Scriptorium

Ready to deliver consistent and personalized learning content at scale for your learners? In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow share how structured content can transform your L&D content processes. They also address challenges and opportunities for creating structured learning content.

There are other people in the content creation world who have had problems with content duplication, having to copy from one platform or tool to another. But I will tell you, from what I have seen, the people in the learning development space have it the worst in that regard—the worst.

— Alan Pringle

Related links:

LinkedIn:

Transcript:

Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.

Introduction with ambient background music

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

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

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

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

End of introduction

AP: Hey, everybody, I’m Alan Pringle.

BS: I’m Bill Swallow.

AP: And today, Bill and I want to talk about structured content in the learning and development space. I would say, the past two years or so, we have seen a significantly increased demand of organizations who want to apply structured content to their learning and development processes, and we want to share some of the things those organizations have been through and what we’ve learned over the past few months, because I suspect there are other people out there who could benefit from this information.

BS: Oh, absolutely.

AP: So let’s talk about, really, the drivers, what are the things that people, content creators in the learning development space, what’s driving them to it? One of them off the bat is so much content, so, so very much content, on so many different delivery platforms. That’s one that I know of immediately, what are some of the other ones?

BS: Oh, yeah, you have just the core amount of content, the number of deliverables, and the duplication of content across all of them.

AP: That is really the huge one, and I know there are other people in the content creation world who have had problems with content duplication, having to copy from one platform or tool to another. But I will tell you, from what I have seen, the people in the learning development space have it the worst in that regard—the worst.

BS: Didn’t they applaud you when you showed up at a conference with a banner that said end copy, paste?

AP: Pretty much, it’s true. That very succinct message raised a lot of eyebrows, because they are in the position, unfortunately, in learning and development, having to do a lot of copying and pasting, and part of the reason for that copying and pasting is, a lot of times, the different platforms that we’ve mentioned, also, different audiences. I need to create this version for this region, or this particular type of student at this location, so they’re copying and pasting over and over again to create all these variants for different audiences, which becomes unmanageable very quickly.

BS: Yeah, copy, pasting, and then, reworking. And then, of course, when they update it, they have to copy, paste, and rework again to all the other places it belongs, and then, they have to handle it in however many languages they’re delivering the training in.

AP: So now, everything is just blown up. I mean, how many layers of crap, and I’m just going to say it, do these people have to put up with? And there are many, many, many.

BS: Worst parfait ever.

AP: Yeah, no, that is not a parfait I want to share, I agree with you on that. So let’s talk about the differences between, say, the techcomm world and the learning and development world and their expectations for content. Let’s talk about that, too, because it is a different focus, and we have to address that.

BS: So techcomm really is about efficiency and production, so being able to amass quite a wide mass of content and put it out there as quickly as possible, or put it out there as efficiently as possible. Learning content kind of flips that on its head, and it wants to take quality content and build a quality experience around it, because it’s focused on enabling people to learn something directly.

AP: And techcomm people, we’re not saying you’re putting out stuff that is wrong or half ass. That is not what we mean, I want to be real clear here. What we mean is, there is a tendency to focus on efficiency gains, and getting that help set, getting that PDF, getting that wiki, whatever thing that it is that you’re producing, getting that stood up as quickly as possible, whereas on the learning side, speed is not usually the thing that you’re trying to use to sell the idea of structured content. I don’t think that’s going to win a lot of converts in the learning space. I do think, however, you can make the argument, if you create this single source of truth so you can reuse content for different audiences, different locations, different delivery platforms, and you’re using the same consistent information across all of that, you are going to provide better learning outcomes, because everybody’s getting the same information. Regardless of what audience they are or what platform that they’re learning, whether it’s live instructor-led training, something online, whatever else, you’re still getting the correct same information, whereas if you were copying and pasting all that, you might’ve forgot to update it in one place as a content creator, and then, someone ends up getting the wrong information, a student, a learner, and that’s when you’re not in the optimal learning experience situation.

BS: Right, and it’s not to say that every single deliverable gets the exact same content, but they get a slice from the same shared centralized repository of content so that they’re not rewriting things over and over and over again. And they’re still able to do a lot of high-quality animations, build their interactives, put together their slide presentations, everything like that, but use the content that’s stored centrally rather than having to copy and paste it again and again and again.

AP: Yeah, and let’s talk about, really, the primary goals for moving to structure content for learning and development folks. We’ve already talked about reuse quite a bit, that’s a big one. Write it one time, use it everywhere, and that also leads to creating profiling, different audiences, content for different audiences.

BS: Right, I mean, these goals really are no different than what you see in techcomm, and what techcomm has been using for the past 15, 20, 25 years. It is that reuse, that smart reuse, so write it once, use it everywhere, no copy paste, having those profiling attributes and capabilities built in so that you can produce those variants for beginner learners versus expert learners versus people in different regional areas where the procedure might be a little bit different, producing instructor guides as well as learner guides. All of these different ways of mixing and matching, but using the same content set to do that.

AP: Yeah, it’s like one of our clients said, and I have to thank them forever for bringing this up, they were bogged down in a world of continuous copying and pasting over and over and over again, and maintaining multiple versions of what should’ve been the same content, and they said, quote, “We want to get off the hamster wheel.” And that is so true and so fitting, and we probably owe them royalties for saying this over and over again, because such a good phrase. But it really did capture, I think, a big frustration that a lot of people in the learning and development space have creating content, because they do have to maintain so many versions of content.

BS: And those versions likely are stored in a decentralized manner, so they could be on multiple different servers, they could be on multiple different laptops or PCs, they could be on thumb drives in some random drawer that are updated maybe once every two, three years. So being able to pull everything together into a central repository and structure it so that it can be intelligently reused and remixed, there’s so many benefits to that.

AP: Yeah, and in regard to the remixing, the bottom line is, you want the ability to publish to all your different platforms. I believe the term people like to use is omnichannel publishing, so you basically can do push-button publishing to basically any delivery need that you have, whether it’s an instructor versus student guide for training you’re having live, e-learning, even scripts for video. Even when you’re dealing with a lot of multimedia content, there is still text involved, underpinnings of that content, audio and video, there’s still probably bits and pieces of that, that can come from your single source of content, because at the core of it, it’s text-based, even though if the delivery of it is a video or audio.

BS: Now, we’ve had structured content for a good couple decades, at least-

AP: At least, yeah.

BS: … but there really is a reason why the learning world really hasn’t latched onto it completely, and it really comes down to the different types of content that they need to produce versus what traditionally a techcomm group would do. So right off the bat, there are all the different tests, quizzes, and so forth, all the assessments that are built into a learning curriculum. There was never really anything built to handle those in traditional structured authoring platforms in schemas.

AP: And there are solutions now that will let you handle assessments and different types of questions, and things like that.

BS: But the whole approach to producing learning content, it’s quite similar to techcomm and to other classic content development, but it’s also quite unique in its own right, and we do have to make sure that all of those different needs, whether it be the assessments, any interactives that need to be developed, making sure that you tie in a complete learning plan, and perhaps even business logic to your content, making sure all that can be baked in intelligently so that we’re able to produce the things that we need to produce for trainers.

AP: Yeah, and now, especially, you have to be able to create content that integrates easily with the learning management system, which has its own workflows, it’s got tracking, it tracks progress, it scores quizzes, it keeps track of what classes you’ve taken, prerequisites, all of that stuff, that is a whole delivery ecosystem, and structured content can help you communicate with an LMS and create content that is LMS friendly by baking in a lot of the things that you just talked about.

BS: And the content really does boil down to a more granular and targeted presentation to the audience rather than techcomm, which is more of a soup to nuts, kind of everything in the kitchen sink approach to offer.

AP: Yeah, and then, there’s also the whole live delivery aspect, that is not something that’s really part of techcomm at all.

BS: I wouldn’t want someone there reading a manual to me.

AP: No, nor would I. Well, it might be a good way to treat insomnia, but that’s not what we’re here for. But you do have to consider, the assessments are a big difference from a lot of other content that is a good fit for the structure world, and then, the possibility of live instruction, that’s also another big difference, which, still, there are structured content solutions that can help you with both of those very distinct learning and development content situations. So I think it’s fair to say, based on talking to a lot of people at conferences focused on learning, and a lot of our clients, that the traditional way of creating learning and development content, it is not scalable. The copy and paste angle in particular is just not sustainable in any way, shape, or form.

BS: No, you have so many hours in a day, so if you need to start producing more, you really need to start adding more people. And you add more people, then you have the likelihood that more things could go wrong with the content, or the content could get-

AP: Will go wrong.

BS: … could get out of sync with itself.

AP: Yeah. Well, let’s talk also a little more about some of the challenges. We’ve talked about the interactivity, how that and the assessments, that’s something that’s kind of particular that you have to solve for in the learning space. Let’s talk about the P word, PowerPoint.

BS: PowerPoint. Yeah, being able to pull focus slides together, which really would likely have a very small subset of a course’s content built within them, unless you’re producing a wall of text per PowerPoint. Those are quite unique to the space, so you don’t see much in techcomm where things are delivered via PowerPoint, or you hopefully don’t.

AP: No, PowerPoint is great because it’s wide open and you can do a lot of things with it, PowerPoint is bad because it’s wide open and you could do a lot of things with it. That’s the problem with PowerPoint.

BS: And a template’s only as useful as those who follow it.

AP: Exactly. And now, you mentioned templates, structure content is a way to templatize and standardize your content, and I’m sure that can rub people the wrong way. My slides need to be special, this, that, and the other. There’s a continuum here of, I want to do whatever I want to the point of sloppy, or I can do things within this particular set of confines so there is consistency. And again, I think it’s fair to say, providing consistency for different learners with slide decks, that is going to make some better outcomes instead of a free-for-all, I can do whatever I want scenario. And I’m sure there are people out there who are going to kick and scream and disagree with me, but that’s a fight we’re just going to have to have folks.

BS: Well, no, it provides us a consistent experience throughout, rather than having some jarring differences from lesson to lesson or course to course.

AP: Yeah, yeah, and I think there’s one thing, too, that, in addition to the PowerPoint angle, with the learning and development space, there is this focus on, we need to create, this thing went off, that thing went off, and this other thing went off. There’s still standardization you can do among your different delivery targets that will streamline things, create consistency, and therefore, a better learning experience. I do believe that’s true, even though some people at first in particular can find it very confining.

BS: Oh, right, I mean, it just takes the development of the end user experience, I don’t want to say completely out of the learning content developer’s hands, but it kind of frees them up to better frame the content for the lesson rather than worrying about the fit and finish of the product.

AP: Yeah, and let’s focus now on some of the options out there in the structure content world for learning and development content. There’s several out there, let’s talk about what’s on the table.

BS: It comes down to two different types of systems, one would be a learning component management system, so it’s a system that’s more built for learning content specifically.

AP: Yeah, I would say it’s purpose built, I agree, yeah.

BS: Yeah, and it functions the same way as a lot of, I guess what we would call the traditional techcomm component content management systems do, where you’re able to develop in fragmented pieces, in a structured way, in a centralized manner, and intelligently reuse and remix all of these different components to produce some type of deliverable.

AP: Right, so you can therefore, within this system, set up things for different locations, different audiences, whatever else. And if you were moving into an LCMS or one of the other solutions we’re talking about, you are also going to make localization and translation much more efficient, and you’ll get stuff turned around in other languages for other locales much more quickly. So we’ve got the LCMS’s which are more proprietary, and then, on the flip side of that, let’s talk about DITA.

BS: So DITA does provide you with a decent starting point for developing your content, and we’ve helped several clients do this already, but a lot of the tools that are out there on the flip side, where the LCMS is targeted at developing learning content, a lot of the tools for DITA aren’t, so it requires a lot of customization on the tool chain, as well as in the content model, to get things up and running. However, DITA does give you an easier point of integration with any work that is being produced by your techcomm peers.

AP: Yeah, I do think it’s fair to say it’s a little more extensible, but the mere fact it is an open standard as an extensible means that it may take some configuring to make it exactly what you need it to be. And like Bill was saying, DITA has some custom structure that is a very good fit, it is specifically for learning and training, and you can further customize those customizations to match what you need. I will say, I think some of the assessment structures are not as robust as they should be, and we’ve had to customize those for some clients. So that’s another thing that you would have to kind of think about when you’re trying to make this decision, do I need to go with an LCMS, or do I want to go with DITA and a component content management system, and understand that I’m going to have to make some adjustments to make it more learning and development friendly?

BS: No matter which way you slice it, though, moving to any kind of a structured repository in a structured system really starts to open things up from a back end production point of view, while not necessarily forgoing a lot of the experience-driven design that goes into producing those different learning deliverables. It is a way to kind of become more efficient, and as Alan mentioned, avoid the copy and paste, which can be a nightmare to maintain over time.

AP: And at the same time, you do not have to throw out your standards for the quality of the content and the quality of the learning experience. You want to have structure, support, and bolster, and maintain those things, and don’t look at it as something that is going to degrade those things, because when used correctly, it can really help you maintain that level of quality and consistency that you really need for an outstanding learning experience. And with that, Bill, I think we can wrap up. Thank you very much.

BS: Thank you.

Outro with ambient background music

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

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In episode 179 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle share the inside scoop on how to write an effective request for a proposal (RFP) for content operations. They’ll discuss how RFPs are constructed and evaluated, strategies for aligning your proposal with organizational goals, how to get buy-in from procurement and legal teams, and more.

When it comes time to write the RFP, rely on your procurement team, your legal team, and so on. They have that expertise. They know that process. It’s a matter of pairing what you know about your requirements and what you need with their processes to get the better result.

— Alan Pringle

Related links:

LinkedIn:

Transcript:

Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.

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 this episode, we talk about writing effective RFPs. A request for a proposal, RFP, approach is common for enterprise software purchases, such as a component content management system, which can be expensive and perhaps risky. Hey everybody, I am Alan Pringle.

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

AP: So Sarah, we don’t sell software at Scriptorium, so why are we talking about buying software?

SO: Well, we’re talking about you, the client buying software, which is not always, but in many cases, the prerequisite before we get involved on the services side to configure and integrate and stand up the system that you have just purchased to get you up and running. And so, because many of our customers, many most, nearly all of our customers are very, very large, many of those organizations do have processes in place for enterprise software purchases that typically either strongly recommend or require an RFP, a request for proposal.

AP: Which let’s be very candid here. Nobody likes them. Nobody. 

SO: No, they’re horrible.

AP: Vendors don’t like them. People who have to put them together don’t like them, but they’re a necessary evil. But there things you can do to make that necessary evil work for you. And that’s what we want to talk about today.

AP: So the first thing you need to do is do some homework. And part of that homework, I think, is talking with a bunch of stakeholders for this project or this purchase and teasing out requirements. So let’s start with that. And this is even before you get to the RFP itself. There’s some stuff you need to do in the background. And let’s talk about that a little bit right now.

SO: Right, so I think, you know, what you’re looking to get to before you go to RFP is a short list of viable candidates, probably in the two to three range. I would prefer two, your procurement people probably prefer three to four. So, okay, two to three. And in order to get to that list of these look like viable candidates, as Alan’s saying, you have to do some homework. Step one, what are your hard, requirements that IT or your sort of IT structure is going to impose. Does the software have to be on premises or does it have to be software as a service? Nearly always these days organizations are hell bent on one or the other and it is not negotiable. Maybe you have a particular type of single sign-on and you have some requirements around that. Maybe you have a particular regulatory environment that requires a particular kind of software support. You can use those kinds of constraints to easily, relatively easily, rule out some of the systems that simply are not a fit for what your operating environment needs to look like.

AP: And by doing that, you are going to reduce the amount of work in the RFP itself by doing this now. So you’re going to streamline things because you’ve already figured out, this candidate is not a good fit. So why bother them and why make work for ourselves having to work and correspond with the vendor that ends up not being a good fit.

SO: Right, and if we’re involved in a process like this, which we typically do on the client side, so we engage with our customers to help them figure out how to organize an RFP process, right, we’re going to be strongly encouraging you to narrow down the candidate list to something manageable because the process of evaluating the candidates is actually quite time consuming on the client side. And additionally, it’s quite time consuming for the candidates, the candidate software companies to write RFP responses. So if you know for a fact that they’re not a viable candidate, you know, just do everybody a favor and leave them out. It’s not fair to make them do the work.

AP: No, it’s not. And we’ve seen this happen before where a organization will keep a vendor in the process kind of as a straw man to strike down fairly quickly. It would be kinder and maybe more efficient to do that before you even get to the RFP response process, perhaps.

SO: Yeah, and of course, again, the level of control that you have over this process may vary depending on where you work and what the procurement RFP process looks like. There are also some differences between public and private sector and some other things like that. But broadly, before you go to RFP, you want to get down to a couple of viable candidates, and that’s who should get your request for proposal.

AP: Yeah, and when it does come time to write that RFP, do rely on your procurement team, your legal team. They have that expertise. They know that process. It’s a matter of pairing what you know about your requirements and what you need with that process to get the better result. And I think one of the key parts of this communication between you and your procurement team is about use case scenarios. So let’s talk about those a little bit because they’re fundamental here.

SO: Yeah, so your legal team, your procurement team is going to write a document that gives you all the guardrails around what the requirements are and you have to be this kind of company and our contract needs to look a certain way and various things like that. We’re going to set all of that aside because A, we don’t have that expertise and B, you almost certainly as a content person don’t have any control over that. You’re just going to go along with what they are going to give you as the rules of the road in doing RFPs. However, somewhere inside that RFP it says, these are the criteria upon which we will evaluate the software that we are talking about here. And I think a lot of our examples here are focused on component content management systems, but this could apply to other systems whether it’s translation management, terminology, metadata, you know, all these things, all these content-related systems that we’re focused on. So, somewhere inside the RFP, it says, we need this translation management system to manage all of these languages, or we need this component content management system to work in these certain ways. And your goal as the content professional is to write scenarios that reflect your real world requirements that are unique to your organization. So if you are in heavy industry, then almost certainly you have some concerns around parts, about referencing parts and part IDs and maybe there’s a parts database somewhere and maybe there are 3D images and you have some concerns around how to put all of that into your content. That is a use case that is unique to you versus a software vendor who is going to have some sort of, we have 80 different variants of this one piece of software depending on which pieces and parts you license, and then that’s gonna change the screenshots and all sorts of things. So what you wanna do is write a small number of use cases. We’re talking about maybe a dozen. And those dozen use cases should explain, you know, as a user inside the system, I need to do these kinds of things. You might give them some sample content and say, here is a typical procedure and we have some weird requirements in our procedures and this is what they are. Show us how that will work in your system. Show us how authoring works. Show us how I would inject a part number and link it over to the parts database. Show us, you know, those kinds of things. So, the use case scenarios typically should not be, “I need the ability to author in XML,” right?

AP: Or, “I need the ability to have file versioning,” things that every CCMS on the planet does, basically.

SO: Right, somewhere there’s a really annoying and really long spreadsheet that has all those things in it, fine. But ultimately, that’s table stakes, right? They should not get to the short list unless you’ve already had this conversation about file versioning and the right class of system. The question now becomes, how do you provide a template for authors and what does it look like for authors to start from a template and do the authoring that they need to do? Is that a good match for how your authors need to or want to or like to work. So the key here from my point of view is don’t worry too much about the legalese and the process around the RFP, but worry a whole bunch about these use case scenarios and how you are going to evaluate all the different tools that you’re assessing against the use case scenarios.

AP: Be sure you communicate those use case scenarios to your procurement team in a way they understand so they have a better handle on what you need because if everybody is kind of on the same page as far as those use cases go the clearer it’s going to be to communicate those things to the candidate vendors when they do get their hands on the RFP.

SO: And I think as we’re going in or talking about going into a piece of software, there probably should already be some consideration around exit strategy, which Alan, you’ve talked about that a whole bunch. What does it mean to have an exit strategy and to evaluate that in the inbound RFP process?

AP: It is profoundly disturbing to have to think about leaving a before you’ve even bought it, but it does, does behoove you to do that because you need a clear understanding of how you are going to transition outside of a tool before you buy it. So when that happens, when you come to a point where you have to do it, you have an understanding about how you can technically exit that tool. For example, how can you export your source files for your content? What happens when you do that? In what formats? These are part of the use cases that you’re talking about perhaps here too. So it really is so weird to have to think about something that’s probably years down the road, but it is to your advantage to do that at this point in the game.

SO: Yeah, I mean, what’s the risk if something goes sideways or if your requirements change? This doesn’t have to be sideways. So you are in company A and you buy tool A, which is a perfect fit for what you’re doing. Company A merges with company B. Company B has a different tool and B is bigger than A. So B wins and you exit tool A as company A and you need to move all your content into tool B. Well, that’s a case where you made all the right decisions in terms of buying the software. You just didn’t account for a change in circumstances, as in B swooped in and bought you. So what does it look like to exit out of tool A?

AP: Yeah, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the tool no longer works for us. It could be what you describe. There can be external factors that drive the need to exit, have nothing to do with bad fit or failure on anybody’s part.

SO: So we have these use case scenarios and we’ve thought about exit, though this is entrance. 

AP: Or even before entrance, you haven’t even entered yet.

SO: And so now you’re going to have a demo, right? The software vendor is going to come in and they’re going to show you all your use case scenarios. Well, we hope they’re going to show you your use case scenarios. Sometimes they wander in and they show you a canned demo and they don’t address your use cases. That tells you that they are not paying attention. And that is something you should probably take into account as you do your evaluation.

AP: Yeah, and don’t get sucked in on a similar note. Don’t get sucked in by flashy things because that flash may blind you and very nicely disguise the fact that they can’t quite match one of your use cases. So look at this sparkly thing over here. Don’t fall for that. Don’t do it. Yeah.

SO: Sparkles. So, okay, so we have our use cases and they are going to bring a, they, the software vendor is going to bring some sort of a demo person and they are going to demo your use cases and hopefully they’re going to do it well. So you sort of check those boxes and you say, okay, great, it works. I think the next step after that is not to buy the tool. The next step after that is to ask for a sandbox so that your users can trial it themselves. There is a big, big difference between a sales engineer or a sales support person who has done hundreds, if not thousands of demos going click, click, click, click, click, at how awesome this is. And your brand new user who has never used a system like this, maybe, trying to do it themselves. So user acceptance testing, get them into a not for production sandbox, let them try out some stuff, let them try out all of your use cases that you’ve specified, right? 

AP: It’s try before you buy is what we’re talking about here. Yep.

SO: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I’ve just made a whole bunch of not friends among the software vendors because of course setting up sandboxes is kind of a pain. 

AP: It’s not trivial. 

SO: Yeah, but you’re talking to just one of two candidates, right? So it is not unreasonable. It is completely unreasonable if you just did a, know, a spray this thing far and wide and ask a dozen software vendors for input. That is not okay from my perspective. And when we’re involved in these things, we try very, very hard to get the candidate list down to, again, two or three at most because almost certainly you have requirements in there somewhere that will make one or another of the software tools a better fit for you. So we should be able to get it down to the reasonable prospect list.

AP: And I think too, this goes back to efficiency. Having fewer people or fewer companies in this means you’re gonna have to spend less time per candidate system because you’ve already narrowed it down to organizations that are gonna be a better fit for you. So it’s gonna be more efficient for them because they’re not having to probably do as much show and tell because you’ve narrowed things down very specifically here in my use cases. Also for you as the tool buyer and your procurement team, you’re going to have less to do because you’re not having to talk to four, six candidates, which you should not be doing for an RFP, in my opinion. I know some people in procurement will probably disagree with that though.

SO: Well, we’re just going to make everybody mad today. And while I’m on the topic of not making friends and not influencing people, I wanted to mention something that probably many of you as listeners are familiar with, which is something called the Enterprise Architecture Board. If you work in a company of a certain size, you probably have an EAB. And the EAB is kind of like the homeowners association of your company, right? They are responsible for standards and making sure that you occasionally mow the lawn and whatever else, whether there are other ridiculous rules the homeowners association set. But EABs, Enterprise Architecture Boards in a company context, are responsible for software purchases, software architecture, and looking at what kinds of systems are we bringing into this organization and usually how can we minimize that? How can we maintain a reasonable level of consistency instead of bringing in specialty solutions all over the place? Now, a CCMS, a component content management system is pretty much the definition of a specialty system. 

AP: It’s niche. Yeah.

SO: Yep, and EABs in general willl take one look at it and say something very much like, “CCMS, no, we have a CMS. We have a content management system. We have SharePoint, just use that. We have Sitecore, just use that. We have fill in the blank, just use that.” And your job, if you have the misfortune to have to address an EAB, is that you need to explain why it is that the approved existing solutions within the company architecture do not meet the requirements of the thing that you are trying to do and because that one’s not hard. The and part is the hard part and it is worth the and they’re going to talk about TCO total cost of ownership. It is worth the effort and the risk and the complexity of bringing in another solution beyond the baseline CMS that they’ve already approved to solve the issues that you’ve identified for your content. This is difficult. I’ve spent a lot of quality time with the AABs and they’re literally their job is to say no. I mean, that is just flat out their job. Their job is to streamline and minimize and have as few solutions as possible. So if you have to deal with this kind of situation, you’re going to have some real challenges internally getting this thing sold.

AP: Yeah, and while we’re making friends and influencing people with our various comments on this process today, one final thing I want to say before we wrap up is, that common courtesy goes a really long way in this process. When you have wrapped things up, you have made your selection. Be sure you also communicate that to the vendors you did not choose.

SO: Yeah.

AP: Too many times in RFP processes, there’s not the level of communication with the people who did not win. And it’s just common courtesy, let them know, no, we chose someone else. And if you’re feeling super polite, you might even tell them why this use case you didn’t quite hit. This is why we went with this organization if you choose to. So be nice and be courteous because I realize this is more of a professional business situation, but it still doesn’t hurt to tell someone exactly why you did what you did.

SO: Yeah, and I know those of you in more on the government side of things, nonprofit, typically do have a requirement to notify on RFPs and even give reasons and all the rest of it. But on the corporate side, there’s typically not any sort of requirement to let people know, as Alan said. you know, people put a lot of work into these RFPs and a lot of pain. 

AP: Yeah.

SO: And one last, last thing beyond you should notify people. I want to talk about RFP timing. So we’re rolling into the end of 2024 here. I fully expect that there will be RFPs that will come out on roughly December 15th, which will be due on something like January 1st. So in other words, “Hi vendors, please feel free to spend your holiday time filling out our RFP so that we can, you know, go into the new year with shiny RFP submissions.”

AP: RUDE!

SO: That is not polite. Don’t do that. It is extremely rude. And it signals a level of disrespect that from the vendor side of the process makes them perhaps less inclined to bend on some other things. So reasonable amount of time for the scope of work that you’re asking for. And holidays don’t count.

AP: Yeah, exactly. to go back, I think we can kind of wrap this up and go back to what we were talking about. All of that legwork that you do upfront for this RFP process, your vendors, believe it or not, would generally appreciate it because it shows you’ve done the homework, you have thought about this, and you’re just not wildly flinging out asks with no money, no stakes behind those asks. And they will probably be much more willing to work with you and go that extra mile when you have done that homework. Is there anybody else that we need to tick off before we wrap up?

SO: I think we covered our list. So I’ll be interested to see what people think of this one. So let us know, maybe politely, but let us know.

AP: And I’ll wrap up before there’s violence that occurs. So 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 Creating content ops RFPs: Strategies for success appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 178 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Christine Cuellar perform a pulse check on the state of AI as of December 2024. They discuss unresolved complex content problems and share key considerations for entering 2025 and beyond.

The truth that we’re finding our way towards appears to be that you can use AI as a tool and it is very, very good at patterns and synthesis and condensing content. And it is very, very bad at creating useful, accurate, net new content. That appears to be the bottom line as we exit 2024.

— Sarah O’Keefe

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Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.

Christine Cuellar: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, it’s time for another pulse check on AI. So our last check-in was in May, which in AI terms is ancient history, so today, Sarah O’Keefe and I are gonna be talking about what’s changed and how it can affect your content operations. Sarah, welcome to the show.

Sarah O’Keefe: Hey Christine, thanks.

CC: Yeah. So 2024, as we’re currently recording this 2024 is winding down. People are preparing for 2025. Throughout this year, we went to a lot of different conferences and events. Of course, everybody’s talking about AI. So Sarah, based on the events that you like just recently got back from, you finally get to be in your own house. What are your thoughts about what’s going on with AI in the industry right now?

SO: There’s, still a huge topic of conversation. Lots of people are talking about AI, a huge percentage of presentations, you know, had AI in the title or referenced it or talked about it. With that said, it seems like we’re seeing a little more sort of real world, hey, here’s some things we tried, here’s what’s working, here’s what’s not working. 

CC: Mm-hmm.

SO: And I’ll also say that we’re starting to see a really big split between the AI in regulatory environments, which would include the entire EU plus certain kinds of industries and the sort of wild, wild west of we can do anything.

CC: Yeah. So do you feel like it sounds like, know, when AI first came onto the scene, there was mostly, you know, let’s just all adopt this right now. Let’s go for it full steam ahead, especially marketers as a marketer. can I can say that because we’re definitely gung-ho about stuff like that. It sounds like, the perspective has shifted to being more balanced overall. Is that what you would say?

SO: Yeah, I mean, that’s the typical technology adoption curve, right? You know, have your your peak of inflated expectations, and then you have the I think it’s the valley. It’s not the valley of despair, but it’s something like that. But you know, you sort of go from this can do anything. This thing is so cool. Go, go, go, go, go to a more realistic. Okay, what can it actually do? And what you know, does the and this is true for AI or anything else? What can it do? What can’t it do? What does it do well?

CC: Mm.

SO: Where do we need to put some guardrails around it? What are some surprises in terms of things that are and are not working?

CC: Yeah. And at some of the conferences we were at this year, our team had some things to say about AI as well. So we will link some of the recap blog posts we have in the show notes. Sarah, what are some of the things AI can’t do right now? are the still, what are, Sarah, what are some of the big concerns about AI that are still unanswered, unresolved?

SO: So in the big picture, as we’re starting to see people roll out AI-based things in the real world, whether it’s tool sets or content ops or anything else, we’re starting to see some really interesting developments and some really interesting assessments. Number one is that when you look at those little AI snippets that you get now when you do a search and it returns a bunch of search, well, actually it returns a page of ads.

CC: Yes.

SO: And then some real results under the ads. And then above that, it returns an AI overview snippet. So those are surprisingly bad. You do a search on something that you know a little bit of something about and see what you get. And you will see content in there that is just flat wrong. I’m not saying it’s not the best summary. I’m saying it is factually incorrect, right?

CC: Yeah, I hate them right now.

SO: So those are surprisingly bad. And talking about search for a minute, which ties into your question about marketing, there’s some real problems now with SEO, with search engine optimization, because if I’m optimizing my content to be included in an AI overview that is A, wrong, and B, doesn’t actually give me credit, Pre-AI, those snippets that showed up would say, I sourced it from over here.

CC: Mm-hmm.

SO: And in many cases now, the AI overview is just like the sort of summary paragraph with no particular, there’s no citation. It doesn’t say where it came from. So what’s in it for me as a content creator? Why am I creating content that’s going to get taken over by the AI overview and then not lead to people going to my webpage, right? How’s that helped me? 

CC: Yeah. Yeah.

SO: So there’s some real issues there, there’s a move in the direction of thinking about levels of information. So thinking about very superficial information. How much does a cup of flour weigh? That type of thing. That’s just a fact and you can get it pretty much anywhere, we hope. And then there’s deeper information. Why is it better to weigh flour than to measure it? By volume, if you’re a baker.

CC: Yeah.

SO: And what does it look like to use weights? And are there differences among different kinds of flours? And what are some of the things I should consider when I’m going in that direction? So one of those, know, flours, a cup of flour weighs 120, sorry, a cup of all-purpose flour weighs 120 grams is a useful fact. And I don’t know if I really care if people peruse that further or come to my website for more about flour. The deeper information, the more detailed discussion of, you know, whole wheat versus all-purpose versus European flours versus American flours and all these other kinds of things, that requires more in-depth information and that is not so subject to being condensed into an AI summary. So that distinction between, you know, quick and dirty information versus deeper information, information that goes into a topic,

CC: Mm-hmm.

SO: We have a huge problem with disinformation and misinformation with information that is just flat out not either not correct or because of the way AI tools work, is trivially easy to generate content at scale. Tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of content. And because it’s trivially easy,

CC: Mm-hmm.

SO: That means it’s also trivially easy for me to generate, for example, a couple thousand fake reviews for my new product or a couple thousand websites for my fake products. It we can fractionalize down the generation of content. 

CC: Yeah.

SO: And the you know, the interesting part of this is that it implies that you could potentially, you know, we talk about doing A/B testing and marketing. You could do A/B/C/D/E/F/G testing pretty easily because you can generate lots and lots of variants and kind of throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and see what works. But the bad side of this is that you can generate fake news, fake information, fake content that is going to be highly, highly problematic from a content consumer trust point of view. And so that I think is the third piece that we’re looking at now that is going to be critical going forward. And that is information trust, content reputation or the reputation of content creators and credibility. 

CC: Mm-hmm.

SO: So for those of you listening to this podcast, how do you know it’s really us? Do you know these are live humans actually recording this podcast versus you know there’s now the ability to generate synthetic audio and you can create a perfectly plausible podcast which is really hard to say unless probably your AI and then it can probably do it perfectly but our perfectly plausible podcasts are you know how do you know that what that what you’re receiving in terms of content, digital content in particular, is actually trustworthy. And so I think ultimately there’s going to be some, need to be some tooling around verification, around authenticity, around, you know, this was not edited. You know, in the same way that you want to be able to verify that a photo, for example, is an accurate record of what happened when that photo was taken.

CC: Yeah.

SO: And if I went in and photoshopped it and cleaned it up, then that’s something that should be acknowledged. By the way, for the record, we do record these things and we do edit them. We try to stay on the right side of just editing out dumb mistakes and not editing it in a misleading way. 

CC: Yeah, ums and ahs and yeah.

SO: So it’s not like we record the whole thing from soup to nuts and never, you know, never break in and never edit things out because believe me, I’ve said some stuff that needed to be taken away. If you ever get the raw files, they are full of, I didn’t mean to say that. you might want to take that out. 

CC: Me too, so many times. Let me start over, that’s me a lot all the time.

SO: Yeah, sorry. Starting over. OK, but the point is that when we put out a podcast, we are saying this is our opinion, this is our content, and we’re gonna stand behind it. Whereas if it’s synthetic or AI generated or AI generated by these non-humans, you can do these weird, let’s make a podcast out of a blog post, well, okay, but what’s the value of that and why would I trust that content?

CC: Yeah.

SO: So that I think is going to be the big question for the next couple of years is what does it look like to be a content creator in an AI universe and to have the ability or sorry to as the content consumer to have the ability to validate what you’re listening to or reading or seeing.

CC: Yeah. And a point that you had brought up in, I believe it was the white paper that you authored back in 2023. One of the points in there was that, people are going to, because of this trust and credibility issue, people are going to have to start relying on companies and brands that they’re already familiar with for the information that they’re looking for rather than a search from scratch because, you know, search is so messed up right now. And that is something I’ve seen personally, like myself, I do it a lot more. I’ve seen that with friends and other contacts and stuff like that. That’s really what people are doing is they’re going to, you know, the source even for recipes. Recently, as I was looking for a recipe and instead of just Googling it like I used to because I’m so sick of the summarized AI search, I went to all recipes, you know, a place that I knew that I liked the recipes or I think Sally’s baking addictions or something like that. There’s a lot of different places like that that now I’ll just go there instead of, you know, a search from scratch. That’s… I don’t know how we’re gonna fix that problem, yeah, trust and credibility, that’s gonna be a huge one.

SO: It’s a really good example though because if you search for a particular recipe, even say two years ago, you would get a certain set of results and then you would say, I’ve heard of that website and I’ll go there. Now you search on a recipe, I’m getting 20, 30, or 40 websites that I’ve never heard of that all seem to have posted exactly the same recipe.

CC: Mm-hmm.

SO: I, you know, do I trust them? Do I trust them not to be AI-generated? Do I trust them to remember to not, you know, recommend that I put gravel in my recipes? You know, maybe not. And so I’m doing the same thing you are, which is, you know, reverting to trusted sources, trusted brands that I know that have a reputation for producing good recipes. Now, the flip side of this is that content is disappearing. 

CC: Hmm.

SO: So, I have an infamous triple chocolate cookie recipe, is really if you’re looking for a chocolate bar in the form factor of a cookie, that is what it is. It’s just stupid amounts of chocolate. 

CC: Mm-hmm. yes, that sounds amazing.

SO: It’s they’re delicious. And I think we’re putting them in our our holiday post, which may or may not have gone live already. So keep an eye out for that. But here’s the thing. I have the recipe because I got it out of Food & Wine about 20 years ago and I have a paper cut out of it that I wrote, hand wrote Food & Wine 12/01 on. So it was December of 2001 and so I went to Food & Wine. I went searching for this recipe knowing that it was originally published by them. I can’t find it. It is not there.

CC: Hmm. wow.

SO: It is not in their database, or at least it didn’t come up in their database when I searched on the exact name of the recipe. I then searched that exact recipe name, you know, just generally on the Internet, and I found three or four or five different places that had it, but none of them credited where I got it from 20 years ago, which I’m pretty sure is the original, right? Because these are all much more recent sites. So there are digital copies out there floating around, but they are not the original recipe and they didn’t credit the original publisher. Now, I don’t know exactly where Food & Wine got it because all I did was cut out the recipe. didn’t cut out the article. It was probably the context around it. But what I’m now reduced to is that I have a paper copy stashed in my paper recipe book, right? And I took a photo of the paper copy and put it on my phone. So I have a sort of digital version, but it is literally a photograph of a printout, which is, it is 2024 and we are doing photographs of printouts, but I can’t find it or I can’t find the original online.

CC: Yes. Yeah. That’s interesting. Why do you think that content has disappeared? Do you think it’s because of the breakdown of the content model where the AI engine is just eating what it’s already regurgitated a bunch of times? Do you think it’s that? Does an org pulled it for some reason or what do you think is the cause?

SO: Well, I mean, my best guess is that their recipe database only goes back so far and they just said anything more than X years old doesn’t need to be in here. They had some similar recipes. So maybe, well, this one’s been updated. It’s a little more modern, whatever. But it was just, it was really troubling that I, even knowing what the source was, I couldn’t find it.

CC: Yeah, that is troubling. So how can companies prepare knowing that this is our context, this is our landscape? What should we do to prepare for 2025 and beyond? Because it’s not just like next year.

SO: Beyond yeah, okay. So first of all you have to understand your regulatory environment Because that is very different by country or by region the issues that the people in the EU are looking at or American companies that sell in the EU, right. 

CC: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

SO: There’s an EU AI act, and there’s a whole bunch of guidance that goes along with that. So there’s some concerns there. Whereas here in the US specifically, we don’t have a lot of regulation around AI, if any. Mostly we lean on, well, if you put out something that’s incorrect, there’s potentially product liability. If you put out instructions that are wrong and people follow them and they get hurt or worse, then the product owner is probably liable for putting out wrong instructions. That’s kind of where our stuff lands. But as a content consumer, I think you have to do what you’re describing, Christine, and become very, very skeptical about your sources methods, right? Where’d you get this stuff? And do you trust the source that it came from? 

CC: Yes.

SO: If you are a content creator, then looking at questions around AI, the questions become, how can I employ AI inside my content workflows in a responsible way that achieves the goals that I have and doesn’t get me in big trouble in whatever way? And there’s also the question of, if I’m a content creator and I know that my consumers, my customers, are going to be using AI to consume my content, then how do I optimize that for that? How do I prepare for that? So it looks very different if you’re a person writing, creating new content, versus you’re the person deploying a chat bot on your corporate website that’s going to go read through your content corpus versus the person actually using the chat bot versus you name it. So.

CC: Yeah.

SO: And then, you know, we’re talking about AI generally, but of course we have AI tooling and we also have generative AI and we have all sorts of different things going on. So it’s a very, very broad topic, but overall, you know, what’s the problem I’m trying to solve? Can I apply this tool in a useful way? And what are some of the guardrails that I need to employ to keep myself out of trouble?

CC: Yeah, in one of our webinars from this year, from 2024, depending on when you’re listening to this podcast, Carrie Hane mentioned something along the lines of like, you know, when you’re dealing with AI, it’s such a huge topic. You need to break it down by what’s the purpose of what you’re trying to do and then tackle the problem that way. Okay. So to wrap up, Sarah, what are your final thoughts, wishes and or recommendations for the world as we enter this new era? Or I guess we’re in it, but as we try to recover.

SO: So the very short, we’ll try and keep it short. I think when all this AI stuff hit us a year or two ago, business leaders generally were hoping that they could just use AI as a general-purpose solution. Fire all the people, use AI for all the things, cool. 

CC: Mm-hmm.

SO: The truth that we’re grasping towards or finding our way towards appears to be that you can use AI as a tool and it is very, very good at patterns and synthesis and condensing content. And it is very, very bad at creating useful, accurate, net new content. That appears to be the bottom line as we exit 2024.

CC: Yeah. Well, thank you very much for unpacking this with us because I know that, you know, things are changing so fast. It’s helpful to have people like you that have been in the industry, the content industry specifically for a really long time that can help, you know, figure out a way through all this and give some practical ideas.

SO: Well, you know, in six months, we’ll just feed this podcast into the AI and tell it to fix it so that it remains accurate. And off we go.

CC: Yeah, there we go. And then we’re done. 

SO: And we’re done.

CC: Yeah. Thanks so much for being here today and for talking about this.

SO: Yeah, anytime.

CC: 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 Pulse check on AI: December, 2024 (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

Is it really possible to configure enterprise content—technical, support, learning & training, marketing, and more—to create a seamless experience for your end users? In episode 177 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow discuss the reality of enterprise content operations: do they truly exist in the current content landscape? What obstacles hold the industry back? How can organizations move forward?

Sarah: You’ve got to get your terminology and your taxonomy in alignment. Most of the industry I am confident in saying have gone with option D, which is give up. “We have silos. Our silos are great. We’re going to be in our silos, and I don’t like those people over in learning content anyway. I don’t like those people in techcomm anyway. They’re weird. They’re focused on the wrong things,” says everybody, and so they’re just not doing it. I think that does a great disservice to the end users, but that’s the reality of where most people are right now.

Bill: Right, because the end user is left holding the bag trying to find information using terminology from one set of content and not finding it in another and just having a completely different experience.

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Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.

Bill Swallow: Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about enterprise content operations. Does it actually exist? And if so, what does it look like? And if not, how can we get there? Hi, everyone. I’m Bill Swallow.

Sarah O’Keefe: And I’m Sarah O’Keefe.

BS: And Sarah, they let us do another podcast together.

SO: Mistakes were made.

BS: So today we’re talking a little bit about enterprise content operations. If it exists, what it looks like. If it doesn’t, why doesn’t it exist? What can people do to get there?

SO: So enterprise content ops, I guess first we have to define our terms a little bit. Content operations, content ops is the system that you use to manage your content. And manage not the software, but how do you develop it, how do you author it, how do you control it, how do you deliver it, how do you retire it, all that stuff. So content ops is the overarching system that manages your content lifecycle. And when we look at content ops from that perspective, and of course we’re generally focused on technical content, but when we talk enterprise content ops, it’s customer-facing content, which includes techcomm, but also learning content, support content, product data potentially, and some other things like that. And ultimately, when I look at this, again bringing the lens back or going back to the 10,000-foot view, we have some enterprise solutions but only on the delivery side. The authoring side of this is basically a wasteland. So I have the capability of creating technical content, learning content, support content, and putting them all into what appears to be some sort of a unified delivery system. But what I don’t really have is the ability to manage them on the back end in a unified way, and that’s what I want to talk about today.

BS: So those who are delivering in that fashion, so being able to provide customer-facing information in a unified way, as far as their system for content ops goes, it’s more, I would say, human-based. So it’s a lot of workflow. It’s a lot of actual management of content and management of content processes outside of a unified system.

SO: So almost certainly they don’t have a unified system for all the content, and we’ll talk about why that is I think in a minute. It’s not necessarily human-based, it’s more that it’s fragmented. So the techcomm group has their system, and the learning group has their system, and the support team has their system, et cetera. And then what we’re doing is we’re saying, okay, well once you’ve authored all this stuff in your Snowflake system, then we’ll bring it over to the delivery side where we have some sort of a portal, website portal, content delivery CDP that puts it all together and makes it appear to the end user that those things are all in some sort of a, it puts it in a unified presentation. But they’re not coming from the same place, and that causes some problems on the backend.

BS: Right, and ultimately the user of that content doesn’t really care if it’s a unified presentation. They just want their stuff. They don’t want to have a disjointed experience, and they want to be able to find what they’re looking for regardless of what type of content it is.

SO: Right, and the cliche is “don’t ship your org chart,” which is 100% what we’re doing. And so let’s talk a little bit about what does that mean, what are the pre-reqs? So in order to have something that appears to me as the content consumer to be unified, well for starters, you mentioned search. I have to have search that performs across all the different content types and returns the relevant information. And what that usually means is that I have to have unified terminology. I’m using the same words for the same things in all the different systems. And I need unified taxonomy, classification system metadata so that when I do a search, everything, and maybe I’m categorizing or I’m classifying things down and filtering, that when I do that filtering, that the filtering works the same way across all the content that I’ve put into the magic portal. So taxonomy and terminology are the things that’ll make your search, relatively speaking, perform better. So we have this on the delivery side and that’s okay-ish, or it can be, but then let’s look at what we’re doing on the authoring side of things because that’s where these problems start.

BS: So what do they start looking like?

SO: Well, maybe let’s focus in on techcomm and learning content specifically. We’ll just take those two because if I try and talk about all of them, we’re going to be here for days and nobody wants that. All right, so I have technical content, user guides, online help, quick snippets, how-tos. And I have learning, training content, e-learning, which is enabling content, I’m going to try and teach you how to do the thing in the system so that you can get your job done. Now, let’s go all the way back to the world where we have an instructional designer or a learning content developer and a technical content developer. So for starters, almost always those are two different people, just right off the bat. And instructional designers tend to be more concerned with the learning experience, how am I going to deliver learning and performance support to the learner? And the technical writers, technical content people tend to be more interested in how do I cover the universe of what’s in this tool set, or this product, and cover all the possible reasonable tasks that you might need to perform, the reference information you need, the concepts that you need? It’s a lot of the same information. It’s there’s a slightly different lens on it. And in the big picture, we should be able to take a procedure out of the technical content, step one, step two, step three, step four, and pretty much use that in a learning context. In a learning context, it’s going to be, hey, when you arrive for your job at the bank every morning you need to do things with cash that I don’t understand. And here’s a procedure, and this is what you’re going to do, steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and you need to do them this way and you need to write them down, and it tends to be a little more policy and governance focused, but broadly it’s the same procedure. So there should be the opportunity to reuse that content. And big picture, high-level estimate is probably something like 50% content overlap. So 50% of the learning content can or should be sourced from the technical content. The technical content is probably a superset in the sense that the technical content covers, or should cover, all the things you can do, and training covers the most common things or the most important things that you need to do. It probably doesn’t cover a hundred percent of your use cases. Okay, so now let’s talk about tools.

BS: Right because I was going to say these two people, the technical writer and the training developer, they are using, at least historically, two very different sets of tools to get their job done.

SO: Right. So unified content solutions, without getting into too many of the specifics, which will get me in big trouble, basically the vendors are working on it, but they’re not there yet. There’s a lot of point solutions. There’s a lot of, oh yes, we have a solution for techcomm and we have a solution for learning and we have a delivery solution, but there’s not a unified back end where you can do all this work.

And some of the vendors have some of these tools in their stable, some of them don’t. But from my point of view, it doesn’t really make a whole lot of difference whether you buy two-point solutions from separate vendors or from the same vendor because right now they’re disconnected.

BS: They’re two-point solutions.

SO: Yeah, they’re all point solutions. So it’s not good. And then that brings us to how can we unify this today? What can we do and what kind of solutions are our customers building or are we building with our customers? So a couple of things here. Option A is you take your structured content solution and you say, “Okay, learning content people, we’re going to put you in structured content. We’re going to move you into the component content management system. We’re going to topicify all your content, and we’re basically going to align you with the techcomm toolset and make that work.” We have a few customers doing that. It works well for learning content developers that are willing to prioritize the document structure and process over the flexibility in the downstream learning experience.

BS: Right.

SO: That’s a small set of people. Most learning content developers are not willing to prioritize efficiency and structure over delivery, which I think is actually the root cause.

BS: Right. Now, those who are doing this, they are seeing some benefit in being able to produce a wide variety of their training deliverables from that unified source. But again, it comes back to how willing people are to give up the flexibility that they have in developing course content.

SO: We can talk about big picture and we can talk about all the things, but this decision, this approach 100% of the time comes down to how badly do you want to be able to flail around in PowerPoint. And if having the ability to put random things in random places on random slides is critical, then this solution will not work.

BS: So on the flip side, you would then look to maybe somehow connect your technical communication system to your learning repository.

SO: Right. So you take your techcomm content and you treat it as a data source essentially for your learning content, and you just flow it into the learning authoring environment. It turns out that’s hard.

BS: It’s very hard.

SO: Super difficult. It’s difficult to get your structured content out into a format that the learning content system can accept in a reasonable manner.

BS: And if your content is highly structured, you’re likely losing a lot of semantic data along the way to get it there.

SO: Yeah, you lose a lot, but it’s just bad. And ultimately, this almost always lands, I mean we talk about flow it in there, but ultimately this almost always means that you’re going to be copying and pasting and reformatting and re-reformatting, and it’s just terrible.

BS: So more often than not, we’re not seeing this level of unification then.

SO: Yeah, I mean, are you connecting your techcomm and you’re learning in a structured environment? A few people, yes. And for the right use case, it’s great. Or flow the techcomm content down into the learning environment, but ultimately not worth it, we’ll just copy and paste. So in terms of unification, basically none of the above, right?

BS: Mm-hmm. So how would people get there?

SO: So there’s a couple of options. The probably most common one is some sort of a DIY solution. We’re going to find a way to glue these systems together. We’re going to find a workflow that involves converting the techcomm content, which usually is created first and move it into the learning content. Again, for the right group, for the right environment, unifying everything in a structured authoring environment makes a lot of sense. I think ultimately that’s where it’s going to land, but the structured content systems need to do some work to make themselves into what amounts to a reasonable viable authoring solution for the learning content people. Basically the learning content people are not willing to put up with the shenanigans that ensue in order to use a structured content system. And I’m not even sure they’re wrong, right?

BS: Yeah.

SO: They’re just saying, “No, this is terrible and we’re not doing it.” Okay, well, that’s fair. So either you tinker and put it all together in some way. Option B is wait for the vendors, wait for the vendors to fix this problem, fix this requirement, and deliver some systems that have a solution here. And it’ll be a year or two or five or 20, and eventually they’ll get to it. You can go with a delivery-only solution, so we’re only going to solve this on the delivery side. If you do that, you really, really, really, really need an enterprise-level taxonomy and terminology project group.

BS: Absolutely.

SO: You’ve got to get that aligned. You cannot go around having half your text say entryway, and half your text say hallway, half your text says study, and half your text says den. And I’m halfway down a clue reference, was it the wrench or the outlet? No, no, no, okay. You have to get your terminology in alignment. You must because otherwise people search on oven and it doesn’t return range because those are in fact… Well, okay, they’re not exactly the same thing, but close enough, so those types of things. So you’ve got to get your terminology and your taxonomy in alignment. Most of the industry, like most of the people out there that are doing techcomm and learning content, I am confident in saying have gone with option D, which is give up. Just don’t do it. Just don’t bother. We have silos. Our silos are great. We’re going to be in our silos, and I don’t like those people over in learning content anyway. I don’t like those people in techcomm anyway. They’re weird. They’re focused on the wrong things, says everybody, and so they’re just not doing it. I think that does a great disservice to the end users, but that’s the reality of where most people are right now.

BS: Right, because the end user is left holding the bag there trying to be able to find information using terminology from one set of content and not finding it in another and just having a completely different experience.

SO: They make it a you problem.

BS: Yeah. So if you’re seeing opportunities to unify content operations in your organization, what are some key ways of communicating that up so that you can begin to get some funding, some support, some executive level buy-in to do these things?

SO: The technology problem is hard. Putting everybody in an actual unified authoring environment is a really hard problem. So I think what you want to do is go for the easier solutions where you can get some wins. And the easier solutions where you can get some wins are consistent terminology across the enterprise. So we’re going to have some conversations about terminology and what we need to do in terms of terminology, and everybody’s going to agree on the words we’re going to use. Taxonomy, what does our classification system look like? What are the names for our products and how do we label things so that when we deliver all these different content chunks, they’re coming from all these different systems, we can bring them into alignment? I mean, you can do the work on the back end to align taxonomy or you can do it on the delivery side to say these things are synonyms. So there are some ways of addressing this even when you get down into the delivery end of things. But I think what you want to do is start thinking about the things… Oh, and translation management, which ties into both terminology and taxonomy. I think you want to start maybe with those things and then slowly work your way upstream, like a salmon, avoiding the bears on the… Okay, you’re going to try and work your way upstream towards the authoring. Because ultimately if you look at this from an efficiency point of view, it would be much, much more efficient to have unified authoring and put it all together. It’s just that right now today, that’s a heavy lift and it only makes sense in certain environments. So what can we do to prepare for that so that when we do get to that point and those tools do start to unify a little bit better, we’ve done the legwork that’ll make it easier to make that transition as we go?

BS: Right. So it’s spending the effort to unify as much as you can the content and the language and the organization, as well as trying to keep pace with where I guess all of these different industry tools are going and making sure that you are making improvements in the right direction. So if you’re thinking about structured content, that you are keeping an open mind as to where and how I guess these other groups can start leveraging what you’re using and vice versa. And I guess talking with the other groups in your organization. So if you’re in techcomm, then talk to the training group, see what they’re doing, see what their plan is, what’s their five-year roadmap? Are they looking at certain technologies? How might that play into your development, and vice versa, being able to share that information.

SO: And I know, Bill, you’re doing a session on re-platforming at tcworld this November 2024. And when you’re thinking about re-platforming, what are some of the factors that you should be looking at there that tie into this?

BS: Well, it directly plays into that next step of we have a platform on the techcomm side, we bought it 12 years ago, it served our needs. But the training group, let’s say, has been talking and they have this other system that they’re not too happy with, and they want to see if they can start sharing our content.

Well, then you have an open conversation to say, “Okay, how can we get to a shared solution, what do these requirements look like,” and go ahead and pick a system that kind of meets both requirements. But then you have that heavy lift of just saying, “Okay, so now we have these two different old systems and we need to dump our content, and I use that very generally, into the new system, so that everyone from those two groups can now author in the same place.

SO: And I’m thinking as you’re evaluating these systems, all other things being equal, which they are not, but all other things being equal, you would look for the one that’s more open, that is more flexible knowing that things are going to change because they always do. What’s available to us that’ll give us maximum flexibility in a year or two or five when these new requirements come in that we have not anticipated at this point?

BS: Right, because you’re exiting your old systems because they are potentially inflexible. We cannot accommodate anything new. We can sustain what we’re doing indefinitely, but we can’t accommodate this new thing that we need to do.

SO: Yeah, it’s interesting because looking at the the techcomm landscape, we have a lot of customers and a lot of just generalized ecosystem that has moved into structured content, and starting as early as the late nineties or maybe even the early nineties in Germany, people were moving into structured content at scale. And now we’re looking at it and saying, “Okay, well there’s all this other content out there and we need to look at that and we need to look at whether we can bring that into the structured content offerings.” But not unreasonably, those other groups are looking at it and pushing back and saying, “This isn’t optimized for the kind of work that I do. It’s optimized for the kind of work that you people do. So how can we improve this and bring it into alignment with what the new and additional stakeholders need?” And it’s a hard problem, I really feel for the software vendors. It’s easy for us sitting here on the services side to say, “Hey, do better,” because we’re not doing the work.

BS: Very, very true. And at that point, you have a winner and a loser, and I hate to say it that way, but you have a winner and a loser on the system side at that point. Where you’re pulling one other group in because you have an established structural approach and they could benefit from it, but basically they have to absorb the brunt of the change that’s going to happen, and it’s not necessarily fair.

SO: Well, yeah. I mean, life isn’t fair. But also I’ll say that that pain that you’re talking about, the people that are now in structured content, they had that pain. It was just 10 years ago-

BS: Very true.

SO: …and they’ve forgotten. For those of you that were around and in this industry 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, or 25, I mean, remember what it was like trying to get people to move from you will pry unstructured FrameMaker from my cold, dead hands. You’ll pry Microsoft Word from my cold, dead hands. You will pry PageMaker, Interleaf, Ventura Publisher from my cold, dead hands.

BS: WordStar.

SO: Okay. So tools come and go, and the tool that is the state-of-the-art, BookMaster, for today is not necessarily the tool that’s going to be state-of-the-art for tomorrow or yesterday. I mean, basically this stuff evolves and we have to evolve with it, and we have to understand what are the best and most reasonable solutions that we can offer to a customer or to a content operations group in order to deliver on the things that they need to deliver on.

BS: Very true. So there are no unicorns.

SO: No unicorns, or maybe more accurately you can construct your own unicorn and it might be awesome, but it’s going to be a lot of work.

BS: So I think we could probably talk about this for hours because there are so many different facets that we can touch upon, but I think we’ll call it done for now, and maybe we’ll see you soon in a new episode?

SO: Yeah, if this speaks to you, call us because we’ve barely scratched the surface.

BS: All right. Thanks, Sarah.

SO: Thanks.

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

The post Do enterprise content operations exist? appeared first on Scriptorium.

Whether you’re surviving a content operations project or a journey through treacherous caverns, it’s crucial to plan your way out before you begin. In episode 176 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Christine Cuellar unpack the parallels between navigating horror-filled caves and building a content ops exit strategy.

Alan Pringle: When you’re choosing tools, if you end up something that is super proprietary, has its own file formats, and so on, that means it’s probably gonna be harder to extract your content from that system. A good example of this is those of you with Samsung Android phones. You have got this proprietary layer where it may even insert things into your source code that is very particular to that product line. So look at how proprietary your tool or toolchain is and how hard it’s going to be to export. That should be an early question you ask during even the RFP process. How do people get out of your system? I realize that sounds absolutely bat-you-know-what to be telling people to be thinking about something like that when you’re just getting rolling–

Christine Cuellar: Appropriate for a cave analogy, right?

Alan Pringle: Yes, true. But you should be, you absolutely should be.

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Christine Cuellar: 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. this episode, we’re talking about setting your ContentOps project up for success by starting with the end in mind, or in other words, planning your exit strategy at the beginning of your project. So I’m Christine Cuellar, with me today is Alan Pringle. Hey, Alan. 

Alan Pringle: Hey there.

CC: And I know it can probably sound a bit defeatist to start a project by thinking about the end of the project and getting out of a new process that maybe you’re building from the beginning. So let’s talk a little bit more about that. Why are we talking about exit strategy today?

AP: Because everything comes to an end. Every technology, every tool, and we as human beings, we all come to an end. And at some point, you are going to have tools, you’re gonna have technology and process that no longer supports your needs. So if you think about that ahead of time, and you’re ready for that inevitable thing, which will happen, you’re gonna be much better off.

CC: Yeah. So this conversation started around the news of the DocBook Technical Committee closing, and that’s kind of a big deal for a lot of people, and it kind of sparked this internal conversation about like, you know, what if that happened to you? How can people avoid getting caught by surprise? And of course, as Alan just mentioned, the answer to that is really to begin with the end in mind, to have an exit strategy because everything does end at some point. So this got me thinking about, you know, I don’t know, Alan, you’ve seen the horror movie The Descent, right? You’ve seen that movie? Yes, because it’s amazing and it’s a horror movie and it’s awesome. So it me kind of think of that because, you know, this group, and I’m not going to spoil it, no spoilers for people who haven’t seen it yet, but, if you haven’t, go watch it. The first one’s my favorite. I haven’t seen the second one, so I’m biased. Anyways, that’s not the point. This group plans to go along one path, you know, down these caves which are definitely in North Carolina, right Alan? That’s definitely where they take place.

AP: Well, they say it is in North Carolina, but it is quite clearly not filmed in North Carolina. As someone who is familiar with Western North Carolina, I had to laugh at this movie trying to pass off somewhere in the UK as like the Appalachian Mountains, but that’s just a quibble. So go ahead with your story.

CC: Anyways, yeah, they got a mountain in there, right? And then there’s a path into the mountain. Of course, they’re going to explore this deep, dark cave. So they’re descending as the name implies. And so they’re planning to go along one path. think someone maybe tricked someone else along the way. I can’t remember. But they’re planning on going down one path. And there’s a lot of things that begin to happen that they didn’t plan on. And one scene in particular, there’s a cave that collapses and of course that means they have to pivot, right.

AP: Yeah.

CC: So when you’re thinking about building an exit strategy and trying to plan for things that you can’t anticipate, how do you anticipate things you can’t anticipate?

AP: Well, first of all, let’s be clear. All the things that happened in that movie happened in a period of like two hours or an hour and a half. And part of the issue with any kind of process and operations is things can slowly start to go badly and you just kind of keep on trucking and really don’t pay attention to it. But…

CC: Yes.

AP: It’s not just about fine tuning your operations. That’s a whole other conversation. You your process is going to require updating every once in a while. There going to be new requirements and you need to address them in your content ops by changing your process, updating your tools, maybe adding something new. What we’re talking about here is when those tools and that process, they’re coming to an end, for example, because a particular piece of software is being defecated. It is end of life. What are you going to do?

CC: Mm-hmm.

AP:  What if there is a merger? You have a merger and there are two systems doing the same thing. One of those systems is going to lose and go away. Why are you going to maintain two of the same systems? So you’re going to have to figure out how to pivot to get to that.

CC: Mm-hmm.

AP: So there are all of these things that can happen that mean you have got to exit whatever you were doing and move into something new, something different. And the reasons are many, like I just mentioned, but the end result is, are you ready for when that happens? In a lot of cases, frankly, people aren’t.

CC: Yeah. So if you could give listeners three pieces of advice on how to be less dependent on a particular system, if you had to narrow it down to three, what would you suggest to help them not be just dependent on one particular system or maybe a set of systems?

AP: One thing is when you’re choosing tools, if you end up something that is super proprietary, has its own file formats, et cetera, that means it’s probably gonna be harder to extract your content from that system because it is proprietary. Even if your content is in a standard, and in a lot of cases, of course, I’m talking about DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture and XML standard. Even with DITA, even though it’s open source and a standard, some of the systems that can manage DITA content put their own proprietary layer on top. A good example of this is, for example, those of you with Samsung Android phones. I’ve had one in the past.

CC: Yeah, that’s me.

AP: Samsung puts their own proprietary layer on top of the Android operating system and a lot of that stuff frankly I hate, but that’s not the point of this conversation, but it’s the same issue. You have got this proprietary layer where it may even insert things into your source code that is very particular to that product line. So look at how proprietary your tool is or your toolchain is and how hard is it going to be to export? That should be an early question you ask during even the RFP process. How do people get out of your system? And I realize that sounds absolutely bat, you know what, to be telling people to be thinking about something like that when you’re just getting rolling–

CC: Appropriate for a cave analogy, right?

AP: Yes, true. But you should be, you absolutely should be.

CC: And how do you know you are going to get onto the other two things to think about in just a second, but question there, how do, what are some maybe green flags for how that question should be received or how you want that question to be received if it’s going to maybe be the right fit?

AP: I would hope some variation of the answer would be you can export to this standard, although that often is probably not the answer that you’re going to get.

CC: Okay, as standard. What are some other things people need to keep in mind in order to not be system-dependent?

AP: I don’t know if it’s so much system-dependent, but you need to think culturally about what this means. People become very attached to their tools because they become very adept. They become experts in how to manipulate and do whatever with a certain tool set. And they feel like, you know, I am in total control here. I know what I’m doing. Things are running well. 

CC: Yeah.

AP: And when it turns out that tool is going to have to go away, their entire process and their focus on being an expert, it’s blown. It’s just blown away. And that can be very hard to deal with from a person level, a people level, having to tell people, yeah, this is a shock to your system. You’ve been using this tool forever. You’re really good at it. Unfortunately, that tool is being discontinued. We’re gonna have to move to something else. That can be very hard for people to swallow and it’s understandable.

CC: Mm-hmm.

AP: It’s completely understandable. One other thing that I will mention is if you can get your source content, not the actual delivery points I’m talking about here, but wherever you’re storing your source in some kind of format neutral, file format and again, talking mostly about XML content, extensible markup language, because when you create that content, you are not building in the formatting. You were creating it as a markup language. And the minute your content is in a markup language, it becomes easy to easier. I shouldn’t say easy because nothing here is easier. There is a better path to moving that content, possibly to another standard, for example, because you can set up a transformation process that’s very programmatic.

CC: Mm. Yeah.

AP: This particular element in this model becomes this. And when you hit this particular element in this model, you start a new file. If you see this particular attribute, it needs to be moved over here to this attribute.

CC: Hmm.

AP: So it’s a matching process that you have to do so it can be programmatic. So anytime you get into something that’s XML and what does that X stands for? And what does that X stand for? It stands for extensible. That gives you a little more control because it gives you more flexibility. And that’s weird to think more flexibility gives you more control. That almost seems kind of diametrically opposed, but that’s true.

CC: Yeah.

AP: Because you can move something out more easily because it is something that can be sliced, diced, transformed. So there’s that angle.

CC: Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So as a non-technical person myself, I’m gonna see if I can summarize this and you tell me whether or not this is accurate. So from a very high level view of this, it’s almost like, you know, rather than keeping all of your content in one particular content management system or something like that, you’re keeping it in a, it’s all stored in a separate box or a separate repository. And then whatever system you’re going to use is your delivery output. It’s almost like a, is that accurate to say? Okay.

AP: Because when you are in a format that is not, doesn’t have the, if you’re in a file format that does not have the formatting of your content built in, that means you can deliver to a bunch of different presentation layers. You can automatically apply it. 

CC: Okay.

AP: And that’s really, I was kind of headed that way. You can even see your new system as almost a delivery target, I need to figure out how to transform my source content in a way that a new tool, a new system can understand. And so basically you’re saying, okay, let’s export it, let’s clean it up, maybe do some automated transformations and programming on it to make it more ingestible by the other system.

CC: Mm-hmm.

AP: So you could even look at this process of moving from one system to another as being really your final destination, another horror movie, your final delivery target, moving that source content into another system that you’re about to use.

CC: Yeah. Thank you also for unpacking that because that was much more clear than my example, but that was really helpful. So since people are planning with the end in mind, how far out are we thinking this exit strategy would typically be implemented? How far down the road is this?

AP: And that’s the thing, I can’t answer that question because you never know what is going to happen. you, right, mean, it’s like the cave collapse analogy like you mentioned, sometimes you have to take a detour, not of your own choice or of your own making. And again, mergers, tools being discontinued, companies that go under, all of these things can happen. And you need to have a contingency.

CC: Mm. Never know. So it’s a contingency plan, really. Yeah.

AP: And you need to have a contingency plan in place to get ready to exit. It’s just like during natural disaster season, you hear people say, do you have your emergency preparedness kit ready? It’s a very similar thing, but it’s in the corporate world. This is as much about risk reduction as it is about smooth content operations, at least from my point of view.

CC: Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned several like big things that happen that can trigger the need to, you know, it’s time to exit and move on. Are there any scenarios where there isn’t a big thing that happens like a merger or a business closing or different things like that? Are there more quiet ways where you realize you may not realize that it’s time to exit? But it’s more the need to exit is more subtle.

AP: If your content process, your content operations cannot support new business requirements, for example, you need to connect to a new system, you need to deliver your content in another format. If your current system and tools can’t do that, that is a sign you’re probably going to have to find the exit door and find something that will support whatever it is that you cannot do.

CC: Mm-hmm.

AP: It’s usually you just hit this wall where you realize we have taken this tool and this process as far as it can go. It is time to move on. And here I am going to toot the consultant horn again. But that is when you start getting that uneasy feeling, that’s when you can talk to a consultant who can help you unpack it to see if it’s really a sign that the tool is no longer going to fit you or if there’s something you can do within your current system to make things work. That’s when a third-party point of view can be very valuable.

CC: Question for you on that third party perspective, since you’ve seen companies make these transitions many times and exit something and go into a new one, what’s one thing or pitfall that companies need to be aware of that maybe isn’t included in their exit strategy that should be? 

AP: Something that’s very common is to frame everything you want from your new system from the perspective of what your current system is doing. Even though your current system is not going to do something that you need it to do, you still are so fixated on how it is doing things and you can’t get beyond that. That can be a huge problem. Being able to step back and objectively look. This system can’t do this.

CC: Mmm.

AP: We need it to do that. And this is how we need to get there. People can get so mired in the, this is how we’re doing things. And we’re going to move over to this new system and do the same exact thing, just in new tools. That’s not a reason to move. There’s some compelling thing that’s forcing you out of that other tool. So now is the time to change things, update things, make some nips and tucks. Maybe undo some things. Don’t just wholesale move over into a new system and keep things status quo. Otherwise, why bother?

CC: Yeah, yeah. Is there anything else you can think of when you get to when it’s time to start the exiting process? Anything else that you can think of that companies need to have at the forefront of their mind?

AP: It’s the communication. And that includes the vendors and it includes with the people inside the company who are using the tools. And I would also mention it includes procurement. They need to understand the wins, the whys, why you’re having problems, all that, because there can be contractual obligations about when a license ends and another one begins. So you’ve got to keep that information flowing to all kinds of parties to make this exit, this transition work well.

CC: Yeah, you want it to end like the American version of The Descent where the hero actually gets out and drives away in the car, not like the UK version where the person is still stuck in the cave, which is the better ending for a horror movie, I will say, but not for your content ops project. Definitely.

AP: Yeah, but at least in a content ops project, you’re not going to get eaten by some humanoid blind thing living at a cave. 

CC: Hopefully, right? That’s ideal. That’s the best case scenario. 

AP: Hopefully not. Yeah.

CC: Well, Alan, is there any other parting advice you can think of before we wrap up today’s topic?

AP: Don’t go into a cave unprepared. Okay? Just don’t. How’s that?

CC: Yeah, don’t yeah that that is actually good advice. Yeah, don’t go unprepared. That’s really helpful. And like Alan mentioned earlier a third party perspective. I know it’s very biased to be saying it but a third party perspective when it’s time to either make the exit transition or plan for the exit transition. Content strategists can really help with that because we’ve seen we’ve seen a lot of things a lot of caves. Yes. Yeah.

AP: A lot. Maybe not cave dwellers, but a lot.

CC: Hopefully, hopefully no one has actually seen those. Yeah, well, thank you so much for being here, Alan. I really appreciate you talking about this with me today. And thank you for listening to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post Survive the descent: planning your content ops exit strategy appeared first on Scriptorium.

Are you looking for real-world examples of enterprise content operations in action? Join Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Adam Newton, Senior Director of Globalization, Product Documentation, & Business Process Automation at NetApp for episode 175 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast. Hear insights from NetApp’s journey to enterprise-level publishing, lessons learned from leading-edge GenAI tool development, and more.

We have writers in our authoring environment who are not writers by nature or bias. They’re subject matter experts. And they’re in our system and generating content. That was about joining us in our environment, reap the benefits of multi-language output, reap the benefits of fast updates, reap the benefits of being able to deliver a web-like experience as opposed to a PDF. But what I think we’ve found now is that this is a data project. This generative AI assistant has changed my thinking about what my team does. Yes, on one level, we have a team of writers devoted to producing the docs. But in another way, you can look at it and say, well, we’re a data engine.

— Adam Newton

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Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.

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 this episode, we talk about content operations with Adam Newton. Adam is the senior director of global content experience services at NetApp. Hi everyone, I’m Sarah O ‘Keefe. Adam, welcome.

Adam Newton: Hey there, how are you doing, Sarah?

SO: It’s good to see and/or hear you. 

AN: Good to hear your voice.

SO: Yeah, Adam and I go way back, which you may discover as we go through this podcast. And as those of you that listen to the podcast know, we talk a lot about content ops. So what I wanted to do was bring somebody in that is doing content ops in the real world, as opposed to as a consultant.and ask you, Adam, about your perspective as the director of a pretty good-sized group that’s doing content and content operations and content strategy and all the rest of us. So tell us a little bit about NetApp and your role there.

AN: Sure. So NetApp is a Fortune 500 company. We have probably close to 11,000 or more global employees. Our business is primarily data infrastructure, storage management, both on-prem. We sell storage operating system called ONTAP. We sell hardware storage devices, and we are most importantly, think, at this day and age, integrating with Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and AWS on first -party hyperscaler partnerships. My team at DENAP is… I actually have three teams under me. The largest of those three teams is the technical publications team. The other two teams globalization responsible for localization translation of both collateral and product. And then finally, and most new to my team is our digital content science team, which is our data science wing. Have about 50 to 53, think, employees at this point in my organization and all told probably about a hundred with our vendor partners.

SO: And so I think we all have a decent idea of what the technical publications team and the globalization teams do. Can you talk a little bit about the data science side? What does that team up to?

AN: Yeah, that’s a thank you for asking that question. So about two years ago, I was faced with an opportunity to hire. And maybe some of your listeners who are managers are familiar with that situation, right? I hope they are, rather than not being able to hire. I took a moment and thought a little bit more about what I needed in the future. And I thought a little bit differently about roles and responsibilities, opportunities inside NetApp and the broader content world and decided to bring in a data scientist. And then I thought a little bit more about, well, there are other data scientists at NetApp. Why would I need one? And I thought a little bit about the typical profile of the data scientists at that time at NetApp, mostly in IT and other product teams. Those data scientists were primarily quantitative data scientists coming from computer science backgrounds. And I thought, well, you know, we’re in the content business. I want to find a data scientist who is a content specialist and who has a background in the humanities and who also has skills in core data science skills, emphasizing, for example, NLP. And so that was my quest. And I was very, very fortunate to find a PhD candidate in English who wanted to get out of the academy and who had these skills. And it’s been an incredible boon to our organization. We’ve even hired a second PhD in English recently. And Sarah, since you and I are friends, I’ll say one was from UNC and one was from Duke. Okay. So we don’t have to have that discussion here. I’m an equal opportunity person. Although I did hire the UNC one first, Sarah.

SO: I see, I see. So for those of you that don’t live in North Carolina, this is… I’m not sure there is a comparison, but it is important to have both on your team. And I appreciate your inclusion of everybody. It is kind of like… I’ve got nothing.

AN: Yes.

SO: Okay, so you hired some data scientists from a couple of good universities. Or do they get along? Do they talk to each other? 

AN: Fabulously, yes. No petty grievances.

SO: Okay, just checking. All right. So how do you, in this context then, what does your environment look like? What kinds of things are you doing with the docs team? And what’s the news from NetApp docs?

AN: So maybe a little bit of background actually, and you and I have talked about this previously, but we used to be a data shop. And then as things sped up inside our business with the adoption and development of cloud services at NetApp, we found that some of the apparatus of our data infrastructure, our past practices weren’t able to keep up to speed of the cloud services that were being developed. I think this is actually, I’ve talked to other people in our business, this is a very common situation. We handled it in one way. There are many ways to handle it, but the way we chose to handle it was to exit data and to move in our source format anyway to a format called ASCII doc, which I always frequently describe as a dialect of markdown. And we went from being a closed system of technical writers working inside a closed CMS to adopting open source. We now work in GitHub. Our pipeline is all open source and we have now contributors to our content that are not technical writers. In some cases, they’re technical marketing engineers, solution architects, and so forth as well as a pipeline of docs that we build through automations where we, for example, transform API specifications or reference docs that are maintained by developers and output those into our own website docs.netapp.com. In addition to just the docs part, my globalization team has been using for many years, machine translation. So speaking to one particular opportunity of being in one organization, when we output our docs and whenever we update our docs in English, they’re automagically updated in eight other languages and published to docs.netapp.com. So we roughly maintain 150,000 English files and you can times those by eight. Is that right? Did I do the math right? Yeah.

SO: Or nine, depending. 

AN: Nine. Yeah. Is English the language? Yeah, sure. Let’s count it.

SO: Depends on how we use it. Okay, so you have an ASCII doc, you know, Markdown-ish. Is it fair to call it Docs as Code environment?

AN: So we often describe it as a content ops, environment. I’m not sure if that is, different from Docs as Code, but I think maybe I will accept that as a reasonable description in the sense that, we have asked our team members to think about the content that they’re writing as highly structured, semantically meaningful units of information. I think in the same way I think a developer can be asked to think of their code being that way and the systems in which we write in VS code, many engineers are writing in that.

SO: Mm-hmm.

AN: And of course our source files, as I mentioned, all in our automation and our pipelines are all based on being in GitHub.

SO: And so then you’ve got docs.netapp.com as a portal or a platform where a lot of this content goes. And what’s happening over there? Do you have any news on new things you’ve done there?

AN: Yeah. I mean, very recently, you know, the timing of this is really interesting. We, have been working on a generative AI solution, for a year, Sarah. you’ll recall the, the hype, right? When, when chat GPT exploded onto the, the, into the public consciousness, right? Through the media and, shortly thereafter, we began imagining what it might look like to leverage that technology, those types of technologies to deliver a different customer experience. And we identified a chatbot as being something we thought could add to the browse and search experiences on docs .netapp .com. And we just released that on the 20th of August announced it here internally inside of NetApp on the 27th. So we are literally like 48, 72 hours into a public adventure here.

SO: I take full credit for planning it, even though I knew nothing about any of this.

AN: Yeah. And that was a long time. I think it’s worth noting too. It was a long time. And I think it’s beyond the full dimensions of this, this discussion to talk about why it took so long. But I will say maybe to, you know, the, were early adopters and we felt, we felt the pain and the benefit of being that, you know, it was like, you know, changing the tires on a, on a race car, right? That was speeding around the track. So we had to learn and be responsive and also humble in the sense that there were some missteps that we had to recover from and some magical thinking, I think, at the beginning of the project that was qualified more over the course of the project.

SO: And so what does that GenAI solution sitting in or over the top of the docs content set, what does that do in terms of your authoring process? Do you have any, are there any changes on the backend as you’re creating this content that is then consumed by the AI?

AN: I would say we’re in the process of understanding the full implications of having this new output surface, this generative AI assistant, and fully grappling with what the implications are for the writers. We find ourselves frequently in discussions about audience. And audience is all those humans that we have been writing for and a whole bunch of machines that we now need to think more consciously about, you know, and it’s, we find ourselves often talking about standards and style, but not just from the perspective of, you know, writing the docs in a consistently patterned way for humans to be able to consume well, but also because patterns and machines are a marriage made in heaven. And we see actually opportunities to begin to think of the content we’re writing as a data set that needs to be more highly patterned and predictable so that a machine can consume it and algorithmically and probabilistically decide how to generate content from the content we’re creating.

SO: And where is this going in terms of what’s next as you’re looking at this? I think you mentioned that there’s other opportunities potentially to add more data slash content.

AN: Yeah, actually, if I back up to a detail and I shared, but maybe quickly, you know, we do have writers in our authoring environment who are not writers. They are by nature and by bias sort of, they’re, people who have their subject matter experts, right? And they’re in our system and they’re generating content. But I think that some of the opportunities that, so that was about join us in our environment, right? Join us in our environment, reap the benefits of multi-language output, reap the benefits of fast updates, reap the benefits of being able to deliver a web-like experience as opposed to a PDF. But what I think we’ve found now is that this is a data project. This generative AI assistant has changed my thinking about what my team does. And I think, yes, on one level, true. Yes, we have a team of writers and there’s a big factory devoted to producing the docs. But in another way, you can look at it and say, well, we’re a data engine. We own a large, own, maintain a large data set and the GenAI is one consumer of that data set. But we’re also thinking about our data set as being joinable to other data sets inside of NetApp. And in particular, I work inside the chief design office at NetApp, along with UX researchers and designers. And we’re also more broadly part of our platform team at NetApp, shared platform team. So we’re thinking about how might we join our data with other teams’ data to create in-product experiences that are data-led or data-driven in combination with curated experience. So if your viewers were to be able to see me, I am waving my hand a little bit, not because I’m dissembling, but more because I’m aspiring. And I think there’s a really, really cool future ahead for, a way, Sarah, that I think is super energizing for the writers, right? To see that their work is being reframed, not replaced or changed, right? The fear of writers with GenAI, right, of being replaced. Well, I would offer this as an example of, you know, maybe it’s not such a dismal view and maybe in fact there’s a very interesting future if you reframe your thinking about what you do and the opportunities to join what you do to create different experiences.

SO: And I think it’s an interesting perspective to look at GenAI as being a consumer of the content slash data that you’re putting out. A lot of the initial stuff was, this is great. GenAI will just replace all the tech writers. You’re talking about something entirely different.

AN: I guess I wanted to expand on that because I think we’re actually now hovering on a really important point. You know, what is your mindset? You know, what what how are you thinking about this moment in time? The broad we write you or the broader you us generally write who are in this industry. And, you know, I think we don’t see a great indication that GenAI can create net new content and do it well, honestly. I think you can write it summarizing, it can make your day-to-day, your meeting notes and so forth, Microsoft Co-pilot, right? There are some great uses, but I have not seen convincing, compelling indicators that docs can be written by, at least at the enterprise level, right? Our products are complex. We often talk about our writers as sense makers, right? And I think that we can take advantage of GenAI in the right ways. And I think this is one of the ways that we’re taking advantage of it, which is to give customers another experience. And frankly, also for us to learn a lot about what people are asking and assuming and we can learn a lot and continuously improve.

SO: So what’s happening on the delivery side? Somebody asks for some sort of information and it gives either, it says it doesn’t exist or it gives an incorrect response. Are you seeing any patterns there? What are you doing with that?

AN: Yeah, many of your listeners might have produced products themselves, right, or delivered products themselves and remembered what happens in the first day or two of releasing a product, right? So the timing of this chat is really good. Yeah, in the last couple days we’ve seen I was just talking to a data scientist on my team and I was saying, you know, what I think I see here emerging as a possible pattern is that people don’t actually know how to use these things effectively. That, you know, they ask of it questions that it really could never answer, or they don’t fully understand the constraints of the system, meaning that, well, it’s only based on a certain data set. you know, they don’t know that the data set doesn’t include the data they’re looking for, right? Because it sits somewhere else. You know, we’re modifying our processes to intake feedback. I think there’s a real interesting nexus is, is it the AI or is it the content? That’s the really interesting one, right? You know, was the content ambiguous, deficient, duplicitous, whatever, you know, is that a word?

SO: It is now.

AN: At UNC we use that word, not at Duke. But it is an interesting discussion inside our organization when we receive a piece of feedback, what’s causing it? Is it the interpretive engine or is it our source? And so we’re seeing a lot of gaps in our content, it’s exposing a lot of gaps or other suboptimal implementations.

SO: I mean, we’ve said that in a sort of glib manner, because of course you’re living this day to day and hour by hour, but we’ve said that, know, GenAI sitting over the top of a content set is going to uncover all your inconsistencies, all your missing pieces, all your, you know, over here you said update and over here you said upgrade. That was an example I heard from someone else. And so it basically uncovers your technical debt.

AN: Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, bingo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You’re so right there. Terminology, right? my God. Can you believe how many things, how many ways we’ve talked to, talked about X, right?

SO: Right, and the GenAI thinks they’re different because, or it doesn’t think anything right, but the pattern isn’t there and so it doesn’t associate those things necessarily.

AN: Yeah, your listeners may commiserate with this, or the use of words as verbs and nouns, like cable. We often in our documentation talk about cabling devices. How would a GenAI know that the writer of the question is using cable as a verb or noun?

SO: Mm-hmm. So as you’re working through this and with your, you know, it sounds like two days of go live plus a year or two or three of suffering and a year and two days. 

AN: Well, a year and two days, a year and two days.

SO: You know, I think you’re further along than lot of other organizations. Do you have any advice for those that are just beginning this journey and just looking at these kinds of issues? What are the things you did best or maybe worst or would do the same way or not? What’s out there that you can tell people that’ll maybe keep them from, you know, get them, get them or help them as they move forward?

AN: Yeah, but maybe think of it in the old people process systems dimensions. Actually, taking that latter one, systems, I would say beware the fascination of the system without thinking more about the processes and people that are going to be involved in the creation of some kind of generative AI solution. I think, you know, this is as much of an adaptive people process as it is a problem as it is a technical problem. Probably more frankly on the adaptive. And from a process perspective, I’d say, be curious about what you learn. Be attentive to the specifics, but look for the broad patterns in the feedback or what you’re seeing as you develop these solutions, you know, for me, I think I hinted at this before and I think it for me has been frankly, the epiphany of the project. There have been many, but I’d say I I would really highlight this one, which is what does my team do? What is the value of what they generate? And for me, yes, we are, you know, primarily a team that creates documentation, but you know, holy smokes, you know, the, the idea that we are data owners, and we govern a massive, semantically rich, non-determinant, fast-changing data set, that is super, super interesting. Even here inside NetApp, Sarah, we have teams reaching out to us who frankly before probably never thought about the docs. And all of a sudden, because we have this huge data set, they’re like, wow, we can, you know stress test our system or our new technologies using what they have. That’s a super cool moment for our team. 

SO: Yeah, I think you’re the first person that I’ve heard describe this sort of context shift from this is content to this is data or this content is also data or however you want to phrase that. But I think that’s a really interesting point and opens up a lot of fascinating possibilities, not least for the English PhDs of the world. That’s super helpful.

AN: Is this where I confessed at one time trying to think I was going to be one of those and I got out because I realized I was terrible at it?

SO: No, no, no, that goes in the non-recorded part of the podcast. Yeah, I’m going to wrap it up there before Adam spills all of the dirt. 

AN: Yeah, what am I compensating for, right?

SO: But thank you, because this is really, really interesting. And I think it will be helpful to the people listening to this podcast, because it’s so rare to get that inside view of what it really looks like and what’s really going on inside some of these bigger organizations as you move towards AI, GenAI strategies and figure out how best to leverage that. So thank you, Adam. And it’s great to see you.

AN: No, Sarah, thank you. And actually, I would like to thank my team. I mean, it has been an incredible adventure, and I think the team is really amazing.

SO: Yeah, and I know a few of them and they are great. So with that, thank you for listening to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post Enterprise content operations in action at NetApp (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 174 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle explore the mindset shifts that are needed to elevate your organization’s content operations to the enterprise level.

If you’re in a desktop tool and everything’s working and you’re happy and you’re delivering what you’re supposed to deliver and basically it ain’t broken, then don’t fix it. You are done. What we’re talking about here is, okay, for those of you that are not in a good place, you need to level up. You need to move into structured content. You need to have a content ops organization that’s going to support that. What’s your next step to deliver at the enterprise level?

— Sarah O’Keefe

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Transcript:

Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.

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 this episode, we talk about setting up your content operations for success. Hey everyone, I am Alan Pringle and I am back here with Sarah O ‘Keefe in yet another podcast episode today. Hello, Sarah.

Sarah O’Keefe: Hey there.

AP: Sarah and I have been chatting about this issue. It’s kind of been this nebulous thing floating around and we’re gonna try to nail it down a little bit more in this conversation today. This idea of setting up your organization for success and their content operations. And to start the conversation, let’s just put it out there. Let’s define content ops. What are content operations, Sarah?

SO: Content strategy is the plan. What are we going to do, how do we want to approach it? Content ops is the system that puts all of that in place. And the reason that content ops these days is a big topic of conversation is because content ops in sort of a desktop world is, well, we’re going to buy this tool, and then we’re going to build some templates, and then we’re going to use them consistently. And the end, right? That’s pretty straightforward. But content operations in a modern content production environment means that we’re talking about lot of different kinds of automation and integration. So the tools are getting bigger, they’re scarier, they’re more enterprise level as opposed to a little desktop thing. And configuring a component content management system, connecting it to your web CMS and feeding the content that you’re generating in your CCMS, your component content management system, into other systems via some sort of an API is a whole different kettle of fish than dealing with, you know, your basic old school unstructured authoring tool. So yeah.

AP: Right. But in their defense, for the people who are using desktop publishing, that is still content operations.

SO: Sure, it is.

AP: It’s just a different flavor of content operations. And frankly, a lot of people, a lot of companies and organizations outgrow it, which is why they’re going to this next level that you’re talking about.

SO: Right. So if you’re in a desktop tool and everything’s working and you’re happy and you’re delivering what you’re supposed to deliver and basically it ain’t broken, then don’t fix it. You are done. You should shut off this podcast and go do something more fun with your time. Right? What we’re talking about here is, okay, for those of you that are not in a good place, you need to level up. You need to move into structured content. You need to have a content ops organization that’s going to support that. What do you do? What’s your, you know, what’s your next step and what does it look like to organize this project in such a way that you move into, you know, that next level up and you can deliver all the things that you’re required to deliver in the bigger enterprise, whatever you want to call that level of things. So desktop people, I’m slightly jealous of you because it’s all working and you’re in great shape and good for you. I’m happy for you.

AP: So making this shift from content operations and desktop publishing to something more enterprise level like you’re talking about, that is a huge mind shift. is also technically something that can be quite the shock to the system. How do you go about making that leap?

SO: Well, I’m reminded of a safety announcement I heard on a plane one time where they were talking about how, you know, when you open the overhead bins after landing, you want to be careful. And the flight attendant said, shift happens. And we all just looked at her like, did you actually just say that? And she sort of smirked. So making this shift can be, it’s can be, it’s difficult, right? And what we’re usually looking at is, okay, you’ve been using, you know, Word for the past 10, 15, 20, 57 years. And now we need to move out of that into, you know, something structured XML, maybe it’s DITA, and then get that all up and running. And so what’s going to happen is that you have to think pretty carefully about what does it look like to build the system and what does it look like to sustain it? Now here I’m talking particularly to large companies because what we find is the outcome in the end, right, when this is all said and done and everything’s up and running and working, what you’re probably going to have is some sort of an organization that’s responsible for sustainment of your content ops. So you’re to have a content ops group of some sort, and they’re going to do things like run the CCMS and build new publishing pipelines and keep the integrations moving and help train the authors. And in some cases, they’re kind of a services organization in the sense that you have an extended group of maybe hundreds of authors who are never going to move into structured content. So you’re taking on the, again, word content that they are producing, but you’re moving it into the structured content system as a service, like an ingestion or migration service to your larger staff or employee population. Okay, so in the future world, you have this group that knows all the things and knows how to keep everything running and knows how to kind of manage that and maintain it and do that work. And probably in there, you have an information architect who’s thinking about how to organize content, how to classify and label things, how to make sure the semantics, you know, the actual element tags are good and all that stuff. But right now, you’re sitting in desktop authoring land with a bunch of people that are really good at using whatever your desktop authoring tool may be. And you have to sort of cross that chasm over to, now we’re this content ops organization with structured content, probably a component content management system. So what I would probably look at here is, you know, what is the outcome? You know, thinking about the system has stood up, we’ve made our tool selection, everything’s working, everything’s configured, everything’s great. What does it look like to have an organization that’s responsible for sustaining that? And that could be, you know, two or three or 10 people, depending on the size, again, the size and scope of your organization and the content that you’re supporting. But in order to get there, you first have to get it all set up. You have to do the work to get it all up and running. Our job typically is that we get brought in to make that transition. Right? So we’re not going to be for a large organization, we’re not going to be your permanent content ops organization. We might provide some support on the side, but you’re going to have people in-house that are going to do that. They’re going to be presumably full-time permanent kind of staff members. They know your content and your domain and they have expertise in, you know, whatever your industry may be.

AP: Right.

SO: Our job is to get you there as fast as possible. So we get brought in to do that setting up piece, right? What are the best systems? What are the things you need to be evaluating? What are the weird requirements that you have that other organizations don’t have that are going to affect your decisions around systems and for that matter, people, right? Are you regulated? What is the risk level of this content? How many languages are you translating into? What kind of deliverables do you have? What kind of integration requirements do you have? And when I say integration, to be more specific, maybe you’re an industrial company and so you have tasks, service, maintenance kinds of things, and you need those tasks like how to replace a battery or how to swap out breaks to be in your service management system so that a field service tech can look at their assignments for the day, which are, you know, go here and do this repair and go here and do this maintenance. And then it gets connected to, and here’s the task you need and here’s the list of tools you need. And here are all the pieces and parts you need in order to do that job correctly. Diagnostic troubleshooting systems. You might have a chat bot and you want to feed all your content into the chat bot so that it can interact with customers. You may have a tech support organization that needs all this content and they want it in their system and not in whatever system you’re delivering. So we get into all these questions around where does this content go? You know, where does it have tentacles into your organization and what other things do we need to connect it to and how are we going to do that? So I think it’s very helpful to look at the upfront effort of configure or, you know, making decisions, deciding on designing your system and setting up your system versus sustaining, enabling, and supporting the system.

AP: There are lots of layers that you just talked about and lots of steps. It is very unusual, at least in my experience, to find someone, some kind of personnel resource, either within or hiring, who is going to have all of the things that you just mentioned because it is a lot to expect one person to have all of that knowledge, especially if you are moving to a new system, and you’ve got a situation where the current people are well versed in what is happening right now in that infrastructure, that ecosystem. To expect them to magically shift their brain and figure out new things, that’s a lot to ask for. And I think that’s where having this third-party consultant person, voice, is very helpful because we can help you narrow in on the things that are better fits for what you’ve got going on now and what you anticipate coming in the future.

SO: Yeah, I mean, the thing is that what you want from your internal organization is the sustainability. But in order to get there, you have to actually build the system, right? And nearly always when people reach out to us and say, we’re making this transition, we’re interested, we’re thinking about it, et cetera, they’re doing it because they have a serious problem of some sort. We are going into Europe and we have no localization capabilities or we have them, but we’ve been doing, you know, a little bit of French for Canada and a tiny bit of Spanish for Mexico. And now we’re being told about all these languages that we have to support for the European Union. And we can’t possibly scale our, you know, 2 .5 languages up to 28. It just, it just can’t be done. We’ll, we’ll drown. Or people say, We have all these new requirements and we can’t get there. We’ve been told to take our content that’s locked into, you know, page based PDF, whatever, and we’re being required to deliver it, not just onto the website and not just into HTML, as you know, content as a service, as an API deliverable, as micro content, all this stuff. And they just, they just can’t, you can’t get there from here. And so you have people on the inside who understand, as you said, the current system really well, and understand the needs of the organization in the sense of these things that they’re being asked to do and they understand the domain. They understand their particular product set internally. But it’s just completely unreasonable to ask them to stand up, support and sustain a new system with new technology while still delivering the existing content because, you know, that doesn’t go away. You can’t just push the pause button for five months.

AP: No, the real world does not stop when you are going on some kind of huge digital transformation project like one of these content ops projects. So basically what we’re talking about here, especially on the front end, the planning discovery side, is we can help augment, help you focus. And then once you kind of picked your tools and you start setting things up, there’s some choices there that sometimes have to do with like the size of an organization about how to proceed with implementation and then maintenance beyond that. Let’s focus on that a little bit.

SO: Most of the organizations we deal with are quite large. Actually, all of the organizations we deal with are quite large compared to us, right? It’s just a matter of are they a lot bigger or are they a lot, a lot, a lot, lot bigger?

AP: Correct.

SO: Within that, the question becomes how much help do you want from us and how much help do your people need in order to level up and get to the point where they can be self-sufficient? We have a lot of projects we do where we come in and we help with that sort of big hump of work, that big implementation push, and help get it done. And then once you go into sustainment or maintenance mode, it’s 10% of the effort or something like that. And so either you staff that internally as you’re building out your organization internally, or we stick around in sort of a fractional, smaller role to help with that. The pendulum kind of shifted on this for a while, or way back, way back when it was get in, do the work and get out. We rarely had ongoing maintenance support. Then for a bit, we were doing a lot of maintenance relative to the prior efforts. And now it feels as though we’re seeing a shift in a little bit of a shift back to doing this internally. Organizations that are big enough to have staff like a content ops group or a content ops person are bringing it back in-house instead of offloading it onto somebody like us. We’re happy to do whatever makes the most sense for the organization. At a certain size, my advice is always to bring this in-house because ultimately, your long-term staff member who has domain expertise on your products and your world and your corporate culture and has social capital within your organization will be more effective than offloading it onto an external organization, no matter how great we are.

AP: To wrap up, think I want to touch on one last thing here, and that’s change management. And yes, we beat that drum all the time in these conversations on this podcast, but I don’t think we can overstate how important it is to keep those communication channels open and be sure everyone understands what’s going on and why you’re doing what you’re doing. What we’ve talked about so far is very much, okay, we’ve come up with a technical plan, we’ve done a technical implementation, and now we’re going to set it up for success and maintain it for the long haul and adjust it as we need to as things change. But there are still a group of people who have to use those tools, your content creators, your reviewers, all of those people, your subject matter experts, I mean, I can go on and on here, they are still part of this equation here and we can’t forget about them while we’re so focused on the technical aspects of things.

SO: I would say this and directly to the people that are doing the work, know, the authors, the subject matter experts, the people operating within the system. I would look at this as an opportunity. It is an opportunity for you to pick up a whole bunch of new skills, new tools, new technologies, new ways of working. And while I know it’s going to be uncomfortable and difficult and occasionally very annoying as you discover that the new tools do some things really well, but the things that were easy in the old tools are now difficult, right? There’s just going to be that thing where the expertise you had in old tool A is no longer relevant and you have to sort of learn everything all over again, which is super, super annoying. But it’s fodder for your resume, right? I mean, if it comes to it, you’re going to have better skills and you’re going to have another set of tools and you’re going to be able to say, yes, I do know how to do that. So I think that just from a self-preservation point of view, it makes a whole lot of sense to get involved in some of these projects and move them forward because it’s going to help you in the long run, whether you stay at that organization or whether you move on to somewhere else, you know, at some point in the future. That’s one of the ways I would look at this. It is certainly true that the change falls on the authors, right?

AP: Correct.

SO: They all have to change how they work and learn new ways of working and there’s a lot there and I don’t want to you know sort of sweep that aside because it can be very painful. We try to advocate for making sure that authors have time to learn the new thing that people acknowledge that they’re not going to be as productive day one in the new system as they were in the old system that they know inside out and upside down that they get training and knowledge transfer and just, you a little bit of space to take on this new thing and understand it and get to a point where they use it well. So I think there’s a, you know, there’s a combination of things there. For those of you that are leading these projects, it is not reasonable, again, to stand the thing up and say, go live is Monday. So, you know, I expect deliverables on Tuesday. That is not okay.

AP: Yeah. And you’ve just wasted a ton of money and effort because you’ve thrown a tool at people who don’t know how to use it. So all of your beautiful setup kind of goes to waste. So there are lot of options here as far as making sure that your content ops do succeed. And I don’t think it’s like pretty much everything else in consulting land. It is not one size fits all.

SO: It depends, as always. We should just generate one podcast and put different titles on it and just say it depends over and over again.

AP: Pretty much, we’d probably just get an MP3 of us saying that phrase over and over again and just loop it and that will be a podcast episode. And on that not-great suggestion for our next episode, I’m gonna wrap this up. So thank you, Sarah.

SO: Thank you.

AP: I think she just choked on her tea, everyone.

SO: I did.

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.

The post Position enterprise content operations for success (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

Translation troubles? This podcast is for you! In episode 173 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and special guest Mike McDermott, Director of Language Services at MadTranslations, share strategies for overcoming common content localization challenges and unlocking new market opportunities.

Mike McDermott: It gets very cumbersome to continually do these manual steps to get to a translation update. Once the authoring is done, ideally you just send it right through translation and the process starts.

Bill Swallow: So from an agile point of view, I am assuming that you’re talking about not necessarily translating an entire publication from page one to page 300, but you’re saying as soon as a particular chunk of content is done and “blessed,” let’s say, by reviewers in the native language, then it can immediately go off to translation even if other portions are still in progress.

Mike McDermott: Exactly. That’s what working in this semantic content and these types of environments will do for a content creator. You don’t need to wait for the final piece of content to be finalized to get things into translation.

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Transcript:

Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.

Bill Swallow: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we explore strategies for conquering localization challenges, and unlocking new market opportunities. Hi everybody. I’m Bill Swallow, and with me today is Mike McDermott from MadCap Software. Hey Mike.

Mike McDermott: Hi Bill.

BS: So before we jump in, Mike, would you like to provide a little background information about you, who you are, what you do at MadCap?

MM: Sure. My name is Mike McDermott. I am the director of language services at MadCap Software working with our MadTranslation Group. And we support companies that work in single source authoring in multichannel publishing tools like those offered from MadCap Software for IXIA and MadCap Flare and Xyleme and other tools.

BS: So Mike, what are some of the challenges you’ve seen and what works for overcoming some of these localization challenges?

MM: One of the main challenges I see with companies that come to us, and they typically come to us because they’re looking at working in an XML-based authoring tool and they’re curious about the advantages it has for translation. And one of the biggest challenges I see initially with these companies is just figuring out what content needs to go into translation when you’re working in different types of tools. And one of the ways I see to solve that problem is working in a tool where you have the ability to tag certain content and identify content for different audiences or different purposes. It just makes it simpler to identify that content and get it straight into translation and removes a lot of the human error around packaging up content and trying to figure out yourself what files, house texts that might be translatable for whatever the output is that you’re looking to build. So just working in those tools I see inherently helps with translation because it helps you identify exactly what needs to be translated and it gets it into translation much quicker.

BS: So I think we’re talking about semantic content there and making sure that you have all the right metadata in place so that you can identify the correct audience, the correct, let’s say versions of the product, whether to translate or not, and any other relevant information about the content. So you’re able to isolate the very specific bits of content that need to be translated and omit a lot of the content that necessarily isn’t needed for that deliverable.

MM: Exactly, Bill. It lets the technology tell you what needs to be translated in what houses text versus you trying to go through a file list and determine what do I need to send out to a translator to translate. The flip side of that is to just send everything for translation, but it’s very rare that anything in any given project for any type of system is going to need to be translated. So by tagging it in that way, you can quickly get into the translation and get things moving. And what I see happening at the end of these projects, oftentimes when you’re not working in those types of systems is you end up finding bits and pieces of content or different files that ended up needing to be translated that missed that initial pass. Now they have to go back through translation and you’re delayed. So just getting everything right the first time and relying on the tools to tell you exactly what needs to be translated by looking up metadata or different tags just simplifies the process and speeds everything up, helps translation get done quicker and just improves time to market for the end user to get their content out.

BS: So it sounds like it reduces a good amount of friction, especially with regard to finding missing bits and pieces that should have been translated and weren’t, and then needing to go back and make sure that’s done in time. What are some other ways that people can reduce friction in their translation workflow?

MM: Well, a big emphasis for us over the past few years around removing friction is working with connectors and different technologies that can orchestrate the translation process. So we can automate a lot of this and remove the bottlenecks around someone having to, like I said before, manually go into a set of files and package things up for a translator, zip up files, upload them to different locations, and they just get passed around and things can happen when working that way, even outside of just missing files. So working with connectors and these technologies that can connect directly into these systems and get the text right into translation, removing all those friction points just eliminates a lot of room for error in project delays, bottlenecks for tasks that can be easily handled by modern technology.

BS: And I assume that there’s probably some technology there as well that kind of govern other things, other parts of the workflow, like review, content validation, that type of thing?

MM: Exactly, exactly. So we’re trying to automate the flow of data into the different points in translation and then get the content ready. For example, for reviewers, you mentioned reviewers. So once content gets into translation, we can get it right into the translation system from the authoring environment that the customer’s working in, get it into translation. And as soon as the translation is done, a human reviewer on the client side or on our side or whoever can be notified that this content is ready for translation and it just helps keep things moving. So now it’s on them to complete their translation. And once that’s done, the process can continue on and the automated QA checks, the human QA checks can be done at that point, and then the project can be pushed back to wherever it needs to go and put into publication. But by automating the steps and plugging in the humans where they provide the most value, it just removes the time costs in error-prone steps that don’t need to be there.

BS: So it sounds like a lot of it does come down to saving a good deal of time. I would also imagine that these types of workflows, they also help streamline a lot of the publishing needs that come after the translation as well.

MM: Correct. And that’s kind of why we started MadTranslation when we did, was to provide our customers a place to go to work with the translation agency that understood these tools and understand how these bits and pieces come together to build an output. We put it together to provide our customers a turnkey solution where they can get a working project back where they can quickly get into publication. By removing the friction points and using modern technology to automate a lot of these processes, we’re able to get things into translation and add a translation into the final deliverable much faster. So once that happens, we can build the outputs and we can check if it requires a human check on it, things can get to that point much quicker, and we’re not waiting for somebody to manually pull down files and putting them into another location so the next actually take place. We want to automate that part of it so we can get to that final output into a project file where a customer can plug it into their publishing environment and get it out as quickly as possible. A lot of the wasted time is around those manual steps, and when it comes to validation and review, it’s just the reviewers and validators maybe not being ready for the validation or not being educated on how it will work. So it’s important to make sure that everyone in that process knows how it’s going to be done, when things are going to be ready for the review or the QA checks. And then the idea from there is to just feed the content in via connectors, removing the friction point and just send it through. And this is necessary, especially when you’re doing very frequent updates and kind of a more of an agile translation workflow. It gets very cumbersome to continually do these manual steps to get to a translation update. Once the authoring is done, ideally you just send it right through translation and the process starts.

BS: So from an agile point of view, I am assuming then that you’re talking about not necessarily translating an entire publication from page one to page 300, but you’re talking about as soon as a particular chunk of content is done and it’s “blessed,” let’s say, by reviewers in the native language, then it can immediately go off to translation even if other portions are still in progress.

MM: Exactly. Exactly. And that’s what working in this semantic content and these types of environments will do for a content creator is you don’t need to wait for the final piece of content to be finalized to get things into translation. So as you said, it becomes even more important when you’re doing updates because you don’t want to have to send over the entire file set every time you’re doing an update. Whereas when you’re working in a more linear format like Word, you end up having to send that full file every time, and the translation agency is likely reprocessing it using translation memory. But all that stuff still takes time and working in these types of tools, you can very quickly identify those new parts or those bits that you know are ready for translation, tag them or mark them in some way and send them through the translation process.

BS: Very cool. So a lot of the work that we’re seeing now on the Scriptorium side of things is in re-platforming. So people have content in an old system or they have, say a directory full of decaying word files, and they want to bring it into some other new system. They want to modernize, they want to centralize everything, basically have a situation where they’re working in data or some other structured content, bring it into semantic content. What are some of, I guess, the benefits of doing that give you as far as translation goes when you’re looking at content portability? So being able to jump ship from one system to another.

MM: I think working in those systems where the text or the content is stored away from the output that you’re building has a lot of benefits to not only translation being able to just get the text that needs to be translated, exported out of the system and then put back where it needs to go. But it really future-proofs you and gives you the portability that you talk about to make changes because the text is stored in a standard format that can be ported versus you see some organizations getting locked into a closed environment to where when it goes to make a change, it requires certain types of exports to other type of file types that other tools can then import. But by storing them in a standard way in XML, for example, it gives you that flexibility in a future proves you from being locked into any one scenario.

BS: Excellent. So I have to ask, since I’ve come from a localization background as well, what’s one of the hairier projects that you’ve seen or one of the hairier problems that people can run into and in a localization workflow?

MM: One of the challenges we run into sometimes around client review, when you start incorporating validators into the translation system and include them as part of the process, when you get multiple reviewers. Sometimes that will happen where a company will assign a reviewer for every language, but you might have different people reviewing the same set of content. I mean, that’s the biggest delay that we see with projects is translations delivered and then the translation is dumped on a native speaker within the company’s desk and they’re asked to review it and they’re not ready to do the review, it’s not scheduled and it can delay the project. That’s one of the biggest delays we see. So that’s why we try at the front end of a project to figure out on the client side, what’s going to happen after we deliver this project, after we send the files, is the content going to be reviewed or validated? If so, let’s figure out a way to incorporate them into our translation system where they can review the translations before we build the outputs and do all the QA checks. So that’s one of the hairier situations in terms of time delays. Expectations around just time in general have always been a thing in localization. As you know, people can be surprised as to how long it can take for a translator to get through content. I mean, the technology is there certainly to speed it up. Since we’ve started MadTranslations a little over 10 years ago, we’ve seen the translation speed increase quite a bit, but it still takes time for a good translator to get through that content and know when to stop and do the research that’s needed to get a technical term right. So that’s one of the surprise moments I think for new buyers of localization is the time that it can take and there’s solutions in place, like I said, to make it go faster. But if you want that human review and that expertise and the cognitive ability to know when to stop and figure out what this term is or what the client wants or doesn’t want around certain terminology, and then to database it and then include that as part of the translation asset so it stays consistent every time. That takes time versus just sending something through a machine translation, doing a quick spot check and sending it back to the customer.

BS: So it sounds like having that workflow defined and setting those expectations that certain things need to happen at each point of that workflow. Some of it might be automated, some of it does require a person, and that person I guess should probably be identified ahead of time and given a heads-up that, “Hey, something’s going to be coming at you in three weeks. Be ready for it.”

MM: Be ready for it. And also, what are you ready for? So it’s kind of training a reviewer, what are you looking for here? Are we looking for key terms? Are we looking for style preferences? Everyone kind of understanding what it is that a reviewer is going to be looking for, and they might be looking for different things when it comes to technical documentation versus a website, for example. So just having everyone communicate and understand what the intended purpose of the final output is and where everyone fits in the process and defining a schedule around that process definitely helps.

BS: Definitely. I know myself, I’ve seen cases where working for a translation agency, having a client come to me and basically say, “I need this done as soon as possible. What can you do?” And it was a highly technical manual, and we said, “Well, we have an expert in these different languages. This person is available now. This one won’t be available until next month. And this person really only works nights and weekends because they are a professional engineer in their day job.” So turnaround is going to be a little slow, and the client persisted that we just need it as soon as possible. We need to get it out the door in a couple of weeks, and I’m thinking to myself in the back of my head, why are you coming to us now when you need this in a couple of weeks? You shouldn’t just be throwing it over the fence at the last possible minute and expecting it to come back tomorrow. So there was that education. Unfortunately, they decided that they didn’t care. They wanted us to use as many translators as possible and get it done as quick as possible. And we had them sign documents that basically said that we are not liable for the quality of the translation since the client is basically looking to get this done as quickly and cheaply and dirty as possible. It was a nightmare, and I think it took one round of review on the client side for them to basically circle back and say, “Okay, I get what you were saying now.” None of these translations work at all together, because we were literally sending out a chapter to a different translator and there was no style guide because the client hadn’t provided anything. There was no terminology set because the client didn’t provide anything and everything came back different. And they said, “Okay, we get it. We get it. We’ll revise our schedules, get it done the right way. I don’t care how long it takes.”

MM: I’ve run into something very, very similar to what you described, and it was put disclaimers in the documents to where this is going to be poor quality. We’re admitting it right now. This is the only way we’re going to get it back within a week, and we do not recommend publishing. And as soon as the files come back and so on, looks at it and says, “Okay, let’s back up and do it the right way.”

BS: Yes. I guess the biggest takeaway there is plan ahead and plan for quality and not just try to get it done as fast as possible.

MM: And that’s one of the benefits to where we sit at MadTranslations with MadCap Software companies, companies coming into these types of environments. They’re typically at the front end, the planning stages on trying to figure out how all this is going to work. So we have an ability to help them understand what the process looks like and then define it in combination with our tooling and their needs and come up with a workflow that’s going to keep things moving fast, but gives you that human level quality that everyone needs at the end.

BS: Being able to size up exactly what the process needs to look like before you’re in the thick of it definitely helps. And having that opportunity to coach someone through setting up the process for the first time, I’d say that’s definitely priceless because so many mistakes can happen out of the gate between how people are authoring content, what their workflow looks like.

MM: And it’s even more important for companies to have to maintain the content. So it’s one thing to just take a PDF and say, “Hey, I need to translate this file and I’m never going to have to update it again. I just need a quick translation.” It’s another to have a team of authors dispersed around the globe working on the same set of content that then needs to be translated continuously.

So different needs, but like you said, planning, defining the steps and knowing what the requirements of the content are from authoring to time to publication in each language, and how to fit the steps and to meet that as best as possible is best done, like you said, upfront versus when it needs to be published in a week.

BS: Planning, planning, planning. I think that sounds like a good place to leave it. Mike, thank you very much.

MM: Thank you, Bill. Thanks for having me on.

BS: 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 Conquering content localization: strategies for success (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

When organizations replatform from one content management system to another, unchecked technical debt can weigh down the new system. In contrast, strategic replatforming can be a tool for reducing technical debt. In episode 172 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow share how to set your replatforming project up for success.

Here’s the real question I think you have to ask before replatforming—is the platform actually the problem? Is it legitimately broken? As Bill said, has it evolved away from the business requirements to a point where it no longer meet your needs? Or there are some other questions to ask, such as, what are your processes around that platform? Do you have weird, annoying, and inefficient processes?

— Sarah O’Keefe

Related links:

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Transcript:

Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.

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 this episode, we talk about replatforming and its relationship to technical debt. Hi, everyone. I’m Sarah O ‘Keefe. And the two of us rarely do podcasts together for reasons that will become apparent as we get into this.

Bill Swallow: And I’m Bill Swallow. 

SO: What we wanted to talk about today was some more discussion of technical debt, but this time with a focus on a question of whether you can use replatforming and new software systems to get rid of technical debt. I think we start there with the understanding that no platform is actually perfect. 

BS: Mm-hmm.

SO: Sorry, vendors. It’s about finding the best fit for your organization’s requirements and then those requirements change over time. Now Bill, a lot of times when we talk about replatforming, you hear people referring to the burning platform problem. So what’s that?

BS: Yeah, it’s well, it may actually be on fire, but likely not. What we’re really talking about is, you know, a platform that was chosen many years ago. Perhaps it’s approaching end-of-life. Perhaps your business needs have taken a, you know, a left or sharp left or right turn and it no longer, you know, the platform no longer supports those business needs or, you know, it really could be just a matter of cost. You know, the, platform you bought 10 years ago was, was built upon a very specific cost structure and model. And you know, the world is different now, and there are different pricing schemes and whatnot. And you may just want to, you know, replatform to recoup some of that cost.

SO: So does that, I mean, does that work? mean, if you exit platform A and move on to platform B, are you necessarily gonna save money? So no.

BS: In a perfect world, yes, but we don’t live in a perfect world. Yeah. I mean, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, you know, if you’re looking to switch from one, you know, from one platform to another to save costs, there is a cost in making that switch. And, you know, at that point, you need to look at, weighing the benefits and drawbacks, you know, is the cost to move to a new system going to be worth the cheaper solution in the long run. I mean, it’s a very, very basic model to look at. And there’s a lot of other costs and benefits and drawbacks to making a replatforming platform switch. But it’s one thing to consider there.

SO: Yeah, I think additionally, it’s really common to have people come to us and say, you know, our platform is burning. We’re unhappy with platform X and we want to replatform into platform Y. Now, what’s funnier is that usually we have some other customer that’s saying, I’m unhappy with platform Y and I need to go to platform X, right? So it’s just like a conveyor belt of sorts.

BS: You can’t please everybody.

SO: But the real question I think you have to ask before replatforming is, is the platform actually the problem here? Is it legitimately broken? And as you said, it’s evolved away from the business requirements to a point where they no longer meet your needs. And or there are some other questions to ask, like, what are your processes around that platform look like? Do you have weird, annoying, and inefficient processes?

BS: Mm-hmm.

SO: Do you have constraints that are going to force you in a direction that isn’t maybe from a technology point of view the best one? Have you made some old decisions that are now non -negotiable? So you’ll see people saying, well, we have this particular kind of construct in our content and we’re not giving it up ever.

BS: Mh-hmm.

SO: And you look at it and you think, well, it’s very unusual and is it really adding value, but it’s hard to get rid of it because it’s so established within that particular organization. So the worst scenario here is to move from A to B and repeat all the same mistakes that were made in the previous platform.

BS: Yeah, you don’t necessarily want to carry, well, you don’t want to carry that debt over, certainly. You know, so anything that you have established that worked well, but doesn’t meet your current or future needs. mean, absolutely. You do not want to move that forward. That being said, you have a wealth of content, a wealth of technology that you have built over the years and you want to make sure that you can use as much of that as possible to at least give yourself a leg up in the new system. So that you don’t have to rewrite everything from scratch, that you don’t have to completely rebuild your publishing pipelines. You might be able to move them over and change them and you might be able to move and refactor your content so that it better meets your needs. But I guess it’s a long way of saying that not only are you looking at a burning platform problem, but you’re also looking at a futureproofing opportunity. And you want to make sure that if you are going to do that lift and shift to another platform, that you, you take a few steps back and you look at what your current and future requirements are or will be and you make the necessary changes during the replatforming effort before you get into the new system and then start having to essentially deal with the same problems all over again.

SO: Yeah, I mean, to give a slightly more concrete example of what we’re talking about, relative to 10 years ago, PDF output is relatively less important. 10 years ago, we were getting a lot of, need PDF, we have to output it, and it has to meet these very, very high standards. People are still doing PDF, and clients are still doing PDF, but relatively, it is less of a like showstopper, primary requirement. It’s more, yes, we still have to do PDF, but we’re willing to negotiate on what that PDF is going to look like. Instead of saying it has to be this pristine and very complex output, they’re willing to drop that down a few notches. Conversely, the importance of HTML website alignment has gotten much, much higher. And we have a lot of requirements around Content as a Service and API connectors and those kinds of things. So if you just look at all your different publishing output connection pipelines 10 years ago PDF was really still unquestionably the most important thing and that’s not necessarily the case anymore.

BS: And on the HTML side, there’s also, could be HTML, could be JSON, but you do have a wealth of apps, whether it be a phone app or an app in your car or an app on your fridge that needs to be supported as well where your PDF certainly isn’t going to cut it. And a PDF approach to content design in general is not going to fly.

SO: So when we talk about replatforming, we tend to, in many cases, I look at this through the lens of, okay, we have, you know, DITA content in a CCMS and we’re gonna move it to another DITA CCMS. But in fact, it goes way, way beyond that, right? What are some of the, I guess, input or I’ll say legacy, but what are some of the formats that we’re seeing that are on the inbound side of a replatforming?

BS: Let’s see, on the inbound side, we certainly have maybe old models of DITA. So maybe something that was developed in DITA 1.1, 1.2, pre 1.0, something that’s heavily specialized. We have things like unstructured content, like Word files, InDesign, unstructured FrameMaker, and what have you. We’re also seeing that there’s an opportunity there as well to move a lot of developer content into something that is more centrally managed. In that case, we’ve got Markdown and other lightweight formats that need to be considered and migrated appropriately. And then, of course, all of your structured content. So we mentioned DITA. There’s DocBook out there. There are other XML formats and whatnot. And potentially, you have other things that you’re you’ve been maintaining over the years that now is a good opportunity to migrate that over into a system, centralize it, and get it aligned with all your other content.

SO: Yeah, and looking at this, I think it’s safe to say that we see people entering and exiting Markdown, like people saying we’re going to go from DITA to Markdown, but also Markdown to DITA. We’re seeing a lot of going into structured content in various flavors. Unstructured content, we largely are seeing as an exit format, right? We don’t see a lot of people saying, “Put us in Word, please.”

BS: No, no one’s going from something like DITA into Word.

SO: So they might go from DITA to Markdown, which is an interesting one. Okay, so I guess then that’s the entry format. That’s where you’re starting. What’s the outcome format? Where are people going for the most part?

BS: For the most part, there are essentially two winners. There are the XML-based formats, and then there is the Markdown-based formats. And I’m lumping DITA, DocBook, and other proprietary XML models all into XML. But generally, people are migrating more toward that direction than to Markdown. And there’s really a division there. It’s whether you want the semantics ingrained in an XML format and the ability to apply or heavily apply metadata. Or if you want something lightweight, that’s easy to author and is relatively, I don’t want to say single purpose, but it’s not as easily multi-channel as you can get with XML.

SO: Yeah, I mean the big advantage to Markdown is that it aligns you with the developer workflows, right? You get into Git, you’re aligned with all the source control and everything else that’s being done for the actual software code. And if that is a need that you have, then that is, you know, that’s the direction to go in. There are some, as Bill said, some really big scalability issues with that. And that can be a problem down the line, but Markdown generally, you know, okay, so we pick a fundamental content model of some sort, and then we have to think about software. So what does that look like? What are the buckets that we’re looking at there?

BS: For software, we’ve got a lot of things. First and foremost, there’s the platform that you’re moving to. What does that look like? What does it support? You have certainly authoring tools that are there. You also have all of your publishing pipelines. All of that’s going to require software to some degree. Some of it’s third party. Some of it’s embedded in the platform itself. And then you have all of your extended platforms that you are connecting to. Those might change. Those might stay the same. You might not change your knowledge base, for example, but you still need to publish content from the new system. The new system doesn’t quite work the way the old system did. So your connector needs to change. Things like that. I would also say that, you know, with regard to software, there’s also a hit. It’ll be a temporary blip, but it will be a costly blip in the localization space because when you are replatforming, especially if you are migrating formats to a new format, you’re going to take a hit on your 100% matches in your translation memory. So anything that you’ve translated previously, you’ll still have those translations, but how they are segmented will look very different in your localization software.

SO: Yeah, and there are some weird technical things you can do under the covers to potentially mitigate that, but it’s definitely an issue. 

BS: And it’s still costly.

SO: OK, so we’ve decided that we need to replatform and we’ve done the business requirements and we picked a tool and we’re ready to go from A to B, which we are carefully not identifying because some of you are going from A to B and some of you are going from B to A. And it’s not wrong, right? There’s not a single, you know, one CCMS to rule them all. 

BS: Mh-hmm.

SO: They’re all different and they all have different pros and cons. So depending on your organization and your requirements, what looks good for you could be bad for this other company. But within that context, what are some of the things to consider as you’re going through this? So you need to exit platform A and migrate to platform B.

BS: Mm-hmm. I think the number one thing you should not do is expect to be able to pick up your content from platform A and just drop it in platform B. Yeah, it’s never going to be that easy and it shouldn’t be something that you really are considering because not only are you replatforming, but you’re aligning with a new way of working with your content. So just picking it up and dropping it in a new system is not going to help you at all with in that regard. And given that you need to get the content out of the system, that’s the best time to look at your content and say, how do we clean this up? What mistakes do we try to erase with a migration project on this content before we put it in the new system?

SO: Yeah, I think the decisions that were made that tend to take on a life of their own, like this is how we do things. And much, much, much later you find out that it was done that way because of a limitation on the old software. This is like that dumb old story about, you know, cutting the end off the pot roast. And it turned out that Grandma did that because the roasting pan wasn’t big enough to hold the entire pot roast. It’s exactly that, but software, right? So bad decisions or constraints, you need to test your constraints to see whether your new CCMS, in fact, is a bigger roasting pan that does not require you to cut the end off the pot roast. What about customization?

BS:  Customization is a good one. And what we’re finding is that a lot of the old systems or people who are exiting an older system for a newer system, they have a lot of heavy customization because there wasn’t a, in many regards, there wasn’t a robust content model available at the time. So they had to heavily specialize their content model and make it tailored to the type of content that they were developing. And now, you know, something that was built 10, 15 years ago that is using highly structured, specialized structured content. If you look at what’s available now, a lot of those specializations have been built into the standard in some way. So you can unwind a lot of that. It’s a great opportunity to unwind a lot of it and use the standard rather than your customization. That helps you move forward as the specifications for the content model change, you will be aligned with that change a lot better than if you had used a customization along the way. Specialization or any kind of customizations for that matter, you know, they’re expensive. They’re expensive to build. They’re expensive to maintain. They’re expensive to train people on. You know, they affect every aspect of your content production from authoring to publishing. There’s, something that needs to be specifically tailored, whether it’s training for the writers, whether it’s a training, you know, designing your publishing pipelines to understand and be able to render those customers, customized models, the translators that are involved, making sure that, you know, their systems can understand your tags if they’re custom so that they know whether, you know, that they can show and hide them from the translators and you don’t get translations back that contain translated tags, which we’ve seen. There’s a lot going on there. So the more that you can unwind, if you have heavily customized in the past, the better off you will be.

SO: Yeah, I think, mean, and here we’re talking, I think specifically about some of the DITA stuff. So if you’re in DITA 1.0 or 1.1 with your older legacy content, they added a lot of tags and did a 1.3 and they’re adding more and did a 2.0 that might address some of the things like you added a specialization because there was a gap or a deficiency in the DITA standard. So you could probably take that away and just use the standard tag that got added later. Now, I want to be clear that, I mean, we’re not anti-specialization. I think specialization is great and it’s a powerful tool to align the content that you have and your content model with your business requirements. And you have to make sure that when you specialize, all the things that Bill’s talking about, all those costs that you incur are matched by the value that you get out of having the specialization.

BS: Mm-hmm.

SO: So, you’re going to specialize because it makes your content better and you have to make sure that it makes it enough better to make it worthwhile to do all these things. Very, very broadly, metadata customization nearly always makes sense because that is a straight-up, we have these kinds of business divisions or variants that we need because of the way our products operate. And those nearly always make sense. And element specialization tends to be a bigger lift because now you’re looking at getting better semantics into your content. And you have to ask the question, do I really need custom things, or is this out of the box, did a doc book, custom XML content model good enough for my purposes? That’s kind of where you land on that. And then reuse, I did want to touch on reuse briefly because, you know, we can do a lot of things with reuse from reusing entire, you know, chunks, topics, paragraph sequences, list of steps, that kind of thing, all the way down to individual words or phrases. And the more creative you get with your reuse and the more complex it is, the more difficult it’s going to be to move it from system A to system B.

BS: Absolutely. It’ll be a lot more difficult to train people on as well. And we’ve seen it more times than not that even with the best reuse plan in mind, we still see, you know, what we call spaghetti reuse in the wild, where, know, someone has a topic or a phrase or something in one publication and they just reference it into another publication rather, you know, from one to the other. And it doesn’t necessarily, some systems will allow that. I’ll just put that out there. Other systems will absolutely say, absolutely not. You cannot do this. And you have to, you know, make sure that whatever you’re referencing exists in the same publication that, you know, that, that you’re publishing. so we’ve had to do a lot of unwinding there, you know, with regard to this spaghetti reuse and we’ve, we’ve had a podcast in the past with Gretel Kinsey on our side who I believe she talked extensively about spaghetti reuse. What it is what it isn’t and why you should avoid it. But yes as you’re replatforming if you know you have cases like this It’s best to get your arms around it before you put your content in the new system.

SO: Yeah, and we’ll see if we can dig it out and get it into the show notes. What about connectors?

BS: Connectors are interesting. And by that, we’re talking about either webhooks or API calls from one system to another to enable automation of publishing or sharing of content and what have you. For the most part, if you’re not changing one of the two systems, managing that connector can be a little bit easier, especially if it’s your target or the receiving end of the content is reaching out and looking for something else in like a shared folder using the webhook or using an FTP server, what have you. But generally, know, those webhooks can or sorry, those connectors can get a little sketchy. You know, it might be that your new platform doesn’t have canned connectors for the other systems that you have always connected to and need to connect to. So then you need to start looking at, well, do we need to build something new? we find a way of, find some kind of creative midpoint for this? They can get a little dicey. So I think it’s important to, before you re -platform, before you even choose your new content management system, that you look at where your content needs to go. And if you have support from that system to get you there.

SO: So a simple example of this is localization. If you have a component content management system of some sort, you’ve stashed all your content in, and then you have a translation management system. And the old legacy system, the platform you’re trying to get off of, has or maybe doesn’t have, but you need a connector from the component content management system over to the TMS, the translation management system, and back so that you can feed it your content and have the content returned to you. 

BS: Mm-hmm.

SO: Well, if that connector exists in the legacy platform, but not in the new platform, you’re gonna have to either lean on the vendors to produce a new connector or go back to the old zip and ship model, which nobody wants, or conversely, you were doing a zip and ship in the old version, but the new version has a connector, which is gonna give you a huge amount of efficiency. 

BS: Mm-hmm.

SO: The connectors tend to be expensive and also they add a lot of value, right? Because if you can automate those systems, those transfer systems, then that’s going to eliminate a lot of manual overhead, which is of course why we’re here. 

BS: Mm hmm. Human error as well.

SO: So they’re worth looking at, you know, pretty carefully to see what that connector, as you said, Bill, you know, what’s out there, what already exists. Does the new platform have the connectors I need? And if not, who do I lean on to make that happen so that I don’t go backwards, essentially, in my processes? Okay, anything else or should we leave it there?

BS: I think this might be a good place to leave it. We could talk for hours on this.

SO: Be good place to leave it. Let’s not and say we did. OK, so with that, thank you for listening to the Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

The post Cutting technical debt with replatforming (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

Just like discovering faulty wiring during a home renovation, technical debt in content operations leads to unexpected complications and costs. In episode 171 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle explore the concept of technical debt, strategies for navigating it, and more.

In many cases, you can get away with the easy button, the quick-and-dirty approach when you have a relatively smaller volume of content. Then as you expand, bad, bad things happen, right? It just balloons to a point where you can’t keep up.

— Sarah O’Keefe

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Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.

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 this episode, we talk about technical debt and content operations. What is technical debt and can you avoid it? Hey everybody, I am Alan Pringle and I’ve got Sarah O’Keefe here today.

Sarah O’Keefe: Hey everybody.

AP: And we want to talk about technical debt, especially in the context of content operations. And to start off, we should probably have you define what technical debt is, Sarah. I think this is something most people run into during their careers, but they may not have had a label to apply to what they were dealing with. So what is technical debt?

SO: We usually hear about technical debt in the context of software projects. And it is something along the lines of taking the quick-and-dirty solution, which then causes long-term effects, causes long-term costs. So Wikipedia says it’s the implied cost of future reworking because a solution prioritizes expedience over long-term design. And that’s really it. You know, I have this thing, I need to deliver it this week. I’m going to get it done as fast as possible. But then later, I’m going to run into all these problems because I took the easy road instead of the sustainable

AP: So it’s basically when the easy button bites you in the backside weeks, months, years later.

SO: Yeah, and with any luck you are aware that you’re incurring technical debt. The one that’s really painful is when you don’t realize you’re doing it.

AP: Right, or you didn’t know you weren’t part of the process when it happened. And I think this is kind of moving into where I want to go next. Let’s talk about some examples, especially in the context of content of where you can incur or stumble upon technical debt.

SO: So right now, the example that we hear actually most often is that any inconsistencies and problems in the quality of your content, the organization of your content, and the structure of your content lead to a large learning model or AI misinterpreting information and therefore your generative AI strategy fails. So essentially, because the content isn’t good enough, genAI you know, tries to see patterns where there are none and then produces some stuff that’s just complete and utter junk. Now, the interesting thing about this is that probably you are aware, at least at a high level, that your content wasn’t perfect. But the LLM highlights that it’s like, it’s like a technical debt detector. It will show that, look at you, you took a shortcut and it didn’t work or you didn’t fix this and it didn’t. And so here we are. Another good example of this is any sort of manual formatting that you’re doing. So you’re producing a bunch of content, a bunch of docs, a bunch of HTML pages, PDF, whatever. And in the context of that, you’ve got some step in there that involves cleaning it up by hand. So I get it sort of 90—95% is I just apply the template and it all just works. But then I’ve got this last step where I’m doing a couple of little finicky cleanup things and that’s okay because it’s just an hour or two and all I’m delivering is English. Okay, well along comes localization and suddenly you’re delivering in not just one language but two or three or a dozen or 27 and what looked like one hour in English is now 28 hours, you know, once time for English and 27 times again where you’re having to do this cleanup. And so all of a sudden your technical debt balloons into something that’s basically unsustainable because that choice that you made to not automate that last 5% suddenly becomes a problem.

AP: It’s a scalability issue, really, at the core.

SO: Yeah, in many cases, you can get away with the sort of, as you said, the easy button, the quick-and-dirty approach when you have a relatively smaller volume of content. And then as you expand, bad, bad things happen, right? It just balloons to a point where you can’t keep up.

AP: Yeah, and I have recently run into some technical debt, not in the content world, but in the homeownership world. And I’m sure this painful story will resonate with many people and not in a good way. But how many times have you gone to update a kitchen, update a bathroom, only to discover that there was some weird stuff done with the wiring? The plumbing is not like it really should have been. And basically you want to jump into a time machine, go back to when your house was built to have either a gently corrective conversation with the people who are building your house or just murder them outright because you are now having to pay to untangle the mess that was made 30, 40, 50 years ago. I am there right now and it is not a happy place.

SO: And it would have been, whatever it was they did was presumably cheaper than doing it right. But what they actually paid to do it the cheap way, plus what it would have cost to do it right, you know, would have been an extra 5 % or whatever at the time. But now it’s compounded because you’re having to, you know, in the case of plumbing, you know, tear out walls and go back and replace all these pipes instead. So you have to essentially start over instead of just do it. Another great example of this is accessibility. So when you start thinking about a house that has grab bars or wide doorways that wheelchairs will fit through, right? If the house was built with it, it costs a little bit more, not a lot, but a little. But when you go back to retrofit a house with that stuff, it is stupidly expensive.

AP: Exactly. And really, these things that we’re talking about in the physical world very much apply when you’re talking about software infrastructure, tool infrastructure as it can be bad.

SO: Yeah, I mean, there’s a perception of it’s just software, right? We’re not doing a physical build. We’re not using two by fours. So how bad could it be? It can be real bad. But that is the perception, right? That we’re not building a physical object so we can always go back and fix it. And I mean, you can always go back and fix everything. It’s just how much is it going to cost?

AP: Right, how much time and money and effort is it going to suck up to get you to where you need to be so you can then do the next thing that you intended to actually do in the first place? So yeah, I think this is something where this technical debt, sometimes there is no way around it. You inherit a project, you’ve got some older processes in place and you’re gonna have to deal with it. Are there some strategies that people can rely on to kind of mitigate and make it less painful? 

SO: Well, first I’ll say that not all technical debt is bad or destructive in a way. And the canonical example of this is if you’re trying to figure out is this thing gonna work, I wanna do a proof of concept, I don’t wanna see if the strategy that I’m considering is even feasible. So you go in and you take a small amount of content and you build out a proof of concept or a prototype, proof of concept like, look, we were able to generate this PDF over here and this HTML over here, and we fed it into the chat bot and everything kind of worked. And you look at it and you say, okay, so that was good enough. And because it was a proof of concept, you maybe didn’t sort of harden it from a design point of view. You just did what was expedient and you got it done. That’s fine, provided that you go into this with your eyes open, knowing where you cut the corners, recognizing that later we’re going to have to do this really well and we probably can’t use the proof of concept as a starting point, or it’s good enough and we can use it as a starting point, but here’s where we cut all the corners. You have this list of like, we didn’t put in translational localization support, we didn’t put all the different output formats we’re going to need, we just put in two to prove that it would more or less work. But I think you made a really good point earlier. So often you inherit these things. So you walk into an organization and you’re brand new to that organization and you get handed a content ops environment. This is how we do things. Great. And then the next thing that happens is that genAI comes along or a new output format comes along or, we’ve decided we want to connect it to this other software system over here that we’ve never thought about before, or, hey, we’re bringing in a new enterprise resource planning system and we need to connect to it, which was never on the requirements day one. And now you realize, looking at your environment, that what’s there won’t, you can’t get from what you have to where you need to be because the requirements shifted underneath you. Or you came in and you just didn’t have a good understanding of how and when these decisions were made because it was five or 10 years ago with your predecessor kind of thing. So. So how do we deal with this? It’s I mean, it just sounds awful, but it’s like you have to manage your debt just like actual debt. 

AP: All right, sure.

SO: Right, so understand what you have and haven’t done. We have not accounted for localization. We’re pretty concerned about that if and when we get to a point where we’re doing localization. Scalability. We are only going to be able to scale to maybe 10 authors and if we end up with 20, we’re going to have a big problem. So let’s just be aware of that when we get to eight or nine. But the thing is you always have technical debt that you identify that you know about this is hopefully unlike personal finance, you always have more debt than you think you have, right? Because in the content world, things change. Or in your housing example, like the building code changes. So they built the thing, umpteen years ago, and it was okay in the sense that it conformed with the requirements of the building code at the time, I assume. 

AP: Of course.

SO: And now you’re going in and you’re making updates and suddenly the new building code is in play and you’re faced with the technical debt that accrued as the building code changed, but your house, your physical infrastructure did not change. And so there’s a gap between where you need to end up and where you are, part of which is just time has elapsed and things have changed.

AP: Right, and that is very true of some of the requirements you mentioned in regard to content operations. Generative AI, that’s what, the past two years, if that, that wasn’t on the horizon five years ago when some decisions were made. it absolutely is very much parallels. And when it comes to personal finance, sometimes things get so bad, you have to declare bankruptcy. And I think that can also apply to technical debt as well.

SO: Yeah, it’s a, you know, it’s an unhappy day when you look at, you know, a two-story house and you’ve been told to build a 50-story skyscraper. It just can’t be done, right? You cannot take a, you know, a sort of a stick-boiled house made of wood and put 50 stories on top of it. At least I don’t think so. We’ve now hit the edges of what I know about construction. So sorry to all the construction people, you build differently if you know that it’s going to be required to be 50 stories. Even if you only build the initial two, so either you build two knowing that eventually you’ll scrape it and start over with a new foundation or you build what amounts to a two-story skyscraper, right, that you can then expand on as you go up. So you overbuild, mean, completely overbuild for two stories knowing you’re going forward.

AP: Scalability.

SO: But yeah, we have a lot, a lot of clients who come in and say, you know, we’re in unstructured content, know, word unstructured frame maker, InDesign, basically a PDF-only workflow. And now we need a website or we need all of our content in like a content as a service API kind of scenario. And they just can’t get there from a document page-based, print-based, PDF-targeted workflow, you can’t get to, and also I wanna load it into an app in nifty ways. I mean, you could load the PDF in, but let’s not. So you end up having to say, this isn’t gonna work. This is the, I have a two-story suburban house and I’ve been told to build a 50-story skyscraper. Languages, localization are really, really common causes of this. So separately from the, “I need website, in addition to PDF,” the, “We’re only going to one or two languages, but now we’re going to 30 because we’re going into the European Union,” is a really, really common scenario where suddenly your technical debt is just daunting.

AP: So basically you’re in a burn it all down situation. Just stop and start all over again.

SO: Yeah, I mean, your requirements, it’s not that you did it wrong. It’s that your requirements changed and evolved and your current tools can’t do it. So it’s a burning platform problem, right? The platform I’m on isn’t isn’t going to work anymore. And so I have to get to that other place. It’s really unpleasant. Nobody likes landing there because now you have to make big changes. And so I think ideally, what you want to do is evolve over time, evolve slowly, keep adding, keep improving, keep refactoring as you go so that you’re not faced with this just crushing task one day. But with that said, most of the time, at least the people we hear from have gotten to the crushing horror part of the world because it’s good enough. It’s good enough. It’s not great. We have some workarounds. We do our thing until one day it’s not good enough.

AP: And it’s very easy to get used to those workarounds. That is just part of my job. I will deal with it. You kind of get a thick skin and just kind of accept that’s the way that it is. While you’re doing that, however, that technical debt in the background, it’s accruing interest, it’s creeping up on you, but you may not really be that aware of. 

SO: Right. Yeah, I’ve heard this called the missing stair problem. So it’s a metaphor for the scenario where, again, in your house or in your life, there’s a staircase and there’s a stair missing and you just get used to it, right? You just climb the steps and you hop over the missing stair and you keep going. But you bring a guest to your house and they keep tripping on the stairs because they’re not used to it, at which point they say, what is the deal with the step? And you’re like, yeah, well, you just have to jump over stair three because it’s not there or it’s got a, you know, missing whatever. So missing stair is this idea that you can get, you can get used to nearly anything and the workaround just becomes, “Get used to jumping.”

AP: And it ties into again, there’s technical debt there, but you have kind of almost put a bandaid on it. You’re ignoring it. You’ve just gotten used to it. Yeah, you do. So really, there’s no way to prevent this? Is it preventable?

SO: I mean, if you staffed up your content ops organization to something like 130% of what you need for day-to-day ops and dedicated the extra 30 or maybe 10%, but you know the extra percentage to keeping things up to date and constantly cleaning up and updating and refactoring and looking at new and yeah so no there’s no way to do it and everybody is running so lean.

AP: I’m gonna translate that to a no. That is a long no. So yeah.

SO: And as a result, you make decisions and you make trade-offs and that’s just kind of how it is. I think that it’s important to understand the debt that you’re incurring, to understand what you’re getting yourself into. And, you know, I don’t want to, you know, beat this financial metaphor to death, but like, did you take out like a reasonable loan or are you with the loan sharks? Like how bad is this and how bad is the interest going to be?

AP: Yeah, so there’s a lot to ponder here and I’m sure a lot of people are listening to this and thinking, I have technical debt and I’ve never even thought about it that way. it is a topic that is unpleasant, but it is something that needs to be discussed, especially if you’re a person coming into an organization and inheriting something you may not have had any say in the decisions that were made 10 years ago, five years ago, and things have changed so much that might be why they’ve brought you in. So it is something that you’re gonna have to untangle.

SO: Yeah, sounds about right. So good luck with that. Call us if you need help, but sorry.

AP: Yeah, so if you do need help digging out of the pit of technical debt, you know where to find us. And with that, I’m going to wrap up. Thank you, Sarah. 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.

SO: Thank you.

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