groups at the higher level and then included in embedded sections that are your learning objects within them, and that is however you would define your units or sections or whatever in your learning content.

AP:     You’re not required to do things, necessarily, in absolute path with this.

KH:     Right. Right. You can use them however you need to use them and-

AP:     Or not use them.

KH:     Or not use them at all, right, which we have not used them in our LearningDITA courses, but yeah, you can use them however you see fit. You may not have units and sections. You may really only have chapters, and then you can use learning objects or you can use whatever you need to. You can use a normal map.

KH:     The interesting thing about the learning objects and learning map elements, they’re based on topic refs, so you will have to use specific things like, in a learning object, you will define your learning content ref, and that will have to be the specific element that you use. You can’t use a topic ref element, but in the href that you use, you will be able to reference other DITA material as well, so it doesn’t have to necessarily be a learning object topic type. You can use a normal concept topic in that place.

AP:     That’s where your reuse really comes into play.

KH:     Exactly. Exactly. The reverse is also true so, in your normal DITA map, you can reference those learning topic types, and it’s not going to throw an error. It’s just however you have processed your content when you later turn it into a PDF or you put it into SCORM or whatever to go on their interactive website.

AP:     You were just talking about various output types, and you mentioned SCORM. Let’s tell people what SCORM is out there.

KH:     It stands for shareable content object reference model, and it’s basically a way to package your information that then your learning management system can process.

AP:     It’s kind of like an interchangeable way that different LMSs can suck in a course, basically, more or less.

KH:     Yes. Yes.

AP:     The thing about DITA, even standard DITA, not just this specialization, is that it gives you tremendous amounts of flexibility in what you transform that content into.

KH:     Of course.

AP:     For training, I mean you could do a teacher guide. You could do a student guide. You could even do handouts. That’s on the print side alone.

KH:     Absolutely. The great thing about using DITA, and especially for assessments and things that you have teacher information for, is that you can author it at the same time and store it in the same place so that you can look at them at the same time.

KH:     For example, if you have a test, and you’ve got questions and then the teacher answer key, you can author those things and then view them at the same time, so you will have the answer options and then a special tag that says, “This is the right answer,” or, “LC correct response.” It’s really nice not to have to have one Microsoft Word file with the student information and then a separate printout or Microsoft Word file for your teacher information. You can store and write them at the same time.

AP:     In addition to the modularity that DITA enables, the whole conditional aspect of content plays into this too, so you’ve got this built in intelligence where you can create a question and an answer, and they’re together.

KH:     Yes, it’s a huge benefit.

AP:     Then you can output it showing the answer or not depending on the audience for that particular printout or whatever it is.

KH:     Right. Exactly. Exactly. Then, especially for learning management systems and interactive courses for students, you can then print those answers to the screen when they have selected the correct or incorrect answer. You can have different outputs for different inputs that they have, so if they pick one answer, you can output one thing, and if they pick another answer, you can output the other thing.

AP:     Basically, you’re creating feedback with it.

KH:     Exactly.

AP:     Based on if they answer a question incorrectly, it could provide guidance, “No. That’s not right, and here’s why.”

KH:     Exactly.

AP:     It gives them kind of in-depth context that you can include. We’ve actually done this on our LearningDITA.com site. It is based on the learning and training specialization. If you get a question wrong, a lot of the times it will tell you, “No. That’s not the right answer, and here’s why.”

KH:     Exactly.

AP:     We talked a little bit about print. We talked a little bit about online. Let’s talk a little more about the online ability in learning management systems and what you can do with this content.

KH:     You can include a lot of the media content that you could not in print. If you have instructional videos and things like that, you can include them in the learning and training specialization. Also, I think the conditional processing is a huge benefit as well. I think you can have a lot more interactivity built in without that human interference.

AP:     Well, it’s a tremendous amount of overhead to maintain two separate versions, especially if you’re working in a desktop publishing tool like Microsoft Word-

KH:     Absolutely. Absolutely.

AP:     …and keeping those two things in sync. The amount of brain power alone that has to go into that, “Oh, I changed this, so I need to change it over here in this version.” Can only imagine if you had more than… if you went beyond student and teacher, if there was another audience in there, I can’t even imagine how hard it would be to do two much less three.

KH:     Exactly, and which is possible for some of the audiences that need to use learning and training specialization. You might be training different groups that need to know different levels of things.

AP:     Exactly.

KH:     Then you have that conditional processing that says, “For this group, we need these topics and these lessons, but for this other one, we don’t necessarily need all of them. We just need the first three”

AP:     You still have all of that source to build off on-

KH:     Right. Exactly.

AP:     …and you’re not having to make a copy and paste it over and over and over.

KH:     Exactly. It’s saving all of that time that DITA normally saves but for this entire instructional content.

AP:      I know you’ve worked a whole lot on LearningDITA.com, and you’ve worked with a few clients and talked to them about the learning and training specialization. Based on your own experience and talking to clients, what do people find really challenging about using the learning and training specialization?

KH:     They’re, just as in DITA, is sort of a mindset shift in authoring. A lot of times, you have to be mindful of the format that your questions, for example, are going to be in. You might not want to have as many interactive drawing types of questions and things like that. Sometimes it’s difficult to move from a paper model into this is going to be reused, and this has to fit in the DITA model. Of course there’s specialization. You can specialize your question types, but it is a little bit difficult to go from I have full control over what this question looks like versus this is the structure that it has to fit in.

KH:     I think the same thing is true for just authoring the courses. You start to think about that implied structure. You think, “Oh, what is my overview? What is my summary?” Which I think sometimes is helpful because students tend to crave that structure. They like having, “This is what the header looks like, and this is what I’m looking for,” but I think it’s difficult to make that shift.

AP:     In order for modularity to work, even in standard DITA content, not even the learning and training content, if you don’t have that shift in mindset and you’re not thinking about this is what this is going to look like on paper, this kind of paper-based paradigm, DITA, in general, is going to be difficult for you.

KH:     Right. I think that’s very true. It is true, but it saves a lot of time. It saves a lot of time.

AP:     How does it save time?

KH:     Well, for example, in instructional content, you don’t have someone… You find that people will rewrite questions over and over again for different courses or, like I was talking about before, really similar courses with a little shift in content but, in this way, you can reuse them and then also reuse content that you’ve already written, say, in your technical documentation for a product. Maybe you can then use it, that same content in your training, so you don’t have to rewrite it every time. If you do, maybe you conref some in and then change the way that it’s framed.

AP:     What does conref mean, for those who don’t know?

KH:     Conreffing is a way that you can pull sections, whether it be paragraphs or whatever granularity you want it to be, you can pull it in from your existing content into your new topic and your new content…

AP:     Yeah, so-

KH:     …with an ID or… Right.

AP:     Okay, so reuse is a huge part of it.

KH:     Yes, absolutely.

AP:     We’ve already touched on that. Then there’s also the formatting angle too we’ve also touched on a little bit too, because if content creators, your instructional designers, are not having to spend time focused on how is this going to format in print, what is this going to look like when it’s in the LMS, all that’s handled automatically by the transforms that transform the DITA into the various output types. You don’t have to be thinking about that. You get to focus strictly on the content itself.

KH:     Right, which again is hard to accept for some people that are used to, like I said, drawing their own pictures, maybe, for learning content or setting it up in a specific way, but it does save a lot of that time.

AP:     You mentioned, earlier, video, and you’re talking about art. You can still get-

KH:     Yes, all of those things.

AP:     …multimedia stuff will still… You could still reference them as objects in this content.

KH:     Of course.

AP:     In a lot of LMSs, you can play a video, for example.

KH:     Right. Exactly. Yeah, so it’s all still possible. It’s just a different way of including it and thinking about where you’re going to include it.

AP:     If people need help with the learning and training specialization, what are your suggestions?

KH:     Well, there are not a lot of resources, but we do have a course on LearningDITA.com called The Learning and Training specialization.

AP:     Free.

KH:     Free course, right? That is the first place that I would go for an overview of all of the topic types and sort of what they all do and some of the different elements included in them.

AP:     Yeah. I think one of the more important things, and you’ve already touched on this, is you don’t have to use it all. If you go in there with the mindset that, “I have to use every single one of these elements in this hierarchy,” you’re going to make your life very unpleasant.

KH:     Let me just say we couldn’t even include all of them in the course. I mean you probably will never even need to know about all of them, but if you do, you can always visit the DITA 1.3 specification to look them up, but this gives a good overview of what those things are and how to use them.

AP:     Yeah. I think it’s important to realize the people that created this specialization, I’m sure they were thinking about all the different use cases. It’s not one size fits all.

KH:     Of course. Right.

AP:     That’s why there are so many elements and so many layers. It’s a matter of adapting all those layers to suit your particular purposes.

KH:      Right. Think of the entire specialization as, “This is probably everything that is possible, but what do I need and what maps to the content that I have and the needs that I have?”

AP:     That fits beautifully into the whole idea of DITA, which has the word Darwin in it, Darwin Information Typing Architecture. It is meant to be adaptable. That means you adapt it to what you need.

KH:     Yes, exactly.

AP:     I think, on that note, we will leave it there. Thank you so much, Kaitlyn, for your time.

KH:     Thank you.

AP:     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.

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In episode 58 of the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Sarah O’Keefe discuss how to unify content after a merger.

In terms of pushback or in terms of change management, what we have to do is ask, “What does this other team do really well that potentially is going to be asked to change tools? How do you do this well?” And position the change as an opportunity.

— Sarah O’Keefe

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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 episode 58, we look at how to unify content after a merger.

EP:     Hi, I’m Elizabeth Patterson.

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

EP:    And we’re going to talk some today about unifying content after a merger. So I think the first question to really get into is, what are some of the biggest content challenges that you commonly see after a company merger?

SO:     Well, the biggest challenge in general is always change management. We should probably just start by putting that on the table and saying that overall people hate change, and mergers mean change for everybody, whether you’re the acquiring company or part of the acquiree, but the biggest content challenges that you face after a merger, so you take company A and company B and now we have a new shiny company C, or possibly just company A with company B included. So from a customer point of view, you now have a single company, but if you go and look at a post-merger website, or actually more likely post-merger websites, plural, what you’re going to see is that the content itself is not consistent. It doesn’t present the same unified, merged perspective that the company wants you to see them as, right?

SO:    They put out a press release and say, “We’ve now joined together. A and B are now C sharp, and it is awesome.” But then you go to their website and it’s very easy to tell which of the pre-acquisition companies actually created a particular kind of content, so you have a lack of consistency. That means that you’re going to have search problems, you’re going to have delivery problems, you’re going to have terminology problems where the two previous companies are using words to mean different things. The branding’s not unified. The documents look different.

SO:     So you have all of those issues, which are all kind of customer facing, outward facing issues, and then on the inside, the big challenges you’re going to have on the inside are two or three or more teams that do things in different ways, so they have different content creation processes, different content approval processes, different production workflow. They might be putting out different formats, and I mean literally. Like, “This group over here does only PDF and this group over here does only HTML,” or they’re both putting out PDF but one team was out of Europe, so their paper’s all A4, and one team is out of the US or North America, so everything they’re doing is US letter.

SO:    Setting aside the sort of obvious delivery problems, that now you have all this stuff that just doesn’t quite match up and it makes the merged company look bad, it’s expensive. It’s really expensive to maintain all these different publishing pipelines for what is now a single or what is supposed to be a single team.

EP:    Right. And likely if you’re not presenting a unified brand you’re eventually going to start losing customers.

SO:     It will not help you with your customers. Yeah. And in many cases, these mergers happen because at a strategic level, the company wants to unify the products or be able to cross-sell the products or be able to expand their geographic reach, and you can’t do those things if you can’t present a unified, cohesive user experience.

EP:     When companies merge, they’re bringing different content to the table. So some may be structured, some may be unstructured, there might be large manuals, there might be small tech docs, there might be things broken into topics and things that aren’t. How do you go about actually unifying that content and creating that unified brand across the companies?

SO:     Well, it’s an opportunity, right? Because it’s an opportunity to look at where you are, and as an organization or as a now merged organization, and figure out what your best way forward is. In many cases, the bigger company, the acquiring company will simply say to the company they acquired, “You need to fit into our workflow.” And clearly if you have 50 content creators and you bring on another five from a smaller organization, then it makes a lot of sense to just sort of move them into your existing workflow, whatever that may be.

SO:    But when you have what’s more of a merger of equals, you know, a team of 15 over here, and a team of 20 over there, and there’s not a clear, “We’re doing things better and you people are doing things badly,” then I think this is a big opportunity, because it’s an opportunity to revisit the entire content workflow and make some decisions about, “What are the best practices going forward? What is each team doing really well? Where can we improve?” And perhaps, “Should we just throw away the whole thing and come up with a new workflow entirely?” It’s also worth noting that after a merger, you may have a team that’s big enough to justify an investment that you could not justify separately. So if I have a team of 10 and you have a team of 10, and we merge, and so now we’re a team of 20, that opens up some possibilities that individually the investment for a team of 10 might have been too big, but for a team of 20 it might be a reasonable approach that we can now choose because we’ve gotten bigger.

SO:     So I think what you want to do is take a look at what everybody has. Do the traditional things, do a content audit, do the stakeholder interviews, identify what teams do really well. What are you really proud of? What have you done best? What do you think are the best things that you’ve done with your content? And once you gain some trust, ask the opposite question. What do you do worst? Where do you see the problems? What’s the number one thing you would like to fix? That question usually leads to some really, really interesting answers. Probably don’t want to start there. If I walk into a meeting and introduce myself and start asking, “What is the biggest problem that you see?” You know, let’s have some coffee, and do some icebreakers and some introductions, and talk about the good stuff before we dig into the bad stuff.

SO:     But the bad stuff question is far, far more valuable, right? Because if I ask a group of writers, “What do you hate doing?” And they’ll say, we spend hundreds of hours a year redrawing engineering content. You know, “We get engineering drawings, but they’re not in a usable format for what we’re trying to do with our content, and it is just soul sucking, and we want it to go away.” That’s an entry point, not just into, “We can save you a bunch of time and money,” but into, “Let’s look at how we can fix your process to make the soul sucking braindead stuff go away and allow you to focus on the value added writing really good content. Creating really good content, and I say writing, but whether it’s audio or video or text, how do you deliver this information best? So go talk to the people, go look at the existing content, go look at the legacy content, figure out what’s good and what’s bad, and based on all of that, working … And of course this is from our perspective as consultants, but working with the team or the teams, we can then put together recommendations for going forward and some sort of a roadmap that says, “It’s going to take this long. It’s going to cost this money, this much money. These are the kinds of resources that you need.”

EP:     Okay. So naturally, digging into all of the content that they have and looking at, “What are you not doing correctly? What are you doing correctly?” All of that’s going to mean that companies are going to have to make some big changes in what they’re doing, and there might be one team that has to make more changes than the other. So how do you avoid pushback in that type of scenario?

SO:     Well, there’s going to be pushback. I mean, I’m not sure it can be avoided, because as I said at the top, people hate change. Change is painful. And stepping back for a second, think about this from a merger point of view, right? You were in a nice little group of like 10 people and you were doing your thing and everything was great. And then along comes this monster company that has like 40 writers, and they say, “Hey, guess what Elizabeth? You are now part of our 40, now 50 person organization, and all that expertise that you’ve built up in tool A, B, and C is totally irrelevant. We don’t use those. Those are kindergarten tools. We’re going to be using these cool new tools. We’ve been using them forever. You have to learn them all. Oh, and by the way, our content is organized differently and approved differently, and basically everything you know is worthless.” So when you put it that way, people tend to push back. I mean, yeah. Structurally what you’re really saying is, “Your expertise coming from the mergee is no longer of value.” Right? “The things you know about this tool are not valued in the new organization because we’re not using that tool.”

SO:     In terms of pushback or in terms of change management, what we have to do is we have to look at, “What does this other team do really well that potentially is going to be asked to change tools? How do you do this well?” And position the change as an opportunity. So instead of saying, “Your expertise is now worthless,” it’s, “Hey, you’re going to have the opportunity to learn some new tools, and these are cutting edge, industry leading, et cetera, et cetera, and they’re going to make you more valuable. Your career, your resume is helped by learning this new stuff.” I mean, just as a general rule, learning a new tool is a good thing. It increases your skill set and all the rest of it. So instead of, “Change is bad and scary,” it’s, “You have an opportunity to learn some new stuff.”

SO:     And I have told people, especially on, again, the mergee side, “Look, just give it a chance. Try this tool, learn this tool, shift into the new workflow, kind of give it a shot, see how it goes. If you hate it,” and with mergers and acquisitions, very often there’s a lot of, “We hate this. We don’t want to do it,” and a lot of stress. Well, if you hate it, that’s fine. You can eventually go and change jobs. I mean, you’re not going to win, right? I mean, the acquisition has happened. You can’t stop it, so take this opportunity to learn the new tool, and if you find that you don’t want to work in this new environment, at least you have a new tool when you then decide, “I’m out of here. I’m going elsewhere.”

SO:     But I think that’s really the key, is to identify the things that we need to take from each organization as we merge them together. Try to avoid simply saying, “Hey, you people, you will now be subsumed into Big Mega Corp,” and identify some things. Sometimes those smaller teams are doing a much better job than the bigger teams. I’ve certainly seen cases where the smaller team was pretty cutting edge, and their approach, their technology stack, their way of doing things actually won out over the bigger company or the bigger team. Now, we are not yet today in a world where these kinds of mergers are driven by how the content teams are producing their content, but there is an opportunity there to look at the smaller team and see what they’re doing and see what we can take out of that.

EP:     How does training factor into all of this? Because we’re bringing on teams that have different levels of experience or introducing new tools. Some of them might be familiar with the tool, some of them might not. So how does training play into all of this?

SO:     One of the things to keep in mind is that when there is a merger, we focus on training in the content stack, but when there is a merger, it’s actually quite common to have a lot of training. For example, something like a new HR system, or, “Oh, everybody has to attend this mandatory training that we’ve always done in the big company, but the small company or the smaller company never did it.” So we can’t just look at training in a vacuum, because it’s really quite likely that the people that we need to train on content related things have actually been through piles and piles and piles of mandatory training due to their acquisition. So I think it’s important to start there and recognize that that’s happening.

SO:     One of the worst training experiences I had in my life as a trainer was when I showed up and I just had this really cranky group of people and I couldn’t figure out why they were so mad. They were just bitter and annoyed, and they weren’t quite pelting me with tomatoes, but they were just really, really sketchy. And I hadn’t been there long enough for them to get mad at me, so eventually I figured out it wasn’t me, and eventually, eventually eventually, I got out of them that they had been required to travel to go to training, for … It was like three of the past four weeks. So I was week three of mandatory training, and they had just had it. They were away from home. These were people that didn’t typically travel a lot, and they had been put on this three weeks of, “Just go to the mothership and get trained and assimilated.” They weren’t mad at me, but they were really mad.

EP:     That’s a pretty big commitment there.

SO:     Yeah. And it was unreasonable. They should’ve spread it out. The company should’ve spread it out better and not landed in the situation where they were so mad they weren’t going to hear a word I said. So we got past that eventually, but that’s one thing to keep in mind, is there are going to be a lot of training demands. So really pay attention to, “Are we making people travel more than they’re comfortable with? Are we stacking up training? Can we minimize it? Can we do video online instead of making people travel?” All those kinds of things.

SO:     Okay. Outside of that, when we start thinking about training, we have to look at, well, as a content creator, what level of expertise … What’s your skills gap? If we change systems, then what do you not know yet? What do you need to know? If you look at moving somebody out of a book based, PDF based content world, then you’re going to have to teach them not just things like tagging, how to do reuse, how to work in a content management system. But probably you’re going to have to start at the beginning, which is, “What is topic based authoring, and why should you care?” So we have to kind of look at who’s in the organization, in the group that’s going to change systems potentially, and how much do they need to know about those systems? Like, what level do we need to get them to, and what level are they currently at? And then figure out how to bring them up to the level they need potentially over time.

SO:     We don’t have to do it all in three days of training. We can do a lot. We have a lot of flexibility. You can do self study, you can do online, you can do classroom-based. At the end of the day, classroom-based training with a really good trainer is more effective than any other approach that is out there. And it’s expensive, right? I mean, A, you have to bring in the trainer. B, you probably have to bring in some of the trainees. So you have travel costs, which are hugely expensive. You have to have a training room. Many companies have one. Some don’t. But there is, especially after a merger, there’s great value in putting all the people, the newly potentially unified team, right? They’re supposed to be unified, but they might not be. Putting all of those people in a room together and having them do training together and kind of get to know each other, and maybe they go out to dinner that night or they socialize a little bit at lunch. There is enormous value to doing that, and it needs to be factored in when you think about training. So when we look at classroom training and say, “Oh, that is going to be so, so expensive,” absolutely true. Consider the value that classroom training brings you.

SO:     Now, I say that. At the same time, given the globally distributed teams that we have now, there are things you can do with online training that you may not be able to do with classroom training. Some people cannot travel for a variety of reasons. It could be medical issues of their own. It could be that they have caregiving responsibilities and they can’t pick up and fly halfway around the world. It could be that they are working in another country, and bringing them into the country where you want to have the training could be problematic. You might not be able to get a visa on time, that type of thing. Oh, and it’s easier to record online training. Certainly you can record classroom training, but it tends to be kind of suboptimal.

SO:     So live instructor led training online mitigates some of the travel issues. It’s still live, so you have questions and answers and that kind of thing. And then as you kind of move down the pipe to, let’s say, e-learning and asynchronous e-learning, those kinds of things, that’s where you have an opportunity to just simply record the training and have people do self study on their own time, which then addresses some of the time zone issues and things like that. So that was a long winded way of saying there are lots of different ways of doing training, and not any single one of them is going to solve every problem.

EP:     Right. So you could pick and choose, I guess, the situations in which, “Okay, this might be more effective for classroom based training, and then we can have additional training offered online to offer that flexibility.”

SO:     Yup, exactly. So I think there’s a place for all of them. We very often encourage people to do some self study for the introductory levels. If we’re talking about DITA training, then of course we have learningdita.com, and they can kind of work through that, and then the classroom training or the live instructor led training, we focus on the specific implementation that that customer has. So your specific content model, your specific tools, your specific content workflows. And I think there’s a lot of value in doing training that’s not just, “Hey, this is topic based authoring,” but in fact, “Here’s how you are going to work in your environment, in your organization.”

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.

EP:     Well, we’ve talked about content challenges after a company merger, and what unifying that content will look like, and then the training that follows that. What makes all of this worth it?

SO:     Well, there are certainly companies that have not done this. There are companies that infamously merge a bunch of subsidiaries and then just let them do their thing, and they actually don’t unify them. But more often they do want to unify, and what makes it worth it is that the organization, the organization that’s doing the roll up or that’s doing the merger has a strategic vision for the merger. “We want to combine these companies because we will move forward and we will be stronger together as this unified company.” Therefore, if that’s your goal, then you need a unified customer experience, right? You need people to come to your acquired company website and feel as though they are looking at a single entity. So there’s a unified customer experience that you need. People expect you to speak with a single voice and not have this obvious, “Well, that clearly came from the old company, because it doesn’t look like anything like what the new company produces.” So that’s one thing, so that’s the customer experience angle.

SO:     There’s a cost angle. There’s cost associated with managing, maintaining, licensing a content production process. The technology that goes into it, the processes, just the general sort of maintenance of that workflow. As a general rule, it would be cheaper to have one workflow for everybody than it is to have two workflows or three or 17.

EP:     Of course.

SO:     You’d be surprised. And then if you want your content creators to collaborate, work together, cross over their skill sets, work on each other’s documents, those kinds of things, then you need some cohesion. You need the team to kind of come together as a unified team. And this process will achieve that, right? Because if you get to a unified content process, you can typically get to a unified content team.

SO:      Now, I will say that the people are always, always, always the most difficult part of this process. Always. Technology is easy, people are hard, and mergers in particular, or actually acquisitions, they can be hard. When you put together two groups of 25 and then management from on high says, “Well, we know that you’re going to be more efficient as a bigger group, so get rid of 5% or 10% of your people,” and that inarguably happens. I mean, it just does. So people are very wary of mergers or acquisitions, and you can’t really blame them, but we need to work on that team cohesion and getting everybody sort of on the same page working together, and not, “Oh, I’m from the old group and you’re from the new group, and we don’t like each other much.”

SO:     I have seen cases where that has failed, in that there was no team cohesion, so you have two groups operating under the same umbrella. Structurally, they look as though they should be one team, but in fact they are two teams and they don’t talk to each other, and it is really bad. So as a manager or as a leader, I need to do whatever it takes to bring those teams together eventually. Not in week one, but bring them together, get them all kind of working together, and get them working as a team and not as the sort of company A and company B teams.

EP:     Right. Well with that, I think we’re going to go ahead and wrap up. So thank you, Sarah.

SO:     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.

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In episode 57, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow look at content strategy across different disciplines and how an enterprise-level content strategy can grow from departmental efforts.

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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 57, we look at content strategy across different disciplines and how an enterprise level content strategy can grow out of departmental efforts. Hi everyone. I’m Sarah O’Keefe. I’m here with Bill Swallow.

Bill Swallow: Hello.

Sarah O’Keefe: Bill is actually for once in the room here in North Carolina and has spent the last few days visiting with the so-called home office and complaining about the chewy and wearable air.

Bill Swallow: It’s gross. I don’t know how you do it.

Sarah O’Keefe: Well, we could return the favor in January and-

Bill Swallow: That’s true.

Sarah O’Keefe: … discuss how do you do that in the frozen North? But we’ve named his office the Arctic Scriptorium, although I guess now that we have an employee in Minneapolis, you’re only what, the sub-arctic Scriptorium?

Bill Swallow: Yeah. We’ll take apple country again.

Sarah O’Keefe: Apple country Scriptorium. So, today what we wanted to do was talk about enterprise content strategy and what that really means when you try to put the pieces together across a whole group of departments, and what their interpretations of content strategy are. When we talk about content strategy, every discipline seems to have a slightly different definition of what that is.

Sarah O’Keefe: If you talk to tech comm people about technical or tech comm content strategy, or product content strategy, of marketing content strategy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and each one of those departments or functions seems to have a slightly different idea of what their priorities are and what they need out of content strategy. So, starting with, for example, marketing, what’s a typical focus for content strategy in a marketing-focused area?

Bill Swallow: A lot of the marketing content strategy is focused on customer engagement and corporate brand. So, being able to put the best face for the company forward in making sure that your customers and your target audience are getting the experience that your company expects them to get. So, all of the content strategy pieces that make that happen will be very different from say looking at your technical communications group producing your documentation.

Sarah O’Keefe: So, on the marketing side you get things like voice and tone standards.

Bill Swallow: Voice and tone standards, delivery formats to some degree, and positioning.

Sarah O’Keefe: And editorial calendars and web content strategy and all the rest of it.

Bill Swallow: All that fun stuff.

Sarah O’Keefe: And then, what does tech comm focus on?

Bill Swallow: Well, you have tech comm, you have a lot of the, a lot of similar things. You still have your voice, you still have your tone but it usually takes a slightly different approach, at least traditionally.

Sarah O’Keefe: You typically hear style guide, right?

Bill Swallow: Well, you hear style guide but-

Sarah O’Keefe: Not so much voice and tone.

Bill Swallow: It’s a bit of both because the style guide really does have control over voice and tone as well. And your marketing content strategy is certainly going to have a style guide as well. But it may not be the same. What technical content does well is that whether or not you’re using any kind of structured environment or XML, tech comm is really good at structuring content at a conceptual level.

Bill Swallow: So, looking at things and breaking them down into topics, whether it’s long form or short form, having very specific compartmentalized approaches to producing content, and then wrapping it all up together to produce either in the classic sense a manual, or online help systems, or putting out just information that is well-organized and defined. And the real trick and the real difference is that there is a very strong focus on being technically accurate and correct in the tech comm side, which you don’t necessarily find in other departments.

Sarah O’Keefe: I think in addition to that, what you see is that the… it’s not quite as simple as marketing is pre-sales in tech comm or product content as post-sales. But if you look at it that way very broadly, then the marketing teams tend to be very much focused on how do we increase revenue, how do we increase cost share, how do we increase sales, right?

Sarah O’Keefe: They’re focused on, let’s invest and as a result have increased sales, have increased revenue, have increased customers, whatever. On the tech comm side, nearly always, tech comm is focused on efficiency and cost avoidance.

Bill Swallow: Yes.

Sarah O’Keefe: How can we… We have to produce all this content, whether it because of regulation or just so that people can use the product successfully. How do we produce all this information as efficiently as possible? Historically, that has not been a focus on the marketing side. Right? The question of how long does it take, how expensive is it to produce this piece?

Sarah O’Keefe: Marketing might look at the question of, oh well three varnishes and eight metallic ink colors is going to make for a really expensive printed product, but you very rarely hear it costs too much to write this content or to manage this content. And that tech comm has been, I don’t know about exclusively, but largely focused on we have so, so much content we have to manage it efficiently.

Bill Swallow: Right. Because also a lot of the tech comm-based content is more evergreen than the marketing content will be. So therefore it’s going to stick around for a lot longer period of time. A lot of the marketing content is very short lived. I mean, you certainly would have marketing copy that could potentially be out there for a year or more. I’m not saying that there isn’t. But a lot of the marketing content, it’s very targeted and it’s very-

Sarah O’Keefe: Time [crosstalk 00:06:02].

Bill Swallow: Yes, very, very time-sensitive.

Sarah O’Keefe: Then of course there are other content creators that produce customer-facing information like tech support, which tends to for the most part align with the product content. And then something like training, which to me kind of goes across the two. If you look at it between marketing and tech comm, it kind of sits in a weird maybe third place, but kind of in-between.

Sarah O’Keefe: The question then I think, becomes how can we look at content strategy across an enterprise and do a better job of putting those pieces together, of working across the various functions and taking the things that they do well on the content strategy side, and putting that all together, how do we do that? I mean, how do we take that step into saying we’re not going to have marketing content strategy and product content strategy and training content strategy and I don’t even know what else content strategy. How do we put them together?

Bill Swallow: Well, I’m not sure we would say that you don’t have those things, but you would definitely have something, an umbrella strategy that pulls them all together. The first thing you need to look at, okay, what are the strengths, the weaknesses, the commonalities and the unique needs for each of these groups? So, what are they doing really well? What are they struggling with? What are very specific things that they need to worry about that other groups don’t need to worry about? What are the things that they worry about that everybody worries about? Trying to find all these pieces and see how they can fit together and complement each other from group to group.

Sarah O’Keefe: Then, what we found is that the, as you said, the umbrella or the overarching tool that can make it possible to really understand what you’re dealing with tends to be the customer journey.

Bill Swallow: Generally.

Sarah O’Keefe: Yeah, because you can look at a holistic customer journey and say, “Okay, well the customer goes from being a prospect to being a researcher, to being a buyer, to being a learner, to being a user and then back around through the… back to being a prospect because they might upgrade or they might buy other products or they might become an advocate or an evangelist for your product. So, you have that-

Bill Swallow: And hopefully never a detractor.

Sarah O’Keefe: Hopefully. So, you have that process that they go through and sometimes it’s shown as a loop, sometimes it’s kind of an infinity figure eight. But what’s important is that it is not a straight line from A to B to C to D to E. There’s definitely some loop back in there. The customer, and this I think is really the crux of it. From the customer’s point of view, you the enterprise, you the organization are a single thing, right?

Sarah O’Keefe: I bought this product from Microsoft. I bought this product from Apple. I bought this product from whoever. They don’t know or care that in fact, inside that great big organization, you have a product content team and a marketing content team. Oh, and you have both sales and marketing, and marketing communications, and technical marketing, and tech support, and you have VIP tech support, and training, and… It just goes on and on and on.

Sarah O’Keefe: Well, I don’t care. You know? I bought a piece of software and I want you to give me the information that I need to use that software or that hardware or that tool successfully. I am entirely disinterested in the fact that the content I need is sitting on xyz.company.com and not on abc.company.com. That should not be my problem.

Sarah O’Keefe: What happens is, when you have these departmental content strategies, it becomes my problem because I have to find it, right? I have to find the right website or the right–God help me–PDF, and then I have to dig through it and find the right thing. Oh, and then it probably is contradicted by the other website.

Bill Swallow: Well yeah, it doesn’t help that how you navigate when researching a product varies differently from how you navigate when trying to research how to troubleshoot something in the product. Finding content across, like you mentioned, multiple different portals and having to use these portals in a different way and the fact that they organize their information potentially in a very different way. It gets back to the detractor thing. I mean, are you fostering detractors of your company, your brand, or do you want them to be a net promoter?

Sarah O’Keefe: So, working our way around to our point, which is enterprise content strategy is your friend, right? It’s not your friend because it’s cool and awesome and… It is your friend, because if you don’t use the same words for the same product across different departments, your customers are screwed. They can’t find what they’re looking for because they are using the wrong word.

Sarah O’Keefe: So, when I say you need to use the same words to describe things or the same words to allow people to search, well, you need an enterprise taxonomy. You need enterprise level metadata that is consistent across the enterprise, not just department by department. Because again, your customers are not interacting with your content department by department. They’re just not.

Bill Swallow: Right.

Sarah O’Keefe: Once they learn over in the land of marketing that you refer to a product as ABC123, if you then go over to the product content and all of a sudden it’s 123ABC, they are not going to be very happy with you.

Bill Swallow: Right, or XYZ-

Sarah O’Keefe: Or XYZ, or AlphaBetaGamma. Just because, oh well we do it differently over here and those people are morons, right? I mean, how many times have we heard that? We go into a company and we say, “Wait, you do it this way. And they do it that way.” And the canonical answer is, “Well, we’re right and they’re wrong.”

Bill Swallow: Yup.

Sarah O’Keefe: Well, that may be true, although I will tell you, we then go talk to the second group and they say, “Well, we’re right and they’re wrong.” But it’s actually irrelevant because what matters is that you’re producing content that doesn’t align, that makes it the customers’ problem and therefore you’re both wrong.

Bill Swallow: I had bought a chainsaw a while back and-

Sarah O’Keefe: Okay.

Bill Swallow: … I was actually going through and just going through the maintenance procedure of it just a couple of weeks ago because I need to clear some small trees from my property. I was looking up in the print manual, which was stored with the chainsaw, which was half-destroyed, you know what type of oil I needed and such, and it’s an electric chainsaw so I had to figure out exactly what I needed to do to fix all the moving pieces. And I could only get to half the information.

Bill Swallow: So, then I went online and I was finding that the information that was online for my very specific model of chainsaw was very different from the print manual that came with the chain saw itself. So I had to call the support number just to ask them which one should I be following because my print manual’s destroyed and the online information is different from what I can read in the print manual.

Sarah O’Keefe: But it’s a chainsaw.

Bill Swallow: And they didn’t know. They didn’t know.

Sarah O’Keefe: It’s okay. What are the odds that you’ll get hurt if you use-

Bill Swallow: Oh, yeah.

Sarah O’Keefe: Yeah. So-

Bill Swallow: I still have all fingers, toes, and other limbs, so I’m good.

Sarah O’Keefe: But I mean, so this is actually… A, they used the wrong format, right? I mean, if you’re going to use paper, make it something laminated-

Bill Swallow: Yes.

Sarah O’Keefe: … or put it in a little Ziploc baggy or something.

Bill Swallow: Well, that was probably my fault-

Sarah O’Keefe: It’s a chainsaw, it’s going to be outside, or it’s going to be in your garage getting eaten by the mice. Do you have mice? Anyway. So then, that’s problem A. Problem B is they contradict each other, but is that because the one online got updated?

Bill Swallow: We don’t know because the person I called looked it up and they couldn’t tell me which one was right or wrong.

Sarah O’Keefe: Okay, fantastic.

Bill Swallow: Because, and this goes back to the reason why having this global content strategy is important, is because when you have very important information like this, it’s kind of important to centralize it so that all groups are using the same information, always. What I assume happened here is that a particular spec sheet went down from their R&D group or their production group and was used at one point in time to create one deliverable, and a copy of it was somehow modified and used to create some different copy for maybe the online stuff.

Bill Swallow: That is absolutely what you do not want to have happen. Fortunately, a chainsaw only works a certain way, so if there’s something that goes wrong, generally if you’re used to using power tools, you can kind of avoid injury. But you know, having other things, especially automated pieces of machinery-

Sarah O’Keefe: I think I know what I’m doing, so I’ll avoid injury here. Now, I personally would say something along the lines of, “Well, this information contradicts, so you know what, I don’t need to clear that brush that badly.”

Bill Swallow: Yeah, I used that excuse long enough. Unfortunately, it has to be cleared.

Sarah O’Keefe: Okay, so now that we’ve established that enterprise content strategy is a good thing for your various limbs, how do you do this? I mean, you’re sitting inside a group, you know, maybe you’re in a product group, maybe you’re in a marketing group, maybe you’re in a training group, you know that you have these contradictions. You know that you have 18 websites out there that all have different information on a different technology stack produced by different people with different taxonomy in different terms and different everything. What do you do? What’s your first step? I mean other than call us.

Bill Swallow: Yeah, other than call us or-

Sarah O’Keefe: What’s your first step?

Bill Swallow: … other than sit at your desk crying.

Sarah O’Keefe: Crying.

Bill Swallow: Yeah, about it. The first thing is to start talking with people in your company across these different departments. Try to find your peers. So, if you are in charge of the technical communications team, you want to make sure that you have inroads with someone who’s in charge of the marketing team-

Sarah O’Keefe: And tech support.

Bill Swallow: And tech support.

Sarah O’Keefe: And training, and-

Bill Swallow: And training, and all these other people who feed into the content pipeline. You need to make those connections if you don’t have them. You need to kind of understand who’s who, so have that org chart handy and go knock on some office stores or call people up, or what have you.

Bill Swallow: Then, once you do have all of their ears, make sure that you don’t dive into the deep end. You want to kind of wade in slowly and start small. The first part really is to try to define, okay, you know, what is your strategy? Find out who’s doing what and why. What are you doing well? What are you not doing well? What are some processes that you’re following? And how might we be able to start sharing some of this stuff across? Find out where those common areas are. Make note of the things that absolutely have to be treated a certain way for a particular group and go from there.

Sarah O’Keefe: Yeah. If the problem’s big enough, and I would argue that your chainsaw potential massacre there is a big enough problem, you might try the Go Big strategy, which is basically to write it up and say, “Hey, over here it says this, and over here it says this, and this is really bad.” And take it up your management chain and try and get some immediate action. That can be highly effective and/or it could be not so effective and result in you being literally walked out the door for being a general pain in somebody’s tuchus.

Sarah O’Keefe: So, think about that. Think about how much risk you really want to take. But I do think that it’s always a good idea to network within the company, and finding your peers in the other organizations is always a good idea, and making those connections will help you even if this goes nowhere because having those connections, having friends in other parts of the organization that you talk to and work with and network with and understand what they’re doing means that your career at that company will be a lot easier.

Sarah O’Keefe: Something happens, they call you or they email you and say, “Hey, did you hear about such and such? Maybe you should be in this meeting.” You know, those connections, you need to make those connections no matter what. But in this particular case, I think it’s a very good idea.

Bill Swallow: It’s very easy to start butting heads too, when you start making these connections. I mean some people have a very specific strategy for a very specific reason and they’re going to be loath to change the way they’re working. But again, you got to… Hopefully everyone involved can use the overall customer experience or the customer journey as a guideline to say, okay, we’re all in this together. We’re at different points in the journey. How can we make sure that it’s as seamless as possible when they go from group A to group B to group C to group D’s content and contribution to the customer?

Sarah O’Keefe: Yeah, and I think that’s a good summary. So, with that, I think I’ll wrap it up.

Bill Swallow: Sounds good.

Sarah O’Keefe: 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 Enterprise content strategy: Putting the pieces together (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 56 of the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Alan Pringle discuss how to calculate return on investment for your content strategy even if you’ve never measured anything before.

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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 56, we talk about return on investment and how you can calculate it even if you’ve never measured anything before. Hello and welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast. I’m Gretyl Kinsey,

Alan Pringle:     And I’m Alan Pringle.

GK:     And today we’re going to be talking about return on investment or ROI. And I want to just get started with a little bit of context first. So when you’re coming up with your content strategy, why is it so important to make sure that you calculate ROI and be able to show that?

AP:     Generally, because the people that have the money want to know what they’re going to be getting for their money, that’s your return on investment.

GK:     Absolutely. And what are some of the typical kinds of pieces of information that go into coming up with that number?

AP:     Well, one way to kind of look at that is when you’re looking at your content strategy and you’re doing your analysis of your current situation, what’s messed up, what’s not working, where are the inefficiencies? A lot of the numbers and ideas in regard to ROI can come from there. Those are your pain points. If you fix them, what goodness are you going to get from that? And that’s kind of one way to look at where to start to look for those kinds of numbers.

GK:     Absolutely. I know that when I’ve interviewed different people at companies whether they’re writers or whether it’s executives or anybody else with a stake in the content, they all kind of have different pain points and so every piece of information that you can get from those different people in those different groups can kind of give you a better understanding of what that overall ROI might be.

AP:     And I think it’s important to note too, some people’s pain points trump other people’s pain points. If an executive, and especially someone who has the money that can fund your project really wants problem B to get worked out but you’re more concerned at problem A, you might want to take a look at your perspective and realize in order to get the money you may need to focus on what the exec sees as the problem as part of your analysis work on your content strategy.

GK:   Absolutely, and I think that’s especially important if you’ve got pain points maybe that are in conflict with each other from different groups. Then when you’re looking at it from that ROI perspective and thinking, “Which pain points are costing us the most?” Then that kind of clearly shows you which one might be the most important one to consider when it comes to fixing those.

AP:     Exactly.

GK:    I want to talk a little bit more about that kind of conflict and maybe some roadblocks that can come into play when you’re trying to figure out your ROI and one that I want to talk about is lack of metrics. There have been several organizations actually that I’ve worked with where this has been an issue. And one, in particular, that was kind of a pain point they mentioned was they had not been gathering any sort of metrics on things like how much time writers were spending on formatting versus content creation. How much time users were spending searching for content and not being able to find it, both internal and external users. And those were some good numbers that could’ve been used to calculate ROI, but they didn’t have any of that.

GK:     So what they had to kind of do to prove it and sell it more to executives was start with a small scale pilot and go up and then with that pilot they could say, “Okay, now, here, we’re finally collecting some metrics that can prove our ROI.” So I wanted to get your take. Have you seen similar situations? And what other things can be done besides maybe a small pilot project to make up for that lack of metrics if you’re trying to get numbers and you just don’t have anything so far?

AP:   Unfortunately, content people, content creators, often are not good with numbers. Yes, it’s a bit of a generalization, borderline on a stereotype, but there is truth to that. So sometimes you’re going to have to really take a step back and before you maybe start looking into, “I need money for this,” really starting to figure out those numbers. Now, getting them is often not an easy thing to do. You mentioned a really good one. If you can get funding for a small pilot and then extrapolate from that, that’s one way. But another way to do it too is maybe do some research on industry averages. There’re certain things that are fairly true consistent across the board in regard to fields like technical communication. When people in tech comm are using desktop publishing tools, often you were looking at 25 to 50% of a full-time content creators time as being working on the formatting, not actually creating the content but formatting.

AP:     Now, there are ways to get those numbers down templatizing, et cetera, but, in general, say 25% so with that metric in mind, take a look at the average cost of a, for example, technical communicator, and I’m talking about the loaded cost. And when I say that that is the overall costs, including all compensation, vacation, whatever else it’s called, “a loaded cost.” And if you know or can find out, probably from someone a little higher up the food chain, what that loaded cost is, and you say take even a more conservative, 10 to 15% of that time as being for formatting, you’re going to have an idea of how much it costs for one person a year to work on say formatting on their content.

AP:   And if you go in the direction of a content strategy where you’re trying to automate formatting with smarter structured content, you are going to really eliminate that 10 to 15% of whatever number that is for every single person who’s creating content. So if you kind of methodically go through from starting with, “This is what it costs to employ someone for a year, what percentage of their time is doing spent on x and y tasks?” And if you reduce the time of your content strategy to do x and y, you can pinpoint fairly well what you’re going to save per person.

GK:     Absolutely. I think it’s really good to note that even if you don’t have hard numbers that you’ve been calculating and that you’ve been collecting metrics on, industry averages can still give you at least some kind of an estimate to start with. And it doesn’t even have to just be with things like the time spent formatting. It can be on other things like localization.

AP:    Oh, anything.

GK:     You can kind of get some idea of reuse just as-

AP:    Copying and pasting.

GK:     … copying and pasting.

AP:     That’s a really good one.

GK:     So there are all sorts of ways that you can just look at averages and kind of use that to help calculate your ROI at least close. And I think as Alan said, if you do a conservative estimate, you could even make the case that this is sort of what we think it might be the lowest cost savings scenario but you could be saving a whole lot more if the metrics that you actually end up collecting later show that we were wasting more time than you thought.

AP:    You really always want to go with the conservative estimates because what you don’t want to do is over promise and under deliver. You want to do the opposite. You want to say, “This is a very conservative estimate and look at how much we’re gaining just with this conservative view on this.” It’s a lot more compelling and frankly safer for you to do it that way.

GK:    I want to talk a little bit about another issue now that might kind of impede you from getting the numbers that you need and that is organizational issues. And we kind of touched on one a little bit when we talked about are there may be some aspects that are in conflict with each other, but there could be situations like an acquisition or merger that might make it really hard to collect some of the numbers and the metrics that you need across the organization. There could be things like company reorganizations, there might be kind of drama or political issues amongst departments. So there are all sorts of things kind of organizationally that might make it difficult to get those numbers. So what would you recommend when you’re faced with a situation like that to make sure that you get all the information that you need?

AP:    This is where I think face-to-face communication is really, really important. It may be time to have an all-hands meeting in one location. I’m talking face-to-face. If you have to have some people come in because of time zones or conflicts or whatever, come in via a web conference it’s okay, but it’s not ideal. I think if you’re running into those problems, getting everybody in a room, talking face to face and figuring out what possible … I’m trying to find the right word here. What misconception are people having about someone else’s work that’s causing these problems? Where are the conflicts coming from? Getting everybody together face-to-face to talk about what they perceive and then maybe try to get everyone kind of to a level playing field about their understanding of the problems.

AP:    It sounds ridiculous, but talk it out. I mean we laugh here at Scriptorium a lot of times when we call ourselves content therapists because we get caught in these political battles and have to smooth things out a lot of times by being the middle person, the intermediary. But I do think the really the best way to solve these problems is to talk face-to-face. And I know it sounds facile, and it sounds ridiculous, but it can actually work.

GK:    Yes. And I’ve seen it work multiple times with organizations in these kinds of conflicts or with these kinds of situations that a lot of times what was causing those kinds of misunderstandings in the first place was just people not talking. So when you’re coming up with a new strategy and everyone really needs to get onboard and work together, just bringing them into a room together and kind of explaining what’s so important really helps push past a lot of those issues.

AP:   And it can help to have a third party in there. Hire a consultant to maybe help you with that, to come in there. And I’m not saying be the referee in a brawl, that’s not what I’m getting at, although I’ve seen some meetings that came close. To basically, help people think outside their own boxes because when you have someone else asking the questions, it can help you focus in a way than if it’s just people off in the company there.

GK:    Absolutely. And I think that’s especially important if, for example, a content strategy initiative is being led by one department. And so that department’s manager is the one kind of gathering everything. They may not have the ability that a consultant would have to really get honest numbers from everybody if there are kind of conflicts going on. Whereas if you have a third party outside perspective than people might be a little more willing, to be honest, and to kind of give up their information and their numbers. And it also kind of takes the pressure off of you as that manager trying to put your strategy in place. If you’ve got someone backing you up and kind of helping you collect all the information that you need to prove your case, then that can really get you that ROI that you need.

AP:    And it’s important to build trust because when you start talking about what is the average loaded cost for an employee, you’re starting to talk about what people are getting paid. And that can be a rather prickly issue to deal with. So there has to be a level of trust and respect among all the people who are working on the content strategy analysis to understand and really not weaponize that information. They need to use it for good and they need to be careful about how they handle that information and to be respectful of sensitive information when you are dealing with numbers like that.

GK:     Absolutely. So when you’re in a situation where you might be working with bad or incomplete data, what do you think is the best way that you can kind of estimate the ROI, whether you’re dealing with lack of metrics or organizational issues or both?

AP:    We touched on it a little bit earlier, but see if you can do some research on industry averages, that’s one way to start having that kind of baseline information and you can kind of compare yourself, “Does this really apply to us or not?” That can help maybe spark some ideas about what you need to do to better gather the information that’s a little more specific to your particular case.

GK:     Yeah, and I think that can also be a starting point for if you’re not collecting the metrics you need, start now. Look at what you are missing and say, “Okay, as part of our strategy we need to go ahead and start gathering these numbers,” even if we haven’t been historically, we can at least kind of start establishing a baseline right now and say, “Okay, even just starting this week, this is how much time our writers are spending doing this task versus this other task. This is how much we’re spending on localization and how much time it’s taking the content to get back to us after being translated. This is how much content is being reused or has the potential to be reused versus copied and pasted.” Things like that.

GK:     Look at areas where that’s missing and start gathering those numbers. And I think we can kind of go back to something we talked about a little bit earlier too, which is pain points. Look at your pain points and say, “What information can we be gathering that we’re not? That can really help us explain why these are pain points to help solve the problem.”

AP:     To get you out of the pain.

GK:    Yes.

AP:    Yeah. So basically, use your pain as fuel to get yourself out of that. The more specific information you have, the more compelling those metrics are going to be to help you fix the problem that is causing you all those pain points.

GK:     And I think one other point that can be made about bringing in a consultant is that along with things like industry averages, they’re going to have industry experience that maybe you wouldn’t just from your individual organization. And so even if you don’t have really good metrics and industry averages can only get you so far, they can kind of come in and say, “Based on our experience and what we’ve seen across other companies in a similar situation, here are maybe some average estimates that might be kind of similar to kind of help you start calculating your ROI.”

AP:    I agree with that. Absolutely. And I think it’s also important to think about when you’re looking at these numbers and these metrics. There are some also, qualitative things beyond the quantitative numbers that you need to look at too. For example, if you set up re-use well to ensure that approved safety information for your products is properly used across your entire documents set, all of your content, you’re helping to reduce legal liability by having a re-use scenario set up where information is approved and then used exactly as it was written across everything that reduces legal liability. Can you put a number on that? Maybe not, but it’s that kind of thing that you need to be aware of too. They’re going to be some things you’re not going to be able to give a precise calculation. So a lawsuit may not be something that you can put into a report with a hard number, but it is something saying you were reducing legal liability by using a process that has a very institutionalized re-use and review program built into it.

GK:     Absolutely. And that’s a really important point because I’d mentioned at the beginning that there was one company I worked with that was not getting the kind of quantitative metrics, but they also weren’t getting any qualitative metrics and that was something that they wanted to build in. So being able to show not really a number but a kind of customer satisfaction statistic and being able to prove even if you can’t really quantify it with a number, just being able to show that your industry reputation may be improved, that your customer satisfaction may be improved. And then as Alan said, legal liability is another one. Also, kind of employee quality of work-

AP:    And morale.

GK:    … and morale, yeah. So there are a lot of ways that you may not be able to have a calculated into your ROI, but you could still use that to make a strong business case and say, “Here’s sort of our conservative estimate ROI but then also here are these other things that you can’t really measure that really make a strong case for going this route with your strategy.”

AP:     Having both of those things in your assessment is important. I agree.

GK:    So I think with that, we can wrap up. So thank you, Alan, for talking with me today.

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 Calculating return on investment for your content strategy (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 55 of the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Sarah O’Keefe discuss Scriptorium’s approach to content strategy.

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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 episode 55, we discuss Scriptorium’s approach to content strategy. Hi, I’m Elizabeth Patterson and I’m joined by Sarah O’Keefe.

Sarah O’Keefe:     Hello.

EP:     Sarah just recently finished writing a white paper and in this white paper, you mentioned that when you invest in content strategy you’re really committing to a major digital transformation effort. And with that, there are significant challenges, but that also brings great opportunity and I think that that’s something that’s important to note before we start going into some of these specific aspects of Scriptorium’s approach to content strategy.

SO:     Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean you’re making a big commitment, and you’re committing to what I’m afraid is going to be a lot of pain. So just be aware of that before you get started.

EP:     So in this white paper, the first piece that you really focus on is the current state analysis. Could you talk a little bit about what that looks like and some of the current states of content that you have seen along the way?

SO:     So current state analysis means that we go in and we figure out what exactly is going on right now in that organization with their content. How is it being created, how is it being delivered, what are some of the problems? And, of course, there are a lot of problems, right? Because if there weren’t a lot of problems we wouldn’t be there. So current state analysis is a matter of saying, “All right, what’s going on here? What is the problem that rose to a level where you are willing to bring us in? Where you were willing to acknowledge, we have a problem, we need help and we’re going to have scriptorium come in and help us fix the problem?” I try hard not to make 12-step analogies, but the whole thing kind of heads that way.

SO:     So first we say “All right, our content has a problem,” and then we have to figure out how to fix it. So the kinds of things that we run into are content that’s being created that doesn’t have a purpose. It’s just, “We’ve always done that” “But it looks terrible. Why do you do it that way? Why is it so ugly?” I have seen terrible, terrible things perpetrated in InDesign, which is known for allowing you to produce really attractive looking print. But I’ve seen some terrible, terrible print coming out of InDesign and being done in a way that takes enormous amounts of time and is completely unmaintainable. So if you’re going to use InDesign, at least make it look good if you’re going to spend all this time. And yet what we have is it’s an inefficient tool and it’s not being used well, so that’s always kind of a little disturbing.

SO:     Huge amounts of content that is just wrong. Either technically inaccurate or out of date or it’s in the wrong language. It’s being written in English and the primary audience needs Chinese and it’s not being delivered in Chinese, or you’re writing for a particular kind of audience, but the content isn’t appropriate for that audience. So if you’re writing for medical professionals, you can assume a certain level of knowledge, but if you’re writing for an orderly in a nursing home, then you have to kind of make some different assumptions about their background knowledge. So you see content that’s just, it’s not necessarily technically inaccurate, but it’s wrong for the audience.

SO:     And then we see systemic problems. So the content hasn’t been updated because it’s too hard. Nobody knows what the most current version is because they can’t figure out where it lives. They’re not translating because it’s “too expensive,” or they do translate but it takes a year to get the translations out the door, which in this global environment typically is not actually acceptable. Every time I say, “We’ve seen it all,” we see more things. But we’ve seen a lot of stuff, a lot of really just bad stuff.

EP:     So once you have gone through that current state analysis, you’re then able to start completing a gap analysis, which really spells out the problems with the current state. Could you touch a little on this and talk about some of the common problems that you find during this analysis in this stage?

SO:     Yeah. So the gap analysis basically says, “Gee, you really need this in 15 languages and you’re delivering in two,” so the gap appears to be 13 languages, that type of thing. So it’s kind of like, “Here’s your current state, here’s what you would like your state to be and here’s the gap or abyss,” or chasm, or ocean between the two. The most common things we run into, I’ve talked a lot about languages. Localization issues are really common. People say things like, “We need more languages, but we can’t afford it in our current workflow because it’s too expensive,” or “It takes too long,” or, “We don’t have the talent to do it. We don’t know where to find the talent,” that type of thing. “We need to rebrand all our documents, but it’s too expensive to open them up and touch them up and make all of those changes.”

SO:     We see a lot of issues around search, especially when you have a huge puddle of monster PDFs. “We have our content library is 8,000 PDF files and people can’t find what they’re looking for,” and each of those 8,000 files is 300 pages, so first you have to find the right file and then you have to search within the file. So search is a really, really big problem. On a more, again, systemic level, we see a lot of content duplication. So information that’s been copied and pasted from place to place to place, to place to place and has, along the way, kind of like a game of telephone. It’s gotten changed or not changed or the first copy got updated but the downstream copies didn’t get updated, that type of thing. So it’s out of sync. And in many cases, you’ll see content where document A contradicts document B.

SO:     You’ll see inconsistency with styles because writer A and writer B don’t write the same way. They don’t have the same common voice, so that can be a big problem. Other gaps with searchability, in addition to the PDF problem, which is a big one, we also see a lot of problems around websites where a company has not a website but numerous dozens of websites and the information might be repeated on those websites. It might have been written by two different people in two different formats and put on two different websites and contradicts each other. So now what’s the authoritative version? Right? Which one’s right? If I’m the end user and I’m trying to figure out how to use this content, well, who do I trust?

EP:     Right, I’ve run across that on several websites where I read something different.

SO:     Yeah, do you trust x.documents.com or do you trust y.documents.com, and I mean who knows? And one of them was PDF and one of them was HTML and a third one was something else. So you just see just everything, all sorts of problems. And they are causing issues with delivery, right? With the company doing what they want to do.

EP:     Right. So once you’ve identified those gaps, then, obviously, it’s time to identify the changes that are going to be needed in order to reach the desired state that the company has. So how do you go about conducting the needs analysis and then making recommendations that are appropriate for the customer because customer’s needs are different?

SO:     So it can be a little difficult to separate the gap from the needs. But for example, going back to my language problem, if the gap is, “We need to deliver in 26 languages and currently we’re delivering in two,” is that a needs analysis? The gap is the languages aren’t being delivered. The need is something like, “We need to deliver these languages and probably that means we need a better localization strategy. We might need some localization software. Maybe we need a professional external localization vendor.” So there are different kinds of needs that you might run into there. But broadly, we’re going to be looking at overall strategy. So what is your content strategy? What are you going to create and how are you going to deliver it? When, where, why, and what languages and what format and all of that.

SO:     Some sort of reuse strategy for that canonical information so that you’re not copying it around. Localization strategy, systems, workflows, processes to make sure that localization is happening in a professional kind of way. We have to think about the content model and information architecture. So not just how are you going to organize your website if that’s your delivery model, but also how are you going to organize the content itself? So to take an example of that, if you’re doing hardware documentation, like how to repair something very typically you have prerequisites, which is something like, “Unplug the machine, make sure you have these tools and then set up everything and get ready.” So there’s kind of this preliminary step, or process before it says, “Okay, step one, open the casing and step two, do some stuff.”

SO:     So you want to think about the content model of, “Are all of my repair tasks always going to have some sort of prerequisite or some sort of list of tools that you need, or some sort of you need these skills or you need these certifications to do this task.” Because sometimes you don’t want somebody unqualified trying to repair a thing that-

EP:     That wouldn’t go well.

SO:     … could hurt them, or even kill them. So some things to think about there. So you have sort of your systems and your tools and your software and your content model inside of all of that. And then you have to think about the content life cycle, but then, in addition to all of that, you really have to think about the company itself and what level of investment is appropriate for that company. Are they a global multinational company that needs to deliver in every country and in 50 or 60 or a hundred languages? Do they have enough market share in all those different countries to justify that kind of an investment? Or is it a smaller company where we don’t have that same volume of information? Are they updating or republishing content nightly or is it more monthly or every six months? What’s that cadence look like? What’s the velocity? So you can broadly say, “Well, in an ideal world, everybody would do it this very sophisticated way.” But that might not be appropriate for a company that has less content or fewer tentacles out into these different languages or fewer formats.

SO:     Some companies have very straightforward content delivery requirements or is very straight forward content strategy model because the content they’re doing is easy. So from a business point of view, we’re looking at what kind of investment can we justify based on the value that they’re going to get out of it?

EP:     Right, because you have to be able to make that case for the executives.

SO:     Right. And we can’t tell them, “Spend a $1 million in order to save $50,000 on localization,” I mean that’s just not right, and rarely will they sign off on that.

EP:     So we’ve really covered the basics. And what would working with Scriptorium look like? What would that experience be like?

SO:     Well, we hope it’s a positive experience, but generally, if we’re doing this type of analysis, content strategy, assessment work and, for the record, even though nobody asks, we also do the technical implementation work. So I’ll just put that out there because that’s my job putting it out there. We would generally come in and meet with all the key stakeholders that are involved in this. Now, you would think content people and that’s definitely a key stakeholder, but in addition to the content people we’re talking about all the people that touch on content; subject matter experts who review it, people who approve it, product managers very often. Somewhere there’s an executive champion, IT because they’re responsible for the infrastructure or maybe the security around, especially if it’s a cloud-based solution, around the external sort of connectors that might be needed.

SO:     So we need to talk to all of those people and kind of understand what the parameters are of what we’re dealing with. Put all of that together. Do as we said, the needs analysis, the gap analysis and what comes out of that in pretty close collaboration with the key stakeholders in the client company is a plan that says, “Okay, this is what you need. Here’s your current state, here’s where you want to be. This is what it’s going to take to get there” Whether it’s software or process changes or training for your people or a new content model, or all of the above, very often, “And this is what the roadmap looks like and this is how we can do this.”

SO:     We usually include a risk mitigation section. So we talk about risk, “What are the risks of doing this? What are the risks of not doing this?” Because at the end of the day, if I’m an executive looking at this kind of a project, I have to be convinced that the risk of undertaking a project like this, of changing our operations, changing how we create content, changing what kind of content we create and all the rest of it is worth it.

SO:     And not just the financial return, although that’s important, but that it’s worth the change. That it’s worth the risk of making the change and moving forward versus just staying in the status quo. Status quo is not as scary as making changes. And so very often we’re coming in and saying, “Look, you need to make these very significant and profound changes.” People hate change, right? Everybody hates change.

EP:     And adapting takes a while.

SO:     And we’re people coming in and demanding or recommending change and we’re no different from anybody else. You change anything in our office here and you should see the screaming that goes on. And yet at the same time, we’re going in and telling people, “You have to change your day-to-day, how you approach your job.” So there’s a huge change management component and from a leadership point of view, you have to decide that the transformation of your content or the digital transformation, to use the horrific buzzword, that we are recommending is appropriate and necessary for your organization.

EP:     Well, with that I think we are going to go ahead and wrap up. Thank you, Sarah.

SO:     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 Scriptorium approach to content strategy (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 54 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson interviews Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle about what’s changed and what hasn’t changed in content over the years.

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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.

EP:    In episode 54, we discuss what’s changed and what hasn’t changed in content over the years. Hi. I’m Elizabeth Patterson, and I’m joined today with Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle.

Sarah O’Keefe:    Hello.

Alan Pringle:    Hi, there.

EP:    We’re going to talk some about the changes within content. I’m relatively new here and I just want to talk a little bit about how Scriptorium is different now from when it was founded back in 1997.

SO:    I love it.

AP:    No old people jokes, please. Thanks.

SO:    Too late, too late.

SO:    So when we got started with Scriptorium, we sort of had this… not sort of. When we got started with Scriptorium, we had this focus on content and technology and publishing and looking at how to combine those three things. How do you use technology to publish content efficiently? Something like that. And I think our focus from day one was always on efficiency as a priority, looking at how can we do this better? How can we take out the things that are not value added and get to focus on how to create better content?

SO:    So that focus hasn’t changed, we’re still very interested in the question of how content and technology and publishing go together to deliver whatever it is we’re trying to deliver. What’s interesting to me is that every one of those three things though, has changed. The technologies are different, publishing itself is different and even the content that we’re producing is different.

EP:    So what are some of the major changes that you have seen when it comes to writing and delivering content, specifically?

AP:    Well, on the tools and tech side in regard to content creation, 20 plus years ago, it was desktop publishing, was the big thing. And it’s still in use today.

AP:    But we’re seeing more, I think, more and more content creators, regardless of what kind of content they’re creating, whether it’s technical content, whether it’s marketing content, training content, moving more towards what we’re calling smarter content. Usually, structured authoring, XML based, where you have this separation of the content and the formatting. As you’re authoring, you are not applying the formatting. That is done separately later and done in many different ways, where you could be publishing to still, PDF or print perhaps, publishing to the web, to a learning management system. The possibility goes on and on.

AP:    But at the core of all those different delivery platforms, you still have the same source content.

EP:    Right.

SO:    So then when you look at publishing and distribution, I mean, it seems almost trite to say we’re not printing anymore, but it’s true. And it’s a big deal. 20 years ago, I was doing press checks. I was worried about bound books being shipped and making sure that the binding worked, or, oh, this book is over 900 pages, we’re going to have to do something creative, because it won’t fit in a physical binding, because it’s too big. So either the paper has to get thinner, or we have to break it into multiple volumes, or there were these physical constraints around how you do print, and how you bind books.

SO:    Now, as Alan said, we’re still doing a lot of PDF, but everybody just prints the PDF themselves. It is so rare to run across a company that is not a book publisher, that is still doing any sort of actual printed and bound documentation or books.

SO:    And then related to that, instead of having to go through this process of send it to the printer and wait for the blue lines to come back and do press and color checks and all this other stuff, you push a button and it goes on the web and it’s live.

AP:    And I remember even dealing with tractor trailers, who would back up to your facility with basically, boxes that contained thousands of whatever guide you had published, and those had to be manually hauled and then distributed to customers. What Sarah just described, all of that physical labor and transportation is going away. And I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing, says a person whose back carried many, many of those cartons of books.

SO:    Yeah, and to your point about tractor trailers, I mean, I remember a couple of incidents where we had, back in the day when we were printing, we had very, very large files, which were first PostScript, and then later PDF. And those needed to be delivered to the printer, so that the printer could process them and turn that into paper, ink on paper.

SO:    And there were a couple of cases where we had to put it on a CD or some other physical medium, I don’t know how many of our listeners remembers zip drives, but that was a thing, and hand deliver them to the printer. So you’d be either driving across town or getting a courier who would come and pick the stuff up and drive it across town, because it wasn’t possible to email the files.

AP:    Or put it on an airplane seat.

SO:    Yeah. And there was no Dropbox. And if you had a contract with your customer that said, the documentation needs to be delivered to customer X on June 1st, there were literally cases where on June 1st in the morning, we were putting people on a plane holding a CD, who were flying across the country, because they had to deliver this content to the customer on June 1st, or else there was some enormous penalty written into the contract.

SO:    And I mean, it just sounds ridiculous now.

EP:    There’s definitely that convenience in having things instantly published on the web.

AP:    And there’s a cost savings, enormous cost savings.

SO:    Less wear and tear, because we’re not physically hand carrying this stuff across the country, which actually happened. There were also numerous instances of having to drive out to the airport to catch the last FedEx plane. If you missed the office pickup at 5:00 or 6:00 or whatever it was, there was a last gasp drive out to the airport and get there before 8:45 and you could get it on the FedEx plane. I don’t miss that, actually.

AP:    Nor do I.

EP:    We’re talking here about the publishing and distribution of this content. So how specifically has content changed over the years?

AP:    Well, because we’ve moved away from this idea of a printed book, before when you were writing that content, you were thinking about the organization of that content, often in a more narrative, logical way that flowed from the start of the book to the end of the book. So there was this narrative thread, for lack of a better word.

AP:    But now, we have completely gotten away from that in several ways. First of all, there’s been this huge move to modularity. And that’s a big part of this whole smarter content push. You write these smaller pieces of content, and that makes them easier to reuse. You can mix and match to create what you need from these little smaller bits and pieces.

AP:    There’s also the fact that there’s not all this connective tissue that you had to write between all of these pieces in your narrative thread. Now, we’ve kind of discarded those, because those created a context where you expected piece B to always be after… or module A, and you can’t really expect that A, B, C, D flow anymore. They are these freestanding modules and you kind of stitch them together, which is pushing you toward writing things in a little more minimal way, without all those logical connections to link all those pieces.

SO:    And then I think, in addition to that, we’ve got a bunch of new kinds of content. The one that really, that I think is really maybe the most stunning is actually the rise of e-learning. Because back in the day, it was classroom training and if it wasn’t classroom training, there might be something like a terrible video that was captured of the training, that you could watch after the fact. Or there might be some sort of a self-study guide of some sort.

SO:    But this idea of e-learning or of blended learning that you can deliver a video and some online stuff and a test and an assessment and all these different things, in an interactive online environment was not a thing. I spent years and years doing stand up classroom training. And certainly, there’s still a market for that. But this concept of e-learning really didn’t exist and the content needed to drive it didn’t really exist in the way that it does today, by which I mean, it’s widely available, lots of people do it.

SO:    It has not replaced classroom training, but because e-learning allows you to avoid the cost of the instructor, that one-on-one or that one-on-10 cost, e-learnings become very, very popular. And that’s an entire content type that we really didn’t quite have 20 years ago. I mean there was some stuff but not a ton. So that’s one.

SO:    And the other one is things like videos and podcasts and these kind of non-text methods of getting your point across, which then of course ties back into e-learning, which uses a lot of that stuff. And then I think, and this is really a big one, these are all in one sentence, but the convergence of marcom and techcomm, the convergence of marketing content and technical content into, and for that matter, training content into a broader thing that is just, we are going to talk about our product and the content that goes with the product is, I think, really critical.

EP:    Right. So pretty significant changes have happened within this field. So how have your jobs changed over the years?

AP:    Well, we already talked about the tech. And that means that as the tech evolves, you have to evolve, or you’re going to be basically discarded with the bad tech. You really do have to pay attention to what’s going on and be sure you’re up on the latest tools and technologies. I think that’s super important.

AP:    But there’s always been this trend or this, I think, a challenge might be a better word, actually than trend, of it is very hard to sometimes find people who are experts in these tools and know how to use them properly. And as these tools get more and more specialized for creating content, that challenge multiplies, it gets even more and more difficult to find people who know how to use these tools properly.

SO:    Yeah, I think use the tools properly is a really key point. So the tools we’re using have changed, but the idea that you need to master a tool, that you need to understand how it works, you need to understand how best to use it, what it can do, what it can’t do, and what kinds of problems it’s appropriate for and what kinds of problems it’s not appropriate for, that judgment is something that hasn’t changed at all. Every new tool that comes along, we have to look at it and say what is this good for? What is this not good for? Are there showstoppers in here?

SO:    The other one, big one I think, is from my point of view, that content creators and the content production process in general has no margin for error anymore. Again, in the olden days, you would send a book to press and then you had the opportunity to correct your terrible grievous errors in a press check or in a blue line or something like that. And it was expensive to fix things, but you could fix them.

SO:    Now, you push a button and it goes live. And okay, we can fix it after the fact and we can unpublish it or we can make a correction and republish. But that slack time isn’t there anymore. We shipped and now we’re done and now I’m going to go do something else for a couple of days, while I wait for the blue lines to come in. That kind of slack has entirely disappeared from the process.

AP:    I think it’s also worth noting and we’re talking about all these changes, but there are a lot of cases where baseline technology has not changed. The whole idea of XML and basically, writing content as code, when I was in college, and I’m not going to say when and it was my first job, those two places, I learned basic markup languages in both of those, both in college and in my first job. Those skills serve me today, working with these open standards that are for XML based content.

AP:    So there are a lot of cases where you can rely on and even maybe recycle what you’ve already learned and use it as a building point to learn the latest and the greatest technology.

SO:    I think the most difficult part of a content creator’s job, and I’m thinking particularly of technical writers, but in general, is doing the research to get the information you need to write the content. And in many cases, that means you write a draft and then you run it by some sort of the subject matter expert. And I mean, people have written entire books on how hard it is to track down a subject matter expert and get them to give you a review. Get them to read what you wrote, get them to clarify, get them to answer questions.

SO:    So the elusive subject matter expert I think is still a problem. And we formalized a lot of the review processes in electronic workflows, in ways that are helpful. But we still have huge, huge problems with review workflows, because you have to get people to prioritize doing that work. And they, like everybody else, have no slack time. And they see this as, in many cases, as an optional part of their job.

SO:    I’m totally overwhelmed. What can I triage out of my job? And the answer is, oh, this stupid review, I don’t want to do that. I’m just going to ignore it and make it go away. So I mean, that was a problem 20 years ago, and I think it’s going to be a problem 100 years from now.

AP:    And it’s a symptom of a bigger problem too. We have all these blurring of distinctions now in content, and this is one of them. A lot of people who consider themselves not to be content creators, well, guess what? In truth, they are part-time content contributors, whether they want to admit it or not. And technology is really enabling that blurring. And I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.

SO:    Yeah, that’s interesting, because if you go back, go back even further, you go back to the concept of people writing content in longhand on legal pads and those kinds of things, because for the rise of all this word processing and capturing it directly, and then that led into mark up, I don’t know. I feel like maybe it was easier when there was somebody sitting at your doorstep with a legal pad saying, tell me more. As opposed to you getting an electronic notification in your inbox that says please review this. The people are much harder to ignore.

EP:    Well, with that, I think we’re going to go ahead and wrap up. Thank you, Sarah and Alan.

SO:    Thank you.

AP:    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 Evolution of content (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 53 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Bill Swallow discuss rebranding as a business case for smart content. How can you make sweeping branding changes as quickly and as painlessly as possible?

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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 episode 53 we discuss rebranding as a business case for smart content. How can you make sweeping branding changes as quickly and as painlessly as possible? Hi. I’m Elizabeth Patterson, and I’m joined today with Bill Swallow.

Bill Swallow:   Hello.

EP:   We’re going to talk about smart content and rebranding. Rebranding is a business case for smart content. Bill, can you describe a little bit about what that business case is?

BS:    Sure. Rebranding happens when you either have a merger, acquisition, you are taking your company in a slightly different direction, modernizing the look and feel, or you might just have a new content marketing officer who comes in, decides that sweeping changes need to be made. Then all of a sudden all of your content is in the wrong color, wrong size, wrong font, wrong logo, wrong taglines, what have you.

BS:   Usually what this means is that you have to go in and replace them all, but in a traditional content shop you generally have thousands of word files, thousands of FrameMaker or InDesign files. This is all technical content that, while it’s not going to be as flashy probably as your marketing content, it still needs to have a lot of this information applied. Whenever you do make these sweeping marketing changes, you also have to be mindful of all of the supporting documentation that your company has that’s going out to customers, going out to field people, and what have you.

BS:   How do you rebrand all of these things when you have all of these many, many, many files distributed probably across your company, being accessed and used by a variety of different people? It’s very, very time consuming and expensive to rework all of these static files. Replacing logos in word files, resizing them, applying new fonts and so forth. You’re lucky if you have templates to drive this, but generally what we’ve seen is that a lot of people do have these one off files that have ad hoc formatting in there, and everything needs to be redone by hand.

BS:   When we talk about smart content, we’re really talking about separating the formatting, all of that busy work, to get the content to look right, from the content itself. That way you can use the budget that you would have spent redoing all of this stuff to update tools and processes to make things flow a lot more smoothly.

EP:   Okay. With all of these files, you were kind of going into this some. But, rebranding can definitely be a very large undertaking, and you started touching on this a little bit, but what methods are companies and authors currently using to do that rebranding, and how can that be improved so that it is working most efficiently for them?

BS:   Well, a common method that actually shows a best practice is that on the web side. All of your web content is generally stored in some kind of a content management system, and that system is powered by HTML. Some of them use other technologies, but generally speaking we can say that they’re powered by HMTL. So, all of the content is in there as text, and it’s the CMS’s job to organize that information, and present it in a certain way. If you need to go ahead and make those changes, you make the change on the CMS side via templates, style sheets, and what have you, and you generally don’t touch the content itself. So, if you need to change all of your colors from green to red, you go in and you make a style sheet change on the CSS side. Just a couple lines of code max to make that change, and then you republish your content, and it’s in that new color.

BS:   Same thing with applying logos, or redesigning the look and feel of what the published page looks like. All of that happens outside of the content within the system itself. That is generally the best practice you have when you’re looking at what these unstructured environments might look like. I know I might get flack for saying that a web content management system’s unstructured, because it really isn’t. It’s kind of a hybrid. But, generally that’s what we’re talking about, is being able to move to that type of environment. That is the best case scenario, if you have an unstructured situation.

BS:   But, everything else, it comes down to how that content has been written, how that content has been managed, if it’s been managed, and what type of changes you are making, and how extensive it’s going to be when you start trying to fix them. That’s where we get into more of the need for smart content.

EP:   Speaking of smart content, can you kind of go into a little bit more detail about what exactly smart content means, and why is that going to make something like rebranding easier for companies and authors?

BS:   Sure. Smart content very, very basically is structured content with tags and metadata. What that means is that, you have this content that has a lot of information in it that is not formatting based. When we talk about smart content, we’re talking about separating the formatting of the content from the content itself. This way we’re writing without formatting. We’re not applying fonts, we’re not applying colors, we’re not applying spaces in between, we’re not tweaking the alignment. We’re just focusing on what’s being written, and we’re tagging it in a way that your system, depending on what you’re using, will understand, “Oh, this is a list,” so we’re going to publish the list looking this certain way. Here’s a table, and this is a certain type of table, so we’re going to present it in a particular manner that has, let’s say alternate shading. And, this other table, we’re going to present it without alternate shading.

BS:   We’re not doing that formatting within the content itself, but we’re providing information that a publishing system can understand, and then render it a certain way on the output side.

EP:   You were touching on this a little bit when we were talking about the formatting, and writing content without that formatting. But, when we’re thinking about specific branding assets that a company has, what would a typical branding asset look like structured versus unstructured?

BS:   Sure. In unstructured, and when we talk about branding assets I want to step back a little bit and say there’s the actual files and such that constitute your branding, and then there is the actual documentation itself, or the content itself. In unstructured you might have word files, FrameMaker files, InDesign files, and you might be fortunate enough to have templates that utilize, or basically are considered those branding assets, where they contain all the correct fonts, all the correct colors, the correct use cases for them, the correct layouts with all the images that you need for the background, and so forth intact and ready to go. They might have your copyright statements and other boiler plate information already presented in the templates, so all you have to do is open those files, and update the template.

BS:   If your content is, I should say well formed and you are adhering to the templates, in theory all you would have to do is make those template changes once, and apply that template to all the files that use it. That would make the update as quick and painless as possible.

EP:   Yeah, save a lot of time.

BS:   It would, but at the same time you still need someone to go in there and, whether it’s via a script if you’re lucky, or whether it’s via brute force, open a file, apply a new template, see how it looks, make sure it was applied correctly, and then save the file with the new look and feel. With structured information, or smarter content, what you’re essentially doing is you are taking all of that busy work out of the equation.

BS:   You would basically have these text files, and they are void of all formatting, but they have specific semantic information built into them that says, “Hi, I’m a table.” Or, “Hi, I’m a list.” They might have specific properties around those that say, “I’m this type of list.” But, it doesn’t actually format the content itself. What you then have is a series of style sheets, just like you would have in a web CMS.

BS:   You’d have a series of style sheets, you’d have a series of instructions that say, “When I publish for this specific purpose, do these things with the content, and apply these style sheets appropriately, and then publish to this location.” That way all of your content doesn’t need to be touched, you just need to tweak the pieces that publish the content in order to set the rules to say, “Hey, we’re now changing the color over to blue. Hey, we have a new logo so let’s drop that in, and we want to place it at the bottom of the page instead of the top of the page,” for whatever reason.

BS:   All of those rules are applied at the publishing side, rather than someone going in and making that change to every single page of content, or every single topic that you have if you’re publishing to the web, let’s say, and making those changes by hand.

EP:   Oh, it sounds like structured content is definitely the way to go to save you some headaches.

BS:   It definitely is. We’ve worked with a lot of clients on rebranding for this very specific purpose. One in particular had such a strong business case from rebranding alone, they actually calculated out the amount of time it would take them to apply new fonts, new colors, new logos, new taglines to all of their content. They looked at that total cost of time and effort, and it spanned years to update all of their content.

EP:   Wow.

BS:   We’re talking a very big company here. They looked at it and said, “You know what? It’s going to be more cost effective, it’s going to be more time effective to go ahead and just move this stuff over to a smart content format, and do it all that way.”

BS:   Rather than taking a few years of time to get all of this done, and using many, many, many human resources that could have been used elsewhere, like updating content, making further improvements, documenting new products. They decided to outsource and say, “We’re going to covert all of our information, and we’re going to move from our current format to this smart content format,” and they had a third party just go ahead and convert all that stuff. Then, they sat down and they worked hard on how they want this branding to look in their new output.

BS:   We’re talking months of time versus years of time, in order to rebrand all of that content. Again, it was something ridiculous like a few hundred thousand pages worth of content.

EP:   That’s just crazy, definitely something to talk about with your company and look into, to make sure that you’re being efficient. Alright, you were talking a little bit about how structured content is void of all formatting. I wonder if you can define this picture a little bit more on what content without formatting looks like.

BS:   Sure. In this situation you have a series of text files, and these text files are, you can open them up in a text editor. They are not flashy, they’re not proprietary. They could be something that is structured, so some type of XML maybe. Or, they could be even something a little more simpler. They could be something like Markdown. I wouldn’t necessarily call Markdown smart, but it does afford you a lot of the same capabilities, you’re just lacking a lot of metadata that you would get in an XML based solution.

BS:   Generally all of these smart content formats, they are void of all of that formatting information. Instead of saying, “Here’s a heading one, and I’m going to select it and make it 16 point blue, with 24 points of space underneath it.” And, being able to save that to a template and apply that every single time you’re just saying, ‘Hey, I’m a heading.” In a smart content situation, all of the understanding of how to format that heading is on the publishing side.

BS:   If you’re going to one particular format, you might have a series of rules that says, “Okay, this is blue, this is 24 points, this is … it has, it’s centered,” what have you. Then, you go to another target and it says, “Okay, this one is for a particular rebranding effort, or if it’s for a separate product, or it’s for our partner company,” so this one needs to be read, and it needs to be in this different font, and it needs to be offset this way, and handled in a different manner.

BS:   You’re not making those changes to the content.

EP:   Mm-hmm.

BS:   You’re making those changes over on the publishing side based on those rules for where that content is going.

EP:   Okay. Companies right now that are thinking it’s time for them to rebrand, and they’re trying to make decisions. You’ve touched on this a little bit, and the time saver. But, why is migrating to smart content the right choice?

BS:   Well it really affords you the ability to manage a lot of the, again, the look and feel processing of your content separately from the content itself. You’re able to do a variety of different things, publish to a variety of different mediums, without having to change the content. If the specs for your published output changes, then the content itself is unaffected. At that point all you need to do is make those changes on the publishing side, and then run the content through again. If you have different look and feel requirements based on where the content is going, whether it’s going to the web, whether it’s going to PDF, whether it’s going to a third party to be consumed by them. If it’s going to some OEM partner, you can go ahead and process that content differently without having to modify the content itself. You have all those rules built into the publishing side of things, and not in the content storage side.

BS:   The other benefit is that when you start thinking about smart content, things get a lot more modular. Your content is written in smaller chunks.

BS:   Those chunks can be assembled, reassembled, remixed, removed, and you can produce new things with that content without having to rewrite it, without having to go in and physically reorganize it from a source point of view. You’re just saying, “Hey, I have these five talking points and I’m going to arrange them in the output, in any variety of ways.”

BS:   Some other things you can do is that, you can externalize a lot of the branding elements in your smart content environment. Things can be swapped in and out as you need them. Not only do you have the look and feel, and the organization of the content. But, you can swap logos in and out, you can swap screenshots and other images in and out depending on what you need to show. This particularly comes in handy with localization, where you don’t need to go ahead and replace a bunch of images, you just reset the pointers.

BS:   Other things like company names, product names. If those things change, if they change often especially, those can be externalized and managed separate from the content itself so all you have to do is swap in and out a new name, and republish. Swap a new name once, and republish in all of the areas where it’s being used. Things like taglines, copyright statements, and other boiler plate information that generally would require you to rework your content and then republish, you can just make that change once. It could be as easy as flipping a flag on the publishing side to say, “Okay, we’re going from publishing scenario A to publishing scenario B. Now, run the content through.” It saves you a lot of time by being able to externalize all these things, and be able to remove that formatting from the content itself.

EP:   Which then allows you more time to work on other things that your company needs to.

BS:   Exactly, exactly. Because, the worst time sink that you can have is formatting content. It adds a visual value, but the amount of time it takes someone to do it by hand is nearly excruciating. That time could be better spent doing other things, like developing new content, or working on new projects to be able to further leverage the existing content that you have.

EP:   Alright, well I think we are going to go ahead and wrap up. 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 Rebranding as a business case for smart content (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 52 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey talks with Mark Gross of DCL about content conversion. They explore some of the use cases they have seen and what partial conversion looks like.

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About special guest, Mark Gross:

Mark Gross, President of DCL, is a recognized authority on XML implementation and document conversion. Mark’s company, DCL, which stands for “Data Conversion Laboratory” provides data and content transformation services and solutions. Using the latest innovations in artificial intelligence, including machine learning and natural language processing, DCL helps businesses organize and structure data and content for modern technologies and platforms.

Mark has a BS in Engineering from Columbia University and an MBA from New York University. He has also taught at the New York University Graduate School of Business, the New School, and Pace University. He is a frequent speaker on the topic of automated conversions to XML.

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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 52, we talk about content conversion with special guest Mark Gross of DCL.

GK:    Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast. I’m Gretyl Kinsey, and I am here with Mark Gross. Mark, how are you?

Mark Gross:    I am good today. Thank you.

GK:    Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. And I wanted to just start off by asking you to tell us a little bit about DCL and what you do and kind of what differentiates you from other companies kind of in a similar space?

MG:    Well, I guess the name says Data Conversion Laboratory and that’s what we do, but things have changed. We’ve been in business almost 40 years now. When we started, conversion meant mostly one thing. It meant, “I just got this new computer. I’ve got a new system, and I want to move old information from my old system onto the new system, and that was a lot. When microcomputers first came along, people were coming off mainframe and mini computers. But today everything runs on data, and that’s not so much a focus anymore, although it certainly is a focus.

MG:    We’re living in a world where data, information, analytics, the economy just doesn’t run well without well curated, structured data. There’s so much content, so much data out there that you’re inundated. So today much of what our work is about, 20% or 25% of our work is still moving things from one computer to another. But a lot of the rest of the work is really in structuring the information that’s already out there. And I guess as much of our Scriptorium audience might be working with things like DITA and S1000D. Well, that’s very structured information, but most information out there isn’t. So what we do there is take information and we add the structured information into there. And that’s essentially what we’re doing today.

GK:    And you’re definitely right that at Scriptorium a lot of the clients we work with are kind of either going into structure or already in some kind of structure. And so as far as their conversion needs, they may be looking at either something like moving from one structure to another. So for example, something like a homegrown XML to DITA, or they may be looking at something like going from just completely unstructured content into something more structured like XML. That’s kind of what we see as sort of the common needs that companies have for converting their content, especially if they have a large volume of it that’s completely unstructured and they need it to have that structure, then that’s when they would say, “Okay, we’ve got to convert all of this.” And I wanted to get your take on this as well and kind of ask you, what are some of the most common reasons that you see with the companies you’ve worked with? Why they need this kind of conversion?

MG:    Okay. So the first things to talk about are the moving computers. But more of the time today is they’ve got information, and they’ve been collecting it, and they’ve been structuring … And it might be structured already, but the needs today are so much different, and the bar has been raised so much that information just isn’t in the form that it needs to be today for modern uses, for artificial intelligence, for transmitting information. It doesn’t have the right metadata. An example is the work we did for Elsevier and the scopeless database. So the scopeless database, it’s called the index to the world’s literature, scientific literature. And for the last 10 or 15 years, everything has been structured very tightly. It’s bibliography information, so you have author’s names and publishers and the dates and all those things there.

MG:    But going back more than 15 years, 15 years ago, the information wasn’t structured like that. It was just plain line information. Bibliography was just the way you see it in the back of a journal or on the back of a book. So that wasn’t good enough to be able to find things as quickly as they needed to be found. So what we did for them is we went back to all the material going back for another 15 years before that, and then used artificial intelligence and a bunch of very sophisticated software to go in and add the structure that should have been there, if it would have been correct in the first place. But 15 or 20 years ago, we didn’t know that we would need this anymore. So we went back and restructured and ordered information.

MG:    I think there’s lots of cases like that. A company may have documents going back 20, 30, 40 years, which is still valuable, but the older material is sitting, probably not on paper but it might be, but it’d be sitting on microfilm, or it would be sitting in PDF files, which are not really structured files. So there’s a need to go back and upgrade all those materials to try to work with what’s needed today. The world contains billions of pages of information out there, so it’s a shame not to have access to them, and today we want access to all that information.

GK:    Yeah, exactly. And that’s really one of the biggest use cases that we see as well. We’ll see companies saying all of our stuff is locked into an older format like PDF where it’s not as accessible. They can’t really put it on the web except a PDF for download, and it really just kind of restricts what they’re able to provide to their customers. And then they’ve got this demand for content to be able to be kind of parceled up and reused in different ways, and they really just don’t have that flexibility with it when it’s kind of stuck in an older and unstructured format.

MG:    Yeah. And I think just one more example that fits this, I think is work that we’re doing for the New York Public Library now. The New York Public Library has the complete collection of copyright records going back to the 1800s when copyrights first started being put together in the United States, but all that was in books. So there’s hundreds and hundreds of books on shelves, and then all those were scanned. So now you have images of all those pages, and then they were OCRed automatically, and so there’s an OCR, but that’s still not very much use because the data itself is not structured. When you look at a copyright record, it contains a lot of information that’s really fielded, separated by commas and semicolons and other things like that. So you really can’t find anything. A full text search doesn’t do you much good.

MG:    So what we’ve done now is gone back to all that material that’s already been … Images already exist of everything, but we’ve gone back and we’ve now taken the content out of that, and built that and tagged it and structured it, and built that into a database that a public library can now use and put out on the web. So there’s lots of information out there that can use more structuring.

GK:    Absolutely. I want to talk about some more specific use cases that Scriptorium has seen with our clients when it comes to conversion and kind of get your take on some of them. So the first one is the idea of a partial conversion. And a couple examples we’ve seen of this would be something like a company maybe does a content audit, and they realize that some of their content is unstructured, does need to be converted and provided in multiple different formats to their customers. But then maybe they’ve got some other content that’s just out of date. It’s never going to be updated again anyway, and they maybe decide it’s not worth it to convert that content. We’ve seen similar cases where maybe there’s a certain amount of the content that’s the most important, and that’s what they’re updating most frequently, and then maybe they start with that, and then convert the rest later on a schedule that works better for them.

GK:    So I wanted to ask you if you’ve seen cases like this where a company either does a partial conversion, or maybe starts with a partial conversion and kind of how common that is, and what kinds of use cases that you’ve seen there?

MG:    Right. So certainly there’s a cost to conversion. I think companies have a fiduciary responsibility to think about what the return on investment is going to be in anything they do. So I think we see a lot of cases where there’s partial conversions, either because as you said, they just have a lot of stuff and decide not to do it all because they don’t need it all. And the other is they do want it all, but maybe it doesn’t have to be converted with all the bells and whistles in order to reduce the cost. It all comes down to your return on investment. So I think very often this really starts with a content audit. I think people at the organization have to look at and see what the value of what the material they have is.

MG:    For example, an organization might find that only the … They want to convert the product manuals or their repair manuals for products that are 10 years or less and go from there. So that might be good enough. And the rest of it, well, moving it into something like DITA is relatively expensive. It’s dollars per page usually. So they’ll take that, the pieces that are more current and bring them up, while the rest of it can be left as just images and then done on a gradual basis as they go along.

MG:    In other cases, it may make sense … A client of ours is the Optical Society of America. For their hundredth birthday, which was a couple of years ago, they wanted to convert the entire corpus of material going back to 1917, which on one hand you think, “Why would you need … Why would a physicist want material that’s a hundred years old.” On the other hand, it turns out that they’re right. It’s this very valuable information there that wasn’t at all available before. So they chose to turn everything into top quality XML, everything in it. And they went for that over a period. They had a three year program, and they did it over that period.

MG:    In other cases, you know, there’s a cost to perfection. Sometimes you don’t need perfection. You just want to get 99% of the way there. So an example of that is the work we currently do for the US Patent Office. So that’s not a one-time conversion. That’s continuing information because they get five million pages a month of technical material coming into their facility. And until a few years ago, everything was imaged and everything was scanned, but it was just images. There wasn’t much you could do with it other than flip through them on a computer. But the cost of converting all that into XML the traditional way would have just been prohibitive.

MG:    We came up with a completely automated approach. We take documents coming in … OCR on technical documents by itself without correction, doesn’t work very well usually. But we came up with a computer vision approach that would clean up a page before it ever got to the OCR engine. It took off all the math and the tables and all those things, took it off so the page electronically just had text and white space. And then it went through an OCR engine, which produced better than 99% accuracy right out, without any correction. And then it got converted to XML or the automated tools. And then all the things we took out, the math that was left as images was pulled back in and produced the document that was XML completely automatically, but it was only … They ordered at 99.6 accuracy. So their take on it was, “We want all these pages, and getting 99.6% at one 20th the cost is definitely worth it for us.” It may not be worth it in a publishing organization, but it definitely was worth it for them because the documents were still going to be looked at by patent examiners at some point.

MG:    So I think every organization needs to think about what the return on investment is, and there are places in between other than … It doesn’t have to be everything. It doesn’t have to be zero. Some place in between there that really is the right decision.

GK:    Absolutely. And another place that we’ve seen clients kind of evaluate that return on investment is when it comes to the idea of rewriting or restructuring some of their content before they convert. And we see this a lot in cases where a company has maybe written their user manual in a very book-like way that doesn’t convert cleanly over to topics, and similar cases like that where maybe they’ve kind of formatted their content such that it doesn’t have any sort of implied structure, or they’ve maybe been misusing their template in Word or FrameMaker or InDesign or whatever they’ve been using. So when it comes to doing an automated conversion process, they realize that the results are going to be pretty messy and that it’s going to require a lot of cleanup on the output side. So I wanted to get your take on that as well and ask if you’ve seen any cases where it made more sense for a company to do some cleanup and restructuring, maybe rewriting on their content before they tried to convert it?

MG:    Of course there are cases where it’s just such a mess that it’s not worth it. It’s not worth converting without doing some rewriting, but I think it’s less than you might think. I don’t think people, especially when you have large amounts of content, I think there are tools around that let you insert structure where it wasn’t there before. It’s possible. Many of the cases that I’ve seen over time, we could apply some technology too. So there might be some … I think there’s a triage that needs to take place beforehand to review the items and do an inventory of what’s there and maybe identify those, the 10% or 5% or 20% that really is not going to transfer over.

MG:    But I think very often you can get 70 or 80% of the material to be moved over automatically. And I think there’s a lot of benefits, and you could do that. First of all, there is a cost savings to the extent you can do that, but also a lot of times you don’t have to recheck materials that have already been approved and have been used for awhile. You may not have to get recertified, and it doesn’t need … The professionals that are in the organizations don’t have a lot of time for any of this. They can focus on just those pieces that need their attention and the rest of it can be done by others, both by automation and by less trained people who can just do some of the things that need to be done. So I think automation, there’s a lot that automation can do that we underestimate a lot of times. It’s worth doing, taking the effort upfront to see what would happen.

GK:    Absolutely. So I want to talk about another common situation that we’ve seen that can kind of pose some interesting challenges to conversion. And that is when a company goes through merger or acquisitions. And then they’ve suddenly got this collection of content that’s coming from maybe two, three, five, ten different sources, and none of it’s consistent with each other, but all of a sudden all of it needs to be made consistent and rebranded and kind of following this one corporate structure. So I wanted to ask if you’ve dealt with any cases like this and what sorts of challenges that you’ve faced in converting content after a merger or acquisition?

MG:    All right. Yeah, that’s actually … There’s more and more of that kind of activity going on, so that’s definitely good for business, but I think it’s just a more exaggerated case of the usual trying to normalize information. Whereas when you go into one company, you’re really dealing with the materials that were done over a period of 10, 15, 20, 30 years of trying to normalize it, because people have done things over time. When you’re dealing with multiple companies, they for sure have done things, and every company does things differently. Frequently, one of the companies has better practices than the other. That might be why they did the acquisition or maybe that’s why they were acquired. But I think it’s a very similar process of identifying where you want to go, what is the goal. And I think that’s part of the specification process that takes place upfront. “This is what we want it to look like when it’s done,” and then mapping all that information over. And I think it’s just another … I think computers are very helpful there. There’s a lot of automation that can be applied. Today, a lot of artificial intelligence kinds of software can be applied. I think it’s just an exaggerated case.

MG:    But I think it’s more important … In this case it’s even more important to have a good planning process upfront with someone who’s familiar with the various data streams and the data formats and the tools that can be used because that can save years in the process. A lot of times you hear about companies that have merged, and it takes them three years or five years to get their information together, which is a disaster. So I think it behooves the organization to look at that. One of the issues, I think, is the IT groups are usually in charge of trying to merge everything together. And while they have a lot of experience with data streams, I don’t think IT groups usually have a lot of experience with the document streams and how documents come together. So I think it’s even more important to bring in professionals who are familiar with those kinds of materials in order to speed up the process.

GK:    Definitely. So you mentioned that you’re kind of seeing more and more of cases with mergers and acquisitions happening. So I wanted to ask if there are any other kind of common patterns like that that you’re seeing with types of conversions that you’re doing and if there are any unique challenges that you face with each of those and sort of how you deal with those?

MG:    So I think today … Traditionally, we saw these conversion as projects that go on … They have a start, and they might be six months or a year or a few years. But today, actually most of our work is continuing kind of work, like what I described about the Patent Office. That’s day by day work that needs to be done on a very timely basis. And the timeframes are really squeezed in. I mean where traditionally you’d schedule a six month process, today things might need to be delivered in 10 minutes or in an hour or in two hours. So the timeframes, I think are really squeezed down a lot of times. There’s no real time to go back. You’ve really got to describe things upfront and make sure you’ve got a machine that really takes care of everything.

MG:    So I think more and more of what becomes important is having a process upfront to specify what needs supply. Define what’s going to need to be done. And that’s really very detailed work. A lot of times people think of it as an ad hoc process. We have a very formalized specification process when we start something where everything gets laid out, all the details are laid, and we walk a customer through all the steps and the decision points and record the decisions. So I think it becomes very important to do that upfront because of just how the large scale of what we’re doing and the time, the time parameters are there. There’s also, I think, a matter of prioritizing, which you spoke about already. But if you’re going to … you’re really getting in new systems, decide what’s really needed, what’s the return on investment of various materials. And inventory what’s there so that you make sure you’re doing the most important things first. A lot of times you hear things like, “Well, price is no object. We want everything to be moved over.” That’s never true. Price is always an object, and cost is always an object. So prioritization is very important.

MG:    And I think another area that’s become common is this idea of all content reuse as the data streams become large, especially like when you’re dealing with technical documentation, which is much of what we’ve talked about. Systems like DITA and S1000, they are intended to reduce the amount of duplicate content that you’re handling, and I think that’s true in many places, so content reuse and normalizing the information becomes very important. We spoke about if a company merges, those two companies might have similar information, but they’re slightly different or they’re very different. One of the things we’ve done is we’ve built tools that let us examine large collections of information. It’s called Harmonizer, which will go through a collection information and find all the similar paragraphs, not just that they’re identical, but somebody’s changed a few words. So we can identify those so that we can now pull them out and say, “Well, this thing has repeated a hundred times. Let’s make that a module and just refer to it a hundred times.” I think a lot of those kind of things are common just because you’re dealing with more information and it’s all gotten bigger and faster.

GK:    It really has. And we’ve noticed kind of some similar trends and patterns as well with the clients that we’ve worked with. I definitely agree, reuse continues to be a really large factor, especially with companies that are localizing content to other languages. Because if they can’t reuse their content, then that translation cost is occurring many, many more times than it needs to. So I agree, I think it’s really important to, as you said, to plan and to look at your reuse needs and your reuse potential, and see how that can factor in to your conversion process and in that way really make the most of what you do when you convert.

MG:    Just one more point I think that’s important to … just in terms of the patterns.

MG:    An area where we’ve had a lot of focus and we spoke about a few times is just the focus on computer intelligence and artificial intelligence. And I think that’s been a major differentiator for DCL, and way before it was a buzzword. In 1982, already we built a conversion tool called Mindreader, which would take ASCII based files, just plain text files that were coming out of an ancient word processor called the Videk, to convert it to what was then a very modern word processor that had all tags, and it was automatically infering all the ideas and the architecture and putting in tags automatically. That’s been a fortunate beginning. It’s become more and more a focus over the last years because first of all, the data streams have become so much larger, and also labor costs are rising internationally, and that’s going to continue to happen. And so I think that focus on intelligence and using computers to do this has become more and more important as we go along. And having people really understand that is a really important part of all this.

GK:    Absolutely. Well, thank you again for joining us.

MG:    Okay. Well, it’s been a pleasure to be here. And thank you for this session. And these are really good questions. And thank you very much.

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.

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In episode 51 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Gretyl Kinsey talk with vendors at the CMS/DITA North America conference about how they have seen DITA evolve during their time in the industry. This is part two of a two-part podcast.

Interviewees:

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