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In episode 151 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and podcast guest, Jack Molisani discuss how content careers have changed through the pandemic, layoffs, quiet quitting, and AI, and what you should do to stay ahead of the curve.

“Rather than applying for a job […] you want companies to come to you and say, ‘Hey, will you come work for us?’ The only way they’re going to do that is if you write articles, if you’re speaking at conferences, and if you position yourself as an expert in your field.”

— Jack Molisani

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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’re talking with the president of ProSpring Technical Staffing, and executive director of the LavaCon Conference, Jack Molisani, about how content roles have changed over the last year and what you should do now to advance your career in content. Hi everyone. I’m Bill Swallow.

Jack Molisani: And I’m Jack Molisani.

BS: Jack, lovely to have you here again.

JM: Always a pleasure.

BS: So I guess let’s just get right into it. You’ve seen things from both angles, from a conference organizer doing content conferences and also with running a staffing agency for content people. How have roles changed over the past year or so?

JM: What’s really been amazing over this past year, we’ve seen mass resignations, tech layoffs, quiet quitting, all at the same time. Never seen that before.

BS: That’s crazy. So do we know what’s contributing to that?

JM: Let’s take each one in turn. I do believe that a lot of companies did layoffs in the first quarter because they over-hired during the pandemic. Right. So everyone said, oh my God, Oracle’s laying off 10,000 people. Well, they hired 40,000 during the pandemic, so there’s still a net gain of 30,000 jobs. I also believe that a lot of tech companies or companies in general were worried about a recession and they started trimming the fat off their payrolls in advance. But here’s the deal. I believe that if enough companies start laying off out of fear of recession, they’re going to cause the very recession they were afraid was coming.

BS: It’s funny how that works.

JM: Yeah. And then with the great resignation, I think companies did so much with so little for so long that people just got tired of it. And once companies started hiring again, even with the tech layoffs, companies are still hiring that they said, the heck with this, I’m jumping ship. I’m finding something a little more work-life balance in addition to compensation. But really it’s the work-life balance that I’ve been seeing people changing because of.

BS: So does that mean it’s also a factor as far as the quiet quitting is concerned?

JM: That’s a little different. Yes, and because the fear of recession applied to candidates just as much as it did to companies. So maybe people are tired of where they’re working, tired of being abused, but instead of just quitting and finding a new job, they just say, the heck with it, I’m going to do the absolute minimum possible without getting fired. And that’s where the quiet quitting came through. And I did some research on this and there’s actually top five reasons why people did quiet quitting. Would you like to hear them?

BS: Sure.

JM: One, toxic work culture. Right. And now I have the pleasure of having a really great team on my company, as do you.

BS: Absolutely.

JM: And I personally have never experienced a toxic work culture, but I’ve heard many, many stories from people who have. Two is job insecurity and reorganization. With every acquisition and reorg comes the possibility that you’re going to lose your job. So people are being proactive and resigning. High levels of innovation, I thought was an interesting reason why people changed jobs, not just quite quitting, but also great resignation. Because if you’re constantly doing something new and companies are, what’s the word I’m searching for? Demanding shorter development types. Produce, produce, release, release, release. Do you remember the good old days when we released software once a year?

BS: I do remember those.

JM: Right. I know we both have a little gray in our temples or in our beards in our case. But yeah, now they’re innovating, release, release, release. And that gets tiresome. Four was failure to recognize performance. How many times have we heard technical communicators complain because they’re not recognized for all the work they do. And part of my response to that is, are you letting people know how good of work you’re doing? Are you doing a corporate newsletter for your department? Are you letting people know how much you just saved the company? That’s another whole podcast. And this was fifth, was poor response to COVID-19. I still know companies who, managers who are insecure managing a younger workforce want to see people in their chairs and personally,

BS: Yeah. Butts in seats.

JM: Yep. Butts in seats. And I tell my people, I don’t care where you work, when you work, how you work, as long as you get your work done. Right. If you can do that at home in your pajamas at two o’clock in the morning, you go.

BS: Just be on that call later this afternoon.

JM: Exactly.

BS: Yeah. No, I hear that. So I guess we’ve talked a little bit about the negative trend that we’ve saw with resignations, quiet quittings and general layoffs. As far as the roles that we’re seeing out there now, how are they starting to differ from what we’ve seen let’s say, let’s even go back a few more years. So pre-pandemic versus post pandemic. What are we kind of seeing here as far as the roles, as far as content development, content ops, anything new and exciting going on there?

JM: I’ll start with a happy news that we did not see the mass migration of jobs to India and other countries that people were fearing or they left and came back, right? So yes, you might be able to get a cheaper writer strategist, UI designer elsewhere, but if it takes them five times as long and it’s half as good, you’re really not saving money. So I did see a return of jobs since this, we’re both based in the United States. I’ve got a US-centric viewpoint on this, is that I did see jobs come back to the US. I’ve seen both more and less specialization at the same time. Used to be you’d see a job opening and say technical write needed, must have FrameMaker and RoboHelp. Where now it’s like, all right, yes, we want someone who does structured offering. We don’t care which tool. Because really once you’ve got the concept of structured authoring down, it doesn’t matter what content management system or structured authoring development tool you’re using. Because if you know one, you can pick up the others.

BS: Right.

JM: Now that said, a majority of the world is still not doing structured authoring, but I see that as you asked what trends are happening, that is definitely a trend where people who are hiring are looking forward, and even if they’re not doing structure authoring now, they’re looking ahead. So if they’re going to hire someone and they get that few precious headcounts, they’re going to make sure that person that they do hire is prepared to move forward and know what’s on the horizon coming down the pipe.

BS: Gotcha. So as far as things on the horizon or coming down the pipe are actually being forced through the pipe as we speak. Let’s talk a little bit about AI and,

JM: Oh, let’s not.

BS: Its impact.

JM: Okay, so I’ve got two,

BS: I have my own thoughts on this as well, but let’s go. Let’s hear from you.

JM: I have two completely divergent views on AI, maybe three on a good day. One, I think there’s very, very valid uses of AI. For example, 23andMe, we now have millions of people who’ve mapped their genomes. Take 20,000 people who have male pattern baldness and 20,000 who don’t. Give it to an AI and say, find the difference in the genomes. Brilliant use of AI. All right. Now, how do we apply that as technical communicators or content strategists? Right. I saw a chapter, did a presentation on AI for technical writers, and the first thing the speaker said is, I’m not a technical writer and I’m using AI to come up with ideas for blogs on LinkedIn. What?

Now that said, I can see a valid use for AI in content development. For example, you’re doing structured all three. You just wrote 100 topics. Ask the AI to populate your meta tags for you, or here’s a CMS with 400 topics. Read them all, find out which ones are sufficiently similar that we could combine them and reuse, cut down our translation costs, cut down our maintenance costs. Brilliant use of AI. None of the tools are there yet though.

BS: No.

JM: Right.

BS: No.

JM: So I see value, but here’s another thing. I just saw another blog on LinkedIn the other day going, AI is going to increase your efficiency. That is the main thing we’re going to save money is by increasing efficiency. And my thought is I’m documenting a new printer from Canon or Epson or Kodak, how is that going to help me talk to a subject matter expert about how do I maintain this thing? Right. And I distinctly remember doing maintenance documentation on an LCD projector and discovered that if you didn’t put your finger down on the screw as you unscrewed it, the spring would go spring and the screw would go flying across the room. And the only way you know that is by doing it.

BS: Yep.

JM: And I believe that we as technical profession document things that don’t exist yet. That is our reason for existence and how are you going to get that to an AI?

BS: Yeah, I think we’re on the same wavelength here because I take a similar approach where I don’t consider AI as being a valid content generation tool for technical content, but I see it as being useful. One, behind the scenes. So facilitating, like you said, facilitating search, coming up with keywords. So if you need to do any kind of SEO prep for content, being able to spider that, look against your other content, find a good keyword or a key phrase that’s going to work to make this stand out. Yeah, certainly aid in populating search for content that’s going out to the web, but I don’t really see it in a, it’s going to write these procedures for you because exactly, you need that level of preciseness on things that maybe aren’t yet documented. So it doesn’t have anything to rely on to explain it. So that’s interesting.

JM: Your audience has not been able to see me nodding my head during your entire answer. Another thing I want to comment on, I think people are grossly overusing the term AI. I was just speaking with a vendor yesterday about their system that’s supposed to be AI-enabled and a structured authoring system. And I said, well give me an example of the AI that you’ve added. And she goes, well, it will create a table for you. I go, that’s not AI, that’s a wizard. And we’ve had them for decades and she was the marketing person. So when I really pressed her on what part of that was artificial intelligence, she couldn’t answer me. She goes, I’ll let you talk to the engineer.

So I think there’s a lot of buzzwords going on and a lot of people talking about something they don’t deeply understand and they’re just using AI because it’s popular now. Now one more thing I want to add, if you remember, okay, we mentioned LavaCon, which is a conference on content strategy. Was it four years ago? Everybody was talking about chatbots. Oh my gosh, chatbots are going to be the next delivery platform. Everyone’s got to structure their content for chatbots. Next year, crickets. I have to say, from my little perch looking, my little crystal ball on where the industry is going, I said, oh no, this is going to be a flash in the pan. And I kind of feel the same way about AI at the moment.

BS: Yeah, I think it has a little bit more staying power because it’s more than just a delivery format. But I think that what we’re talking about with regard to AI now is probably not what we’re going to be talking about with regard to AI next year, five years later. It’s going to be a very different beast and it’s going to have some very different applications that I think what we’re seeing now, most people now are looking at it and saying, oh yeah, this is something that will generate a few paragraphs for me. And we’re talking about ChatGPT here. But there are other things where we’ve got cases where you can create artwork and such with AI as well. But again, it’s just pulling a bunch of different representations together and smoothing the edges and saying, ta-da. Whether it’s good or not is of course in the eye of the beholder because the AI doesn’t know what’s good or bad, it’s just going to do what you told it to.

JM: Agreed. The other thing that concerns me about AI is hallucinations.

BS: Yes.

JM: I ran ChatGPT and asked it to create tweets for all my speakers, and one of the tweets was about someone who’s not even speaking at the conference. A friend of mine had an AI write her bio and it said that she had a PhD in mathematics when she didn’t.

BS: Oh, I have a PhD as well, in case you didn’t know.

JM: So yeah, so,

BS: And I don’t. I don’t.

JM: But however, that’s creating a whole new job is fact-checking and editing the content that an AI… Now let me add one more thing. We’ll go on to the next question. Is that another valid use of AI that I thought was really clever was one of the banks would write an article and then run it through an AI and said, rephrase this as a CFO would want to read it in the terminology that CFO understands. Rewrite this in terms of how a financial analyst would want to read it. Rewrite this as how a consumer would want to read it. I thought that was brilliant use, again, not generating it from scratch, but taking an existing dataset and transforming it for a target audience.

BS: That’s an interesting perspective. Okay, so we talked a lot about AI. We talked a bit about people starting to look for less on tools experience and more on structured authoring and more, I’d say non tool specific skills. So what other trends are you seeing with companies looking to hire content professionals? Are there any other things that they’re looking for? And what can people do, I guess, to start sprucing up their resume and their experience to look for that next big gig?

JM: So my answer to this is going to be completely non sequitur and you’re not going to see it coming. Are you ready?

BS: Alrighty, let’s hear it.

JM: Take a class at improv.

BS: Improv.

JM: Improv comedy. I’ve studied improv, I’ve taught a workshop on it at the ESTC summit. Interesting thing about improv. I’ve heard people tell me, oh, I could never think fast enough to do improv, which is interesting because the first thing they teach you in improv is to stop thinking and start listening. Right. So one of the things that I discovered after taking a class at improv, I’ve never been thrown off by a question I wasn’t anticipating because part of the whole concept of improv is yes and. You take whatever your partner, boss, whoever gives you and go, yes and, and add to it. Right. And that’s also a great way, if there’s someone on your team that you don’t like their idea, you go, oh, yes and we can also do this. Right. And without just saying, oh, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. That and take a class on public speaking, like at Toastmasters.

Even though a lot of the work we’re doing is remote, I see that 100% remote is probably going to start whittling down. And we’re going to have to either one, come back to the office occasionally or to be visible, right? Speak at conferences, speak at meetups, speak at your local STC chapter, right? Because rather than you applying for a job, and we’ll come back to applicant tracking systems in a second, write that down, that you want companies to come to you, say hey, will you come work for us? And the only way they’re going to do that is if you write articles, if you’re speaking at conferences, if you position yourself as a expert in your field.

BS: So raise your own profile, I guess, out there, LinkedIn, whatever, and build those skills to start putting yourself out there a little bit more.

JM: Oh my gosh, I cannot go on LinkedIn a week without seeing a blog post from Bill Swallow unless that’s AI generated and I should not be impressed.

BS: Oh, I don’t know.

JM: Okay. So I mentioned applicant tracking systems.

BS: Yes.

JM: Real briefly, and I actually have an article and a whole presentation on this that if you want to send that out in aligner notes at the end, we can do that. Real quick. When you apply for a job through a website, it goes through an applicant tracking system. And originally that was just a way to actually track where you are in the system. Well, with the advent of things like Indeed for mobile where you can create a profile and every time you see a tech writer job or a content job, you go apply, apply, apply, apply, apply, apply. So suddenly companies are getting hundreds of resumes that are not even remotely qualified. So again, added artificial intelligence into their applicant tracking systems to weed you out. So 99% of the applications that you submit will never be seen by a person. Right. Because not only are they comparing your resume to see if it matches the job requirements, they’re taking your resume to see if it matches the job description. Right.

So the first thing I tell people, stop applying for jobs through websites. Go to LinkedIn, find somebody who works there, even if it’s a recruiter, because every single recruiter has a LinkedIn profile and say, Hey, I see you have an opening for X, Y, Z. May I send you my resume? They’ll do one of two things. They’ll go, sure, send it over. Or they’ll go, no, go ahead, apply online and I’ll keep an eye open for the application. But now you have a human that can fish your resume out of the spam folder because you are qualified for that job. So that’s another thing I’ve seen change over the past few years, is just an explosion of AI applicant tracking systems weeding people out. In fact, I personally know five people that got jobs from personal referrals last year, and they did not get a single interview applying through jobs, through websites. So again, work your professional network.

BS: Sound advice. I will actually echo on that resume spambot approach to responding to job postings. A few years ago, I actually posted a job for a content, well, not a content developer, but a developer of content systems. So basically I did a plugin developer and I made the mistake of including Java as a desired skill, and I actually got several resumes for baristas come in.

JM: Oh, yes, yes. Absolutely. Yes. Yeah.

BS: And I was looking to see if there was anything, I mean, it piqued my interest because I had to look and see if there was anything in there that indicated that these people were interested in moving into some kind of a development role. And it’s like, no, no, they’re just interested in making really good coffee, which is fine, but it’s not what I’m looking for. Although I’d love the coffee.

JM: And I don’t even think that. I think they now have AIs where you could go, anytime a job opens that matches my resume, submit me. So you’re not even saying apply, apply, apply anymore. It’s the AI automatically submitting to a job that you’re not qualified and AI automatically rejecting you. Madness.

BS: So the computers are taking over.

JM: Yeah, Skynet.

BS: Excellent. Well, I think this is a good place to leave things, Jack. Thank you very much for talking, and actually, I’ll give you a moment to kind of plug LavaCon since that’s coming up as well.

JM: Oh, thank you. So this is our 21st year. We’ve survived two recessions and a .com crash. It’s the LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy. We do have a track on integrating AI into your content strategy, more specifically the benefits and liabilities of integrating AI into your content strategy. But it still covers content strategy and user experience. We’re going to be in San Diego in October. We have a discount code for your listeners. Anybody who registers using Scriptorium as a referral code gets $300 off registration, and it’s at lavacon.org.

BS: Excellent. Jack, always a pleasure.

JM: Thank you for having me.

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 Adapt to evolving content careers with guest Jack Molisani (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 150 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and special guest, Patrick Bosek of Heretto talk about choosing a content model, factors to consider, and when you should think about customization.

“There’s a valid use case for almost every approach that’s out there. There’s no way around that. I think what it really starts to come down to is making sure that you’re matching the 18+ months [ahead] to the decision you’re making now.”

— Patrick Bosek

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Transcript:

Alan Pringle: Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about choosing a content model and the pros and cons of customizing it with Patrick Bosek of Heretto. Hey everybody, I am Alan Pringle, and today we have a special guest. It’s Patrick Bosek of Heretto. How are you, Patrick?

Patrick Bosek: I’m good. How are you, Alan?

AP: Good. Let’s talk a little bit about content models today, and let’s start really at the beginning, choosing one, do you pick a standard? Do you create your own? What do you do?

PB: I guess if you’re looking for my advice, which I suppose you are since I’m on this podcast.

AP: Correct.

PB: It’s obviously use-case specific, everybody goes into the process of creating a content model and the first step they look at is like, “What do we need this thing to do?” Well, not everybody, let me back up. People who make good decisions when choosing a content model start with deciding what they need it to do in the long run. And I think the thing that I’ve seen here over the what? 15 plus years that I’ve been working in this industry, is really that there are organizations which somebody chooses a content model, because they think it’s cool and it works for what they’re doing right now. And then there are organizations that look at the total scope of what they’re going to need to do both in their group and then probably beyond their group for the organization long run. And then they embark on a much more formalized process for choosing a content model.

Very often you’ll see that where you start, how you start is pretty impactful on what you choose. It’s not real common that the very iterative approach, it’s almost an Agile approach in a lot of ways, like, “Oh, this works for this, let’s move it forward and we’ll do it this way, this way, this way.” And it’s very iterative. Does that lead people or land people on structured content? Typically, that lands people on either proprietary tool sets that are built on whatever’s in their proprietary tool set. There’s a lot of wikis out there that have their own set of structure in the background, it could be either text-based or it could be HTML based. MadCap’s got their own proprietary standard. There’s a few other tools that are built on standards which are standards but proprietary.

But I think those are even probably more on the side of things that are intentionally selected. Very rarely do you see an organization that takes this iterative path go into it and then choose something which is structured, because that stuff is typically less available to just put your hands on and just start creating something that you can then spit out a PDF or spit out a website. I think that knowing how it is that you’re going to start and knowing what set of problems and what the time horizon you’re trying to cover are, that’s like getting ready to get ready to choose your standard if choosing your standard is your first step. And I think that knowing where you are there is really critical, how is it that we’re making this choice?

AP: No. And I think you’re right. This is like any kind of business decision, you’ve got to think about what your requirements are and it is not a situation where you were looking at or I would prefer that people not look at the next three to six months. Yes, you may be on fire and have something to do, but you’ve got to be careful and balance things out and think, “Are we going to go with something that’s much narrow and very focused on one use case? Are we going to go a little wider and accommodate things that might be say 18 months, two years down the road?” For example.

PB: Yeah. I think that’s fair. I think the thing I would add to that is that, there’s a valid use case for almost every approach that’s out there. There’s no way around that. I think what it really starts to come down to is making sure that you’re matching the 18 plus months to the decision you’re making. And so I’ll give you a really good example, I think it’s a really good example anyways, so if you’re just writing a README file for a microservice that you’re setting up and it’s going to be maintained with a code and nobody’s really going to be referencing it, who doesn’t actually have their hands on the code, using true structured content for that makes no sense.

AP: It’s overkill. 100%, yes.

PB: Yeah. And it doesn’t really integrate well with the delivery or with the end user. It would be a bad experience all around. That makes a ton of sense to just use what is supported by the repository that you’re putting that into, which is by and large, it’s either GitHub or Bitbucket or the other one, GitLab, so it’s one of those three, but they all support some Markdown. README files, by and large, if you’re choosing something other than Markdown, you should have a really special case. On the other end of the spectrum though, if you’re thinking about, “Okay, this is going to result in a large set of content, which is intertwined and pieces of it and move at different speeds throughout time and different audiences access it in different ways and potentially get different pieces of content based on who they are,” at that point in time, you can’t do that with Markdown without doing a lot of custom stuff.

AP: I was going to, say there’s some people who might tell you that you can do that, but I’m pretty sure you should not. How’s that?

PB: Okay, fair. That’s an important distinction. You shouldn’t do that with Markdown. This is a tangent, but I love tangents. I was looking through the software documentation, I can’t remember which company it was, it might’ve actually been one of the Git providers, and they’re still in Markdown with a lot of their content. But they’ve gone so far with pieces of this to customize it for this platform or this audience or that, they don’t have tags in there, but they have things that are tags in there. I think they’re square brackets with a percent sign or something, and then a name after it, and then an end one too. And I’m like, “These are just tags.”

The thing is, once you get to a certain level of sophistication with effectively having to put metadata in your content to tell your content how to behave in different circumstances or to just expose information to other systems like search systems or AI systems or whatever it may be that isn’t the same information you’re exposing to the end user, you have to do it with tags. There’s no other way to do it, because all tags are as a way of putting information into a document that isn’t rendered directly to the user.

AP: Yes. You’re adding intelligence into your content.

PB: You may not like angle brackets, but if you have this case, you’re going to use some kind of tag at some point. And this actually relates in a funny way, I’ll stop my tangent in a second, to another conversation I had, I promise, to another conversation I had with one of DITA’s founding fathers, or one of the longest standing people on the TC, Eliot Kimber, which you know and I’m sure everybody who’s listening to this are going to know. And I love challenging him with stuff, because he has such good answers to everything.

And so I thought I would play devil’s advocate and be like, “Well, why not use a text based format? Why not use Markdown?” And we started going through some stuff and he was like, “Well, why not use DITA if you have all those cases, if you’re going to do all this stuff, if you can do all this stuff, why wouldn’t you just get that out of the box? At what point does it make any sense to ask the question, why not use Markdown plus this, plus this, plus this, plus this, plus this?” And all you’re doing is rebuilding DITA, which frankly is probably my position, not probably, it is my position anyways. But it was interesting to watch how Eliot got there and the way that he positioned it was so very Eliot and it was… I don’t know. I loved it.

AP: At some point, if you start with something maybe a little more boxed in, that’s not a technical term and you keep having to add things to it to do what you need to do, and that happens a lot, that may tell you you’re possibly a little too constrained, perhaps.

PB: Well, I don’t know if I would use the term boxed in, because I think boxed in, implies a structured starting point that has limits around you. Whereas I think the reality is that, especially a lot of the text-based formats, they’re so open, there’s no standard. There’s general accepted practices if you want to call them that, you can put anything you want in there and you can build a processor that processes it, literally anything. And I’ve seen so many bespoke things put into these formats over the years, that you realize that there is no box and you can do whatever you want with them, which in some ways is the beauty of them. But as you scale, more people have more ideas and there’s no box, so they can add whatever they want and they can add onto the processor. And then some of those people go to other places and some people didn’t document what they did and they forget why they did it and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you have system creep. And the problem is, the system creep is built into your fundamental content structure.

AP: Your choice is enabling what you just said. Exactly.

PB: Right. That aspect, the fact that there’s no separation of concerns there, when you’re building this stuff directly into custom stuff, directly into your core content in a way which isn’t patterned and isn’t based on a larger set of standards and rules, means that you’re evolving something which is innately going to become brittle eventually.

AP: Sure. And as you add business requirements, that brittleness that you’re talking about can become basically magnified from my point of view, say for example, you have a merger and you’ve got two companies doing similar things, yet they’ve got two entirely different content models, two entirely different tool chains, at the end of the day, are you going to keep both of those things? I’m going to guess not. At that point, you’re going to have to go through a process of figuring out what you’re going to do. Is it going to be survival of the fittest? Are you going to do some bake off? Are you going to have someone come in maybe and take a look and say, “What should we pick?” There’s some options there.

PB: And so the merger is a great example, and it’s a clear vision of when two different content infrastructures are going to collide and something’s going to have to win. But I almost think that the merger, people tend to feel like it’s really distant. Nobody goes into work every day and thinks about mergers except bankers.

AP: The people who make the money from them.

PB: Right. But people in tech pubs, they don’t think about the merger until it hits them. But the thing that isn’t distant is product evolution. And a lot of products will… You’ll start a new project, and this will be its own product maybe, and it’ll build up, build up, build up, build up, and then you’ll realize it needs to be merged into this other thing. Or it can go the other way, where you’ll start this module in the product and it will build up, build up, build up, and you’ll realize, “Oh, it needs to be separated out.” And these are mini mergers.

AP: Yeah. Absolutely. Internal mergers.

PB: Totally. And the thing that you’ll see here is that, when you’re keeping content isolated into the product and it doesn’t have this box, so there’s no standard rules that go across all the different products, that when you have to bring them back together, maybe somebody in this product team decided, “Oh, we’re going to add this MDX component or this thing or this thing,” and then it doesn’t work now. Or it could conflict with this other version of that to somebody that was very similar, because they’re not talking to each other, because they’re not on the same product team. And that can become a fundamental problem. And then even beyond that, the thing is, while those are two separate things, you’re still one company.

AP:

Yes. Siloed tech stacks, essentially, more or less content tech stacks.

PB: And siloed user experiences. You go to the documentation for this product or module or whatever it may be, and it’s got this structure and this interactivity and it looks like this. And you go to this other one and it’s like, “Oh, okay, well this is same colors but functions very differently, navigation, all this stuff is just separate.” I think this element of consistency, when you don’t have accepted standards across the organization, it shows up. It shows up in efficiency, it shows up in user experience, and both in the customer and the employee side.

AP: The customers do not get a consistent experience, they don’t get consistent messaging. And I’m sure the marketing folks will be really happy about that when you are basically giving two different flavors, yet you’re the same company.

PB: Totally. Well, two is probably a best case scenario.

AP: Indeed.

PB: I think it might be more like 40 in some cases.

AP: If what I’m hearing from you should thinking bigger, always be in your mind when you’re talking about modeling then? Or is that unfair?

PB: Okay. I guess we’re returning to the question, choosing a content standard or a content content model. I think being aware is what’s important. I think most organizations have a general concept of trajectory, what things look like, what the culture of the organization is going to look like. And not everybody needs scale, not everybody needs consistency across many parties because they’re just never going to be there. There’s plenty of hardware companies, software companies, any kind of company out there that’s just never going to have more than three writers. That is a situation. And in those cases, do you really have to think bigger? No, probably not. Should you? I guess that’s a different question.

AP: It’s a balancing act. I think that’s the best way I would put it. You’re right, with three writers, if you’ve got three content creators that presents a different set of challenges, problems that you need to solve versus having a team of three digits. It’s a completely different beast. It is.

PB: Totally. The reality is that you can get to know two other people very, very well and you can read all their stuff and just by the nature of that, you can stay in the same page.

AP: And then of course, the consultant in me says that group of three, what if your company takes off and you have all this growth that three could become nine or it could become 12 or it could become 15. You never know.

PB: Yeah, for sure. That’s the big question that I think that organizations have to wrestle with. If you know that growth is coming, in my view, it’s irresponsible not to choose something that will facilitate that growth. But if you don’t think that growth is coming or it’s not on the horizon, it might be the responsible thing to choose whatever is going to work with relatively low implementation friction and a good customer experience for your small group at that time. And then once you start to see that growth coming, be proactive in terms of transitioning to something which is going to support that growth.

AP: And that comes to a point I want to make here. If you do decide that a, let’s say smaller, and I don’t mean that in a pejorative way, a smaller solution, smaller scale solution, if you do go that route because it’s a good fit, I would suggest you have your eye on an exit strategy then and there when you make that choice, think about your exit strategy, where you might need to go next and think about how you could map where you are now to the new thing. Does it have to happen immediately? No. But I would recommend that you have that in the back of your head filed away because you may need it sooner than you think.

PB: Totally. I think that’s absolutely fair. The reality is that, when you’re trying to do complex content at scale and choose your axes that you want to put complex on, so it could be personalization, it could be multi versions, it could be multilingual, I could continue going, there’s all these different ways that content can become more of a complex, regional is a great example, this content applies to this region versus this region, which again, it’s personalization, but it’s a special form. When you’re in that circumstance, you really have to choose something that’s going to support that. And that doesn’t really matter if you’re one or 100 authors. You need to recognize that that’s your circumstance, where it’s like, “Okay, we’re going to have a personalization requirement.” Or, “We’re going to have a complex versioning requirement.” Or, “We’re just going to have so much content that isn’t highly isolated, especially content writer ratio or highly collaborative, that we need structure to support that.”

Think in the physical world, why do skyscrapers have more structure underneath them than houses? It’s because they need to be bigger. And so when you know that you have these situations, you have to match your content model selection to those things. And so when you’re starting to think about like, “Okay, what content model is going to do that?” Unless you’ve got a really specialized case or you’re in an industry that’s had a content model specifically built for them, aerospace is the one people throw around a lot.

AP: JATS for technical journals, things like that.

PB: JATS for journals. That’s a great one. The reality is that DITA is the gold standard for that stuff. DITA teams three to 300, they’re highly performant when they’re well-trained and they can build anything to any size you need in terms of content. There isn’t an upper limit for good DITA implementations. And part of that is, one of the words we said we weren’t going to say today, but it’s the ability to specialize DITA. That’s DITA’s secret sauce that I think a lot of people don’t realize how important it is. And this ability to extend the DITA without breaking what you’re currently doing is enormous. The business value there is beyond.

AP: Just to give people some context, before we got started, we were talking about not trying to go too deep down the whole DITA specialization path and what it is. And just for a quick, quick like 10,000 foot summary of it, specialization is a way that you take existing elements that are in the DITA standard and you basically build new structures based on things that are already in the standard. And that’s how you customize. And that is probably an oversimplification, but I want to throw that out there for people who were not familiar with the term. It is just a fancy way in DITA speak of saying customize the DITA model.

PB: There’s one key thing there, and this is the only thing I think you really need to know about specialization. One key thing you didn’t mention, which is that when you take an element in DITA and you specialize it, all of the DITA processors, understand your new element to be a version of your old element. It’s like, “Why does that matter?” Well, that matters because if we have a Scriptorium content model and in our thousand person Scriptorium company, someone named Tony goes and decides that they’re going to add this new functionality and it needs this new structure, they specialize off of the base content model. Even if that content comes back into reuse in other parts of the organization that haven’t implemented specific functionality for Tony’s new element, because those elements are derivatives of the underlying elements, they just get treated that way. You can have structured planned, asynchronous evolution of the model across a large enterprise that doesn’t break all the different delivery mechanisms that are based on the fundamental cross enterprise understanding of the model. That thing there, that’s what makes DITA enterprise grade and everything else not.

AP: Absolutely. To say that it puts the extensible and XML, even though I know I’m mixing DITA and XML here. It is super, super extensible. And it really to me, people talk about should, “I pick an open standard like DITA or should I do a custom model?” Well, from my point of view, you can have both based on the discussion that we’re having. That’s where my brain is going right now. I will say X years ago, actually X decades ago, I remember creating custom models mostly in SGML. There was no standard out there to support what we were trying to do. 20, 25 years later, we have DITA, which if that were available when I was creating those models nearly 30 years ago, you better believe we probably would’ve picked it, because it probably did 85, 90% of what we needed the custom model we created to do, so it takes care of that problem. And as you said, you can customize it without breaking the bigger picture. And that’s a big deal. That’s a really big deal.

PB: Yeah. It’s enormous. It is the business case for why you go through the upfront implementation to do DITA, because you look at content operations implementations that have been around and are still modern and are still delivering an ROI year-over-year, and they’ve been around for a decade or more, they’re all DITA, every single one of them. There’s no such thing as the 15-year-old Markdown implementation. It’s the same thing as with the wikis, they go through cycles. If you want something that’s going to serve you today and then in the long run and you have the ability to do the upfront, it’s going to work. Going back to your SGML comment, I think one of the best ways that DITA was ever positioned to me, this goes back a long ways, this is a friend of mine, he basically said, “The reason they invented DITA was so they didn’t have to do the first million of customization on every project for SGML.”

AP: I agree 110% with that, having lived through what you just said. Yes, a 100%.

PB: It was just reinventing the wheel every company, and it was a really expensive wheel and people were like, “Let’s stop doing this.”

AP: Right. It is cost savings off the bat, because like I said, if it gives you the majority of what you need, you can customize it and flex it to make it do what you want to do. I want to quickly investigate the flip side of that coin, are there times when you should not be customizing/specializing your DITA model?

PB: When you don’t need to. In a lot of ways, I think specialization, especially day one, less is more.

AP: Right.

PB: Yeah. You should have a really, really good reason for specializing. And I think the thing that’s really challenging about specialization is that, if you think about it in terms of other technologies, it’s one of the four features that should convince you to go with DITA. But very few organizations use it day one and very few organizations should use it day one. But the reality is that over time, you’re going to find cases that you just can’t efficiently support in other ways. And the alternative to having specialization is something like HTML classes or some other XML attribute that you throw onto something or some tag thing you invent in Markdown. But it’s super difficult to validate that and to make sure that it’s used consistently. And none of that stuff really effectively translates back to the rest of the publishing pipeline in a way that is consistent. There’s not a strong process for it. You have to invent the process and the pattern and then actually do the thing you want it to do. Should you specialize day one? Sometimes. I would ask your friendly neighborhood consultant. about that one.

AP: I’ll tell you right now, sometimes when it comes to metadata, starting early with that is a requirement, that is based on some past project experience. Yes.

PB: That’s fair. And I think the way that you end up managing the metadata, because metadata is a really… We might have to decide what you mean by metadata, because I can make anything metadata.

AP: Things you shouldn’t, by the way. Yes, you can.

PB: There’s definitely a conversation around, where does your organizational intelligence and taxonomy and terminology weave into your content model?

AP: Yep.

PB: I think there are cases where that is specialization and there are cases where it is not. It’s really something that you want to use more standardized taxonomy mechanisms for that, or maybe you want to use on document metadata or et cetera.

AP: Yeah. There are layers there. You’ve got some choices and you can have other tools carry that burden too, that play well with your system. That’s a possibility as well.

PB: Totally. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. The only other thing that I’ll add to this, is sometimes just because you’re doing something the way you are now doesn’t mean it’s the right way moving forward. And you should not knee-jerk decide you must customize structure to match the way that you were doing things right this second. I would pause and look at things very hard before you decide, “Absolutely I must customize because we’re doing it this way.” Well, if you’re doing it this way now, for example, are your delivery formats going to be the same as they are right now? Is that going to lend itself well to all these different new online formats and things like that? Is it going to lend itself well to talking to other systems via API? I could go on and on. Basically, take a deep breath and decide if what you’re doing now is truly something you need moving forward, there’s a chance that you may need to compromise or rethink the way you’re doing. It may in a way that the DITA structure already supports with no customization whatsoever.

PB: I want to break down your point about doing it now for a second, because I think this is really important. There’s doing it now in terms of what are you publishing now? What are your target publish outputs? And then there’s doing it now, in terms of what are your internal practices? In terms of how it is you’re actually creating the content, what’s going into the content, how the content is coming together, how the content is moving, so do you have a distributed model where writers really don’t talk to each other that much other than at the water cooler, but they write their own books? Do you have a collaborative model? There’s all things in terms of doing it now can be so many things in the background.

AP: It’s not just publishing, it is also creation. That’s a very good point. Absolutely.

PB: In terms of doing it now for publishing, one of the things that I think is really critical is understanding the trajectory of your publishing and where it’s going. If you implement structure properly, there shouldn’t be a lot of publishing cases you can’t handle, generally speaking. And if there are, that’s typically where specialization comes in, if you need more semantics, more data typing, more of this to pull something out, because a lot of publishing cases that are more on the upper ends of complexity, what they’re really doing is, they’re doing intelligent selection. They’re saying, “Give me the things like this that connect to this under these conditions.” Something like that. When you’re looking at your outputs now, having a general concept of trajectory I think is really important. But then, the core point that I want to make here is that, a strong separation between doing it now on the backend and doing it now in terms of publishing is what you need going forward.

And this is where almost every wiki based or HAT tool based or whatever else, which is write it and publish it, WordPress. This is where they all break down because there’s no separation or very, very little separation between what you’re doing on the back end and what shows up on the front end. You can’t evolve those two things independently. And that rigidity means that you get stuck and you can’t do the things you need to do on either side. When you’re building a new content operations ecosystem and you’re redoing these things and you’re thinking about, “What are we going to do in the future?” I would say even more than the content model you choose, you need to choose a content operations’ ecosystem that has separation of concerns and where you can evolve the different components independently without breaking one or the other.

AP: That is really good advice. And I really like your front end and back end distinction, because I think that is very important and it’s very easy to conflate those two things, by the way, especially if you’re working in an environment that already combines those things. I think that’s really, really good advice. And before we wrap up, is there any other smart point you want to leave our listeners with in regard to picking a content model?

PB: Smart points? I don’t know. I don’t know if I do those. Do I do those?

AP: Well, you just did one with the back end front end distinction, so if we want to leave it there, we certainly can.

PB: How about I build on that just slightly?

AP: Sure.

PB: Just to make sure it’s really complicated.

I think that front end and back end is one level of maturity when you’re thinking about the separations of systems and a content operations’ system. But I think that one of the things you’ll see is that a lot of organizations will evolve to the point where it truly is an ecosystem. Think about it this way, you have your centralized content repository, that’s where most of your authoring is done. It’s where your pros are written, et cetera. And then you have your primary front end, which is typically a website, but it’s probably mobile ready and whatever else as well. And you have other front ends too, so you have separation of front end and back end in that way. That’s what we were just talking about.

But it’s very common that you start to see there are other systems which integrate with the back end. You might have a system that manages your API documentation, which is typically generated, it’s not written. However, the usage information around the API documentation, that provides the developers the context and the instruction to know what they’re looking at, that’s all written. That goes into the content repository. Now you need a connection between those two things, and you need some kind of a mechanism where they’re going to be able to play nicely together to some extent, at least to get the information generally to the front end without having multiple experiences where a user has to bounce back and forth between raw reference and then guided more learning style content. You might also have a system which holds information about your product, so it could be product configurations, it could be product specifications, it could be all different kinds of things there.

And that information is oftentimes going to come over in a tabular format. And a tabular format is a really interesting thing, because when you’re looking at simple tabular formats that can be represented as a CSV, it’s not a great idea when you’re doing data exchange, but it can, but it can always be represented in a tags based format. Any tabular format can be represented as tags. And even the most complicated Excel stuff under the hood, it’s XML basically, or it can be exported as XML. You start looking at that and you go, “Okay. Well, what if we’re going to start mixing in things which is more tabular data from other systems into the flow of content that we’re producing for the information experiences down the line? Okay. How are we going to support that in the future and how is that going to come together?”

When you start thinking about these things, the awareness that your most basic content operations is a word processor on a desktop, and then you move to front end and back end. But eventually, if your organization demands it and your customer demands it, and you have to deal with them in that way, you’re going to be in a place where you’re at an ecosystem and there’s going to be content going back and forth between systems. There’s going to be something which is pulling together information, data, and content, and then it’s pushing it out to experiences. You’re going to have multiple experiences.

AP: What you’re describing is content as a service. That’s what I’m hearing.

PB: Yeah. Content as a service is one of the things that comes out of this. I just think that when you step back and you’re like, “Okay, what does our organization look like in terms of the information that in a perfect world our customer could access and could access in a seamless way, without going to different experiences and having to navigate around when it should be together, it is together? That’s a big thing. We have these five things when they should be together, let’s put them together.” That’s a thought exercise, that’s worth an afternoon when you’re about to decide how it is you’re going to build your next content operations’ ecosystem. Because if there’s nothing else else I can promise you, it’s that whatever you choose when you set up a content operations’ ecosystem, even if you don’t actively choose, it’s going to be with you longer than you think.

AP: Absolutely. And I think that’s a good place to end and a good caveat to choose wisely and choose well. Patrick, thank you very much for your time. We appreciate it.

PB: Yep. Thanks for having me.

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 How to choose a content model with guest Patrick Bosek (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 149 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Christine Cuellar discuss the unique challenges, opportunities, and considerations of content operations with elearning content.

“As an instructional designer, as a person who’s creating this learning content, you start thinking about, How do I deliver this effectively? How do I ensure that learning actually takes place? That’s our goal here. We want the people to learn the thing.” 

— Sarah O’Keefe

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Transcript:

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’re talking about content operations in e-learning environments and elearning content. Today on the podcast, I have with me Sarah O’Keefe. Hi Sarah, how are you doing?

Sarah O’Keefe: Hey, Christine. I’m doing well.

CC: Thank you so much for being here and talking about this. This is a topic that’s coming up more and more, so I’m excited to dive more into the unique challenges and opportunities of content operations in e-learning content. I guess to get it started, what does the shift from in-person to digital look like for the classroom environment?

SO: Clearly, the trend for this year is AI. Nobody’s going to deny that, but I think this is probably the number two trend that we’re seeing is an interest in content ops for learning content [and elearning content] all of a sudden. Let’s talk a little bit about the history of this. Back when Gutenberg… No, sorry. Sorry. I’m capable of doing a podcast without talking about the printing press, I think. When digital content comes along, let’s backpedal a little bit and think about classroom training. You go into a classroom at a particular location, at a particular day and time. You have a physical environment. You have a bunch of people in the room with you, so you’re the instructor and you have eight or 10 or 15 or 45 students sitting in front of you.

Although some of this applies to school instruction, what I’m focused on and what I have some experience with is adult learners. That’s probably also worth noting on the outset. Many of you I think are familiar with school environments, but what we’re talking about here is adult learners coming in to do some sort of probably corporate training. I walk into the classroom, and we have a particular kind of computer set up because I’m doing software training. I’ve got a bunch of learners in front of me, and some of them are tired because it’s 8:00 AM. I’m cranky because it’s 8:00 AM and I traveled and all the rest of it. In the olden days, we had this setup where you would travel to a location, bring everybody together in a room, and for two or three or five days you would do a class together.

There’s some really interesting stuff that happens when you have a group in a room learning. You get interesting kinds of group dynamics. You’ve always got a class clown heckler, and you can sometimes turn them to your advantage. But additionally, you have physical issues with the classroom. The monitors are terrible, the computers are slow. There’s some commotion outside the classroom that’s going on that’s distracting. The fire alarm goes off at 11:00 AM. You have a variety of learners with different kinds of motivations, but you’ve got this physical environment that you’re dealing with and this requirement to bring everybody together all at once in the same place. Now, as we move towards e-learning where learning content is being delivered online, you can take your classroom and have a classroom online. Everybody comes together in a Zoom or some other kind of video meeting and you’re presenting to them.

In a lot of ways, it mimics what’s going on in the actual classroom, but there are some advantages and disadvantages. The big one is that people get distracted. They have screens open. They go off and do their thing. They drop because they have to take another meeting. They’re at home, they’ve got a barking dog. Now, there are distractions of the office training location also. But online training does not require people to travel, it introduces time zone issues. Nearly always instead of doing let’s say a three-day class all at once, we would do several sessions of two hours a day spread out over a lot more time. Because we don’t have to cram everything into three days because we didn’t fly in the instructor, that’s an online classroom. Then you start thinking about asynchronous training where instead of me presenting in the online classroom, all that stuff gets prerecorded.

Your job as the learner is to go watch the video that I did and then work through the handouts and exercises and things. Then do maybe some sort of interactive online thing, and then maybe there’s a test. There’s a set of assessment questions to show whether or not you’ve learned the material. Then when that happens, you introduce all sorts of other distractions. But the complexity here is that the difference between an in-person classroom environment and some sort of asynchronous online training is actually pretty extreme when you think about it. You take away that in-person interaction. You take away the group dynamics. You don’t necessarily have your buddy that you’re nudging and passing chocolate to and all this. As an instructional designer, as a person who’s creating this elearning content, you start thinking about, “How do I deliver this effectively? How do I ensure that learning actually takes place?” Which is our goal here. We want the people to learn the thing.

CC: Yes

SO: A lot of the tools that are available to me as a classroom instructor are not available in a digital environment, but there are other things that are available. Recorded video’s a really good example because it means that you could go back and watch the video again, or we could provide closed captioning or subtitles for the video. You could speed it up or slow it down. You could have little glossary terminology information that pops up in the video so that as I’m using some weird jargon-y word, it pops up the definition. Lots of stuff you can do. But ultimately, elearning content, more than other kinds of enabling content. If we compare learning content to techcomm content. In techcomm, the shift from a printed book to a PDF to something like online help. There’s been some interactivity and some other things added, but a printed book in general, the reading experience of a printed book versus some text online, it’s really not that different.

Whereas in a classroom when you talk about learning and training as a process, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that goes on in the classroom that is very, very different in digital. As we start thinking about how do we move and how do we deliver effective e-learning, we have to think about all these issues around the instructional approach, the modality. Is it in-person? Is it not in-person? Is it synchronous or asynchronous, and all the rest of it? That makes for some pretty complex content [including elearning content]. Then we have to think about the content itself, which is of course, where we live. Because I’ve done a lot of training in my days, but I’m not an instructional designer really. But I’m interested in this question of how do I make a learning experience effective? Then we come around to how do we do that in the context of all these cool tools that we have in the content world?

CC: That makes sense. What I’m hearing is that there’s a unique tension for instructional designers where you want to create a somewhat customized experience… Because as you said, getting people to learn the thing is the goal. Creating learning content [including elearning content] that’s going to be effective is the goal. How do you balance the flexibility of being able to create a tailored training deliverable when you are trying to create a more scalable content development process?

SO: Probably the instructor has an outline of some sort. These are the objectives for the class. These are the things I need to communicate to the students. In a classroom environment that looks… Maybe look one way, I’m going to do a little lecture. I’m going to define some stuff. I’m going to have them do a group project. Put two people together, or three, have them work on some things. There’s a lot of different tricks in classroom management. In the e-learning environment, especially if it’s asynchronous, it’s on demand. I can’t really do that. I can’t tell you to go work with your partner sitting at the bench with you because you don’t have a bench or a partner, so you have to do something different. But if you step back and look at it, you have your learning objectives. I want people to learn how to log into the database.

Great. In a classroom setting, I can do that. We’d probably have a sandbox of some sort. They can log in, they can try it out. We can show them how to set their password and show them all the really dumb password rules. The really dumb password rules are the same across the board. Just because you’re in an e-learning class [with elearning content], they don’t change. That 18 bullet points of you have to use at least one special character, but not these special characters. It has to be more than eight characters, but less than 27, that thing. That content is the same, and so I think the trick becomes to identify the things that are the same and the things that are different. What content is the same, and can I basically just deliver in the same way? What content is different? For the classroom, it might say, “Spend five minutes explaining X here. Cover these five bullet points.”

In e-learning, it’s, “Run the video,” or some sort of an interactive environment where they can do stuff. The objectives are the same. The way that you deliver may be different. I think the really interesting part about this is identifying that pretty carefully and then plugging it in. This one’s only for e-learning and this one’s only for classroom, or this one’s only for a certain kind of audience. To take the dumb database login example, am I talking to users or am I talking to database administrators? If you’re a database admin, you probably have a different set of options than you do if you’re a generic user. Do we have a different class or let’s say a different lesson on logging in? Or is it the same lesson but the admin gets a couple of extra paragraphs about weirdo things that they’re allowed to do but we don’t show those to the user when you’re doing a user-level class? You have that sort of conditionality potentially.

But I think the real key here is to focus less on the form of the delivery and more on what is the backbone of the class. What are the learning objectives and how do I deliver those learning objectives in different kinds of modalities, and different delivery mechanisms? Also, where’s the overlap? If I’m teaching you how to use a particular kind of corporate software, probably lesson one across the board is how to log in for every single class. Unless of course… There might be a basic class and an advanced class. In the advanced class, we assume you already know how to log in. But it’s really, really common to have a series of classes. You’re a bank and the tellers get one kind of training, and the bank manager gets a different kind of training, and the… I’ve run out of banking roles that I know about. But you… Mortgage officers!

CC: Yeah, there we go. That’s one. I was like, “I had nothing.”

SO: You think about it though, and how to log into banking system is probably going to be pretty much the same and delivered in lots and lots and lots and lots of different classes as lesson one. That’s great, but you need a system that allows you to write the canonical how-to log in, and then use it over and over and over again across all these… Not just all these different audiences, but all these different delivery mechanisms. Whether I’m in the classroom or I’m online or I’m here or there, I want that here’s how you log in and here’s our password policy to be delivered to have the same content delivered so that all my people learn what they need to learn in whatever learning environment.

Right now, and I said this was one of our trends for this year, what we’re hearing from the people that are coming to us and talking to us about learning content is, “Yeah, I have how to log in procedure or a how to log in lesson, but what I actually have is 10 copies of it, or 20 because they’re all stashed in different systems and I have no way of actually managing them. I just make a copy and make the version for the teller, or I make a copy and I make the version for the database admin. I can’t share, I can’t link them. I can’t do anything other than make copies.”

CC: Which creates a lot of clutter, I guess you would say, in the content system. I’m sure that that leads to inaccuracies. That could lead to… That’s just also a lot of busy work on the part of the instructor. If it’s already done once, why repeat it a bunch of times? What I really like about what you’re saying is there’s a huge piece of intentionality that ties back to what are our goals for all of this elearning content? What are we trying to accomplish and what do we want people to take away from this? Then that is informing what content gets created and how that content gets developed and produced.

I like that because I’m sure as organizations grow and develop, they’re trying to catch up with learning content and get people what they need while they’re doing a myriad of other business functions, trying to keep things going. Taking a step back to really assess what your learning content is doing and where it’s going seems like a really valuable piece of this process. However, that also sounds like there’s a lot to do within that. What options do people have when it comes to managing their learning content? Is it basically a one track that you recommend? Are there a ton of options? Where do people get started when they’re trying to move in this direction?

SO: It’s tricky because we have to actually think about managing learning content and maybe separately managing learning. Let me start with the second one. When you talk about managing learning, it’s once I put this class together, whether e-learning or classroom or anything else, let’s say that there’s a requirement that you take a particular class and you take a particular assessment or test and you pass it at a certain level. Learning management or learner management tracks that. Have you taken the class? Did you take the assessment? Did you pass? Are you off the hook for sexual harassment training for this year? That type of thing. It’s kind of like a front-end learner experience, learner interaction. Also, there’s some really interesting things you can do around learner behavior. Everybody’s watching this video, but they all watch it at double speed, and it’s pretty clear that they’re just trying to get through it as fast as possible.

Then they’re all passing the assessment at nine out of 10 questions correct. That indicates that either your content is really good or the questions are too easy, or who knows? But a learning management system, an LMS, allows you to track those kinds of things. If you think of a school… We’re talking about adults probably. But if you think about a school, you have attendance and grades and tests and report cards, all that stuff is learning management, basically. That’s the front end. That’s where I as a learner and then the instructor as a teacher interacts with the system. Separately from that, we have the backend, which would be probably the learning content management system or an LCMS. Sometimes this is done in component content management systems. An LCMS is a content management system tuned for learning content, and a CCMS is a component content management system, which could be used as an LCMS.

CC: Oh, okay. But it’s not necessarily specifically an LCMS?

SO: It’s not necessarily explicitly, “Hey, I was built for learning content,” but maybe it is.

CC: That makes sense.

SO: Then you’ll find some LCMSs that say, “We’re totally a CCMS.” So, welcome to my world. We are creating learning content [including elearning content] and we are delivering it into all these different delivery channels and delivery experiences like synchronous learning online and asynchronous elearning content and classroom, maybe. Probably not. I don’t do a lot… Aside from the pandemic, which is a big aside from. But classroom training is rare these days. It used to be everything, and now everything’s online, which is a whole other thing. You can make effective online training, but it’s not easy. It’s much easier to pick a fun, dynamic, entertaining instructor and put them in a room. That’s how you make good training in a classroom environment. It’s just that it costs a fortune and people have to travel and they have to be in the same room.

There’s all these constraints, and it’s super expensive. We have our learning content management of some sort, and now what we want to do is go down the line of all the standard content management systems and think about how we’re going to do this. What information can I reuse across multiple delivery channels, multiple audiences, and multiple places in my system? Where do I have information like my user versus admin distinction where I need to use some sort of conditionality? This paragraph should only go over here. The canonical old-school example of this was a test and an answer key. The students get the test. The instructor, we hope, is the only one that gets the test with the answer key. But that’s really a conditional text problem. How do I suppress the answer key? Rather than making two copies of the test, you have one copy of the test. When you render it for the student, you don’t show the answers. Of course, now we can put it in a learning management system and have it present the question to you [for your elearning content].

 You check the box or you type in your answer or you do whatever, and then it says that was correct or incorrect because the system has that data. Components, how do I break down a class into lessons, learning objectives, and then learning objects that go with that? How can I mix and match and repurpose those learning objects to put together what I’m trying to do? You think of this as just this puddle of instructional content of learning objects. Then I want to sequence them in a certain way. They have to build on each other. You can’t go around telling people how to do SQL commands before you teach them what a relational database is. There’s sequencing implied there, and there are prerequisites and hierarchy. If you’re doing hands-on kind of training, hardware training, you very often have prereqs like, “Here’s the equipment that you need to do this. You need a screwdriver and you need this and you need that and you need the other.”

You need physical objects and you need to make sure everyone has them at hand or has them in their class or whatever. If you’re doing e-learning, you probably have interactive components. Again, instead of an instructor lecture, you’re going to have a video, or you’re going to have maybe a hands-on environment where people can get into a locked down, safe environment where they can play around with stuff, but it won’t break anything. It’s a fake environment where they can try out certain things without being worried that they’re going to transfer $2 billion inadvertently out of their bank account … which we’re not for that. There are all these different options out there on the backend to create all these learning objects and then think about how you’re going to deliver them in an optimum way for all your different kinds of channels, whether it’s online or my beloved and long-lost classroom and all the rest of it.

CC: We do have more information about optimizing content operations, about learning content. We’ve been doing some blogs and other podcasts, so we’ll have those available in the show notes. Sarah, for someone who’s hearing all of this for maybe the first time or maybe they’re just starting to become aware of this whole new way of thinking about learning content and they’re wanting to move to this approach, I’m sure they’re in the middle of everything that they’re doing already. They’re in the middle of producing content. It’s an overwhelming prospect, so where would they get started?

SO: The ideal answer is, of course, to call us up and bring us in to help you. But assuming you’re not quite ready for that today, I would actually suggest that you go look at our learning data site. If you go to learningdata.com, you’re going to see an online e-learning environment [and structured elearning content]. Now, I’m not going to tell you that it is necessarily the best possible, most amazing experience in the world, but it’s effective. Here’s the key, you can look at that site and you can also, if you dig into the About page and how was the site put together, it will tell you where the files live for that site because they’re all open-source.

There’s a whole bunch of, in this case, DITA XML underlying the site, which then is pulled into a stack that involves WordPress and LearnDash. Which is, as I said, a learning management, an LMS system that sits on top of WordPress. You could take a look at how that’s put together and how the source files are then transformed into the learning experience for e-learning. Of course, we can also from that, do PDF handouts. I think we do have some slides in there and all these other things. I think that might give you a reasonable idea of what it looks like to think about learning content as being flexible objects that you can remix and repurpose.

CC: That’s great. We’ll have LearningDITA linked in the show notes as well. It’s really easy to check it out. It’s completely free and that’s a great idea. Sarah, thanks so much for talking about this. Is there anything else you can think of that you want people who are interested in learning more to know? Is there anything you feel like we haven’t covered or any other nuances about e-learning content that you’d like to address?

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

SO: E-learning content or learning content is complex because we’re not just dealing with the question of how do I get it on a printed page? But also that question of how will a learner engage with this content? I think that focusing on that question, focusing on how do I make this as effective as possible across all these different delivery mechanisms is probably the key to making this work. Then secondly, the universal theme that we’re hearing from our learning content friends is we can’t keep up. There’s too much stuff. There are too many deliverables. There’s too much change. Everything is going really, really fast. What we’re describing here, a component-based approach to managing learning content [including elearning content] has the potential to address that and to help you manage the velocity that you’re being required to manage. Finally, I’ll also say that we didn’t touch on localization and translation. We do have the ability within an environment like this to support localization in a reasonable manner. That’s another potential reason that you might need to go in this direction.

CC: That’s great. Thank you so much, Sarah, for being here. I really appreciate your time, and-

SO: Thank you!

CC: … letting me pick your brain about this [elearning content and content operations]. This was great.

SO: Anytime.

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

The post Content operations for elearning content (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 148 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Anthony Olivier, founder and CEO of MadCap Software, and Sarah O’Keefe discuss the MadCap acquisition of IXIASOFT, what’s on the horizon for the merged organization, and explore predictions about the impact of AI in the content industry.

“By acquiring a DITA-based CCMS, it allows us to offer not just an unstructured XML-based solution with cloud-based content management, but also offer a structured authoring solution for our customers who want to make that transition.”

— Anthony Olivier

Related links:

LinkedIn:

Transcript:

Sarah O’Keefe: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. Hey, everyone. I’m Sarah O’Keefe, and in this episode, I am joined by the MadCap founder and CEO Anthony Olivier. Welcome, Anthony.

Anthony Olivier: Thank you, Sarah. Happy to be here.

SO: It’s great to have you on board. Tell us a little bit about MadCap and how you made that happen, because I know there’s a fun backstory there.

AO: Yeah, it goes back to when I was CEO of a company. Prior to MadCap, we were called eHelp Corporation. We were the founders and developers of RoboHelp, and at the time it was RoboDemo. We sold the business to, I believe it was the end of 2002, I sold the company to Macromedia, if everybody remembers Macromedia, the creators of Flash. They bought eHelp not necessarily because of RoboHelp, but because of our RoboDemo product at the time. It was a Flash-based product and they were really interested in Flash-based technology. They acquired eHelp for RoboDemo.

Quickly rebranded that as Captivate, and decided at that time that RoboHelp and the technical authoring industry was not core to the strategy. This gave us an opportunity or gave me an opportunity to push the market forward and say, look, if you’re not interested in it, we’re going to create a new technology or a new generation of RoboHelp and create from scratch and develop something that was more future-proof, XML-based, and continued that technology forward under MadCap.

That’s what led to the birth of MadCap in 2005. I’ve been in the industry a long time. A lot longer than MadCap’s been around. This has been now what we live and breathe, technical authoring.

SO: Right. Since all of us are all related in some way, somewhere in the middle of all of that, Macromedia gets acquired by Adobe, and then Flash goes away, but Captivate is still here.

AO: That’s correct. That’s exactly right. Shortly after that acquisition of eHelp and Macromedia, Adobe went and purchased Macromedia. And then the rest is history at that point. I mean, we’re the frame maker of RoboHelp and Captivate. It’s been a definitely interesting journey, but definitely a small industry per se.

SO: Here you are in 2005, you launched MadCap. It’s been, I thought 15 years, but more like 18, right? MadCap’s humming along and you’ve got Flare and all the ecosystem of products that goes with Flare. I mean, I think pretty clearly a happy and fairly passionate Flare user base like some other products I could mention from 20 years ago, but will refrain. And then suddenly one day this past February, there’s this announcement that, oh, by the way, we’ve decided to purchase IXIASOFT and its DITA XML content management system. Please explain.

AO: Absolutely. — We’ve been in the industry long enough, you and I, and we’ve been living and breathing this market for a very long time. I think that we recognize that it’s not a “one size fits all” solution for companies. Some companies want structure. Some companies want unstructured. We’ve recognized that from the beginning, that it’s not a one size fits all. Clearly there’s a market for structured authoring. There’s a lot of companies that do it. There’s a lot of companies that offer DITA-based tools, CCMSs. There’s definitely a market for that and a pretty big market. Taking a little bit of a step back, our retention rates at MadCap prior to IXIASOFT acquisition was about 90%. 90% of our customers stay with MadCap for the long haul.

Now, if you exclude those companies that downsize let’s say because of reduction in force or things like that outside of the control of the organization, those remaining percentage of customers that leave MadCap were typically leaving MadCap, although it was a small percentage, leaving MadCap to go something that’s more structured, more controlled, something that had the benefits that DITA offers as a structured authoring solution and more in line with compliance, larger teams, larger content development teams, large amount of content and needed the CCMS functionality.

If customers are leaving MadCap, that’s where they were going. By us acquiring a DITA-based CCMS allowed us to offer not just an unstructured XML-based solution with cloud-based content management, but also offered a structured authoring solution for our customers who want to make that transition or growing teams. We know that the needs of the organization change to be more compliant. That was the reason behind the acquisition. Acquiring IXIA CCMS allowed us to solve a couple problems or gaps, let’s say.

It allowed us to participate in the structured authoring environment or this authoring market offer a migration part for those MadCap customers that are very happy with MadCap, very happy with the service and support that they’re getting, but needed something a little more powerful, needed the DITA-based structure and needed the CCMS capability. We offer that path for them to move along without having to go to market and shop for a different solution. The third thing is we get to retain those customers. As I mentioned before, we have a retention rate of 90%.

It’s a lot higher if you exclude, as I said, reductions in force, but we get to retain those customers within the MadCap family by having a DITA-based CCMS as one of our offerings. Acquiring IXIA, we provided this almost like a future-proof growth plan for our customers who decide to go with MadCap, whether they decide that they want to go unstructured first, get all their content from Word and other formats into the ecosystem, and then grow with us as they grow, as their needs grow, as they do acquisitions, as their teams grow, and then wanted more of the structure with a DITA solution office. That’s pretty much the evolution of why we decided to purchase a DITA-based CCMS.

SO: When you look at this, that’s sort of the, well, I don’t know about tactical, but sort of the big picture strategic view of how those two product sets can fit together or how you can provide a market fit for your customers. Stepping back from that a little bit, where do you see the industry going?

Where do you see the growth happening and do you see these products, and I don’t mean just MadCap and IXIA specifically, but the various products that cover this marketplace? How do you think they’re going to evolve? Looking at this with 20, 30 years of experience and having seen all the different things that have happened, where do you think this is going in the next five or 10 years?

AO: A couple things. I think that, well, definitely one of the things we’re working on currently and was the first initiatives post the acquisition was how do the products talk to each other? How do they integrate better with each other? How do you move from MadCap solutions to a DITA-based CCMS? How do you leverage all the advantages that a DITA-based CCMS has without having to recreate your content?

How can we make that transfusion for customs a lot easier? That’s our first order of business, is to tackle the movement between the products, and then the strengths and weaknesses of each of the solutions, and how do we use the strength and weaknesses of each solution to fill those gaps. We’ll start seeing this over the short term and longer term, is the products feeling like it’s more of an integrated type workflow.

SO: Do you see people using both, like a single customer that would have instances of both products, or is it going to be a “one or the other”?

AO: I see both. During the due diligence process, in the discussions with IXIA, we looked at the customer base of IXIA. Now, granted, they’re a lot smaller than MadCap in terms of customer base, but we actually saw a fair amount of overlap of customers in very large organizations. IXIA has very, very large customers. I mean, you’re talking about SAP, Siemens, Toyota. I mean, those very, very large organizations with hundreds and hundreds of licenses of the IXIA platform. We actually saw there was actually a fair amount of overlap between our customers and theirs.

Siemens is a perfect example. I’m not sharing anything proprietary, but there’s actually some divisions in Siemens that use MadCap and have been MadCap customers for a very long time. But Siemens is a very large IXIA customer. Coming back to my initial point, there’s not a “one size fits all.” There’s going to be certain divisions that are going to be fine with using MadCap products and having more of this unstructured authoring environment without the CCMS capabilities.

There are going to be certain departments within these very large organizations that are very compliant and need to adhere to very strict guidelines in terms of how they’re authoring the content, how they’re managing that content. There’s definitely going to continue to be this overlap between the customers, and we’re not going to try and push or force anything down the customer’s throat in terms of what they should or shouldn’t be using. It’s really, if you have a problem, we can solve it for you no matter what your needs are.

For example, if Siemens decides, hey, these divisions that are using MadCap want to start looking at moving towards more of a structured authoring environment and having more of the CCMS capabilities, then we can make that transition really easy for them. But if you don’t want to do that, absolutely. They use both. But we want to be able to share the content between both.

Bring the benefits of content reuse no matter what you’re using, if it’s MadCap legacy products, so legacy in the sense that MadCap existing products versus the IXIA CCMS and the DITA-based solution that we have now.

SO: I think I’m not allowed to do podcasts anymore without asking about AI. I’ll ask you, when you look at the trends and where the industry is going, do you have at this point a perspective on what AI is going to do to your business and/or a strategy that you can share in broad strokes as to how you’re going to integrate that?

AO: Yeah. I mean, that’s a really good question, Sarah. AI is definitely becoming more and more prominent. If you’re not thinking about AI and how it could affect or is going to affect the workflow, how you’re creating content, then you’re probably going to be behind the eight-ball pretty quickly. We’re definitely thinking about AI. We’re definitely already working on AI integration into our products in terms of authoring and leveraging, allow the author or content developer to leverage AI in creating content.

I think it’s going to just make the technical author’s job a lot more efficient. They’re going to be able to do more, create more content, which is a good thing for us. We want more content. We want to be able to produce more content. We want customers to be able to create more content more effectively and efficiently and more valuable content more effectively and efficiently. AI is going to allow that. I see it being a positive for technical authors. It’s a matter of embracing it and how do you integrate that with the solutions that we have that are going to make the difference.

If we sit there and try to ignore it, then it’s a problem. We ignore it as a potential risk to the author’s role and function within the organization. I think that we can all end up losing. I think it’s embracing it that’s going to be the important thing. It’s going to change the way we do things, but I think in a positive way.

SO: Looking forward at where this is going, and you’ve obviously got a huge amount of work to do in terms of product integration and alignment and just all the usual things that go with merging to companies, but whether it’s inside the organization, the now combined organization, or broadly in the industry, where do you see the biggest challenges that we’re facing or that you’re facing as you move forward in this space?

AO: I think the biggest challenge is, that I think it’s actually an opportunity, is companies are looking to content development or content in general as becoming more and more valuable to an organization. People are not going out there and making decisions, talking to salespeople as much as they used to. A lot of people want to make decisions on their own, and a lot of that comes down to reading the content, making decisions based on the content that’s out there, whether it be web-based content, instructions, user guides, things like that that make a prospect decide on whether a product is a viable solution for them or not.

That’s where the role of the content plays. I think that for us, bridging that gap between sales and marketing and content development, what we call content development, the traditional technical authoring content development, is going to start blurring. The biggest challenge is getting the technical authors to start embracing and seeing that they actually play a role in the sales and marketing, as well as from a top-down level as well, from a CTO level, from a CIO level, from a CFO level, even CEO level, recognizing that the content that’s being produced by the organization is driving a lot of those decisions on the sales and marketing side.

I think that that’s where we see the industry going a little bit more, the blurring of the lines between sales, marketing, and technical content. That brings an opportunity, but it’s also a challenge because we’ve got to start thinking about things a little bit differently. It’s not about just disseminating information, it’s also about selling the product or the services that we’re documenting. The other challenge, I think this is just generally something that we’ve always faced, is obviously resources. Biggest challenge is hiring quick enough to facilitate the growth and innovate on new ideas.

We’ve always been very good on the innovation side, but keeping pace with that I think is always the challenge. We’ve seen with ChatGPT and AI, it’s very, very fast-paced. We need to be able to keep pace with that, and we need to provide our users, our customers, MadCap customers, IXIA customers with solutions and features and functionality that keep pace with what’s going on on a macroeconomic level.

SO: Yeah, which is interesting because when you look back at, again, 20 years ago, we thought we were going pretty fast. When you compare the velocity from 20 years ago to where we are now, there’s just absolutely no comparison, and it shows no signs of slowing down. I mean, things are just getting faster and faster and faster.

Velocity is an interesting one. With the AI stuff that’s coming out right now, I worry about trust and reputation, because of course, ChatGPT has informed me that I have a PhD, which I appreciate, but. There’s stuff like that happening. What’s that going to look like to produce content and make sure that it’s accurate?

AO: Right, absolutely. And that’s where I think that you cannot replace the human aspect behind the technical author, the content developer’s role, because there’s only so much content. You can get as much content as you want from ChatGPT, but the verification of the accuracy of the content, making sure it makes sense, making sure there is some post editing and review process that goes into it. There’s always going to be that role, right? There’s certain industries that have to make sure that it’s 100% accurate. You just can’t afford to have inaccuracies or misinformation.

SO: I do appreciate my medical devices having accurate documentation.

AO: That’s right.

SO: Well, I appreciate your time. This has been really interesting, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the combined company is going to do. Because of course, you’re coming at the problem or the challenges of technical content from I guess somewhat different perspectives. It’ll just be really interesting to see how those combine and what comes out in the mix when it’s all said and done. Anthony, thank you for coming on and answering all my cheeky questions, and we will look forward to seeing you at the events coming down the pipe.

AO: Great. Thank you, Sarah.

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 Anthony Olivier unpacks the MadCap acquisition of IXIASOFT (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 147 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and Christine Cuellar continue talking about how teams adjust when content processes change, and tools you can use to navigate the question, “Why do I have to work differently?”

This is part two of a two-part podcast.

“We had a client a few years ago refer to us as content therapists, and that’s not far off. […] We provide a sounding board. We’re a sympathetic ear. We help give you the opportunity to bounce off concerns, problems, issues, and offer feedback. It’s a relationship where we are going to listen and give guidance, because again, we’ve been through this before with other people. Let’s apply that knowledge and make your life as easy as possible during, frankly, what can be a very tumultuous time.”

— Alan Pringle

Related links:

LinkedIn:

Transcript:

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 is part two of a two-part podcast. Hi, I’m Christine Cuellar.

Alan Pringle: And I’m Alan Pringle.

CC: And in this episode, Alan and I are continuing our discussion about how teams adjust when content processes change and tips that you can have in your tool belt for navigating the transition successfully. Alan, how often do you see organizations that give thorough training after a new system has been implemented?

AP: You have to. I’ll put it to you this way, if we’re involved, we’re going to be a huge proponent for that. Because I think it is horribly unfair, horribly unproductive to just budget for the technology, not thinking about the people that have to use the technology. Again, we go back to people, which is what you started with at the very top of this podcast. People are the thing, don’t buy the tech and forget to show the people how to use it. Again, you’re going to fail if you go down that path.

CC: That’s a good point. And that goes back to another preemptive activity, which is to make sure that the budget includes room for training, because I’m sure that people get into a situation where they haven’t budgeted for that, but then a consultant is advocating for training. What do you do? Do you delay launching all this kind of stuff?

AP: It’s got to be a line item along with the technology and the migration and whatever else, absolutely.

CC: Which makes sense because then you’re making the most out of the system that you just heavily invested in because you’re bringing your team up to speed much faster, and I’m sure they’re going to be a lot more optimistic about the transition as a whole once they’ve been fully trained on it.

AP: Yes. And don’t forget, there may be employees you haven’t hired yet who will need training, so think about them too.

CC: True. That’s true. That could set up a training process.

AP: You might want to have people in your organization who can then turn around and offer that training. You may want to record sessions if you have a third party providing it and then sharing those later. So think about people you haven’t even hired yet when it comes to training because they’re going to need help too when they come on board.

CC: Absolutely. From the consultant perspective, I know in our podcast a few weeks ago, Bill had mentioned that a consultant paints the clear picture of why the change benefits everyone, and that’s one of the big advantages and we’ve touched on that already here. What else does a consultant do when we come in to help navigate this transition?

AP: We had a client a few years ago refer to us as content therapists, and that’s not far off.

CC: That’s a great example.

AP: We provide a sounding board. We’re a sympathetic ear. We help give you the opportunity to bounce off concerns, problems, issues, and offer feedback on those things. So it’s a relationship where we are going to listen and give guidance in a lot of cases, because again, we’ve been through this before with other people, let’s apply that knowledge and make your life as easy as possible during a frankly, what can be a very tumultuous time.

CC: Yeah, absolutely. I’m curious about the changes in the staff that happen during a transition. Do you see a significant portion of people that just get overwhelmed by the change and leave the company? Is that a common situation or is that more in extreme cases of where the transition’s maybe not being handled well or it’s just a tough case?

AP: I’m going to bust out that consultant answer, it depends, because it really does. We have seen that happen. I have seen that happen. There are some people who are just not going to be a good fit in the new process and it’s time for them to unfortunately move on. Is it usually what happens? No. There are a lot of people who are very interested in adapting and changing and making things better because they realize too, if this process is more efficient, it’s going to cut out some of the gross, for example, formatting scut work I have to do, it eliminates that, gives me time to really write content that’s going to help the person who’s reading it. I can spend more time on the quality of that content and less time on formatting and other things that really can be huge time sucks.

CC: That makes sense. So I like that term content therapist. You mentioned that the consultant sometimes has the unique ability to be able to say the exact same thing and it has a [different] impact. I’m sure that includes delivering bad news. So how are consultants able to share bad news in maybe a more effective way than current team members or management are able to do?

AP: Maybe because it’s more compartmentalized coming from a third party, sometimes people will react differently to it. I think the bad cop angle too comes into play when you have vendors involved or you’re making a selection process among vendors. The consultant often will know, from past experience, what tools are better fits in certain situations and with certain company cultures and we can say, “Yes, this is a good fit here. This is not a great fit here. You really need to ask them about this because they have not been really good about this particular feature set in the past and you need it. So push them on this when it comes time to evaluation time.” So that bad cop angle is not just about working with the client. It can also be to be sure that the vendor fit is as good as it possibly can be when it comes time for tool selection.

CC: Okay. So maybe there’s someone listening to this that is in the very, very early stages of considering a big tool shift or a big content process change in their company and they’re trying to understand what to expect. What can you share about how long to expect their team to really fully adjust and get comfortable in a new system? What should they expect there?

AP: There are going to be degrees. You’re going to have some of these people who are early proponents who help bring people on board. They’re going to be part of that shift very early, maybe even before you get the tools completely in place, they’re going to be helping with that. Then you’re going to have others who may be more stragglers, but that’s what you have training for. That’s how you can help them by showing them this is how, in your role, you should be using this tool, this is the best practice for this situation, that sort of thing, which training can really help with quite a bit.

CC: Okay. And then what are some tips or tricks you have for bringing a team member that may be particularly struggling with that transition on board? I know you mentioned that sometimes people just aren’t a good fit for the new system and that can be hard, but before you make that determination or before they come to that conclusion, what are some tips you have for winning someone over to the new system if all the stuff that’s worked for the other team members hasn’t worked for this person?

AP: Find out what their pain points are, what they don’t like about what they’re doing and show how the new system can address it, that’s one way that you can possibly convert them to your new process. Again, you have to be very careful here not to offer up a cookie cutter solution. People are all very different and people react to things very differently. Just because something worked with one person in your organization doesn’t mean it’s going to apply well to someone else. So don’t try to apply a one size fits all situation when you’re dealing with people who are struggling to adjust. That will probably backfire unfortunately.

CC: So there may be some people that would come around, they just need a different approach.

AP: And again, this is where the content therapist can help. A consultant can say, “We’ve seen this kind of situation before. This worked fairly well. Maybe try this to get these people on board.”

CC: Okay. And what do you think are some signs that it would just be better to part ways if the transition’s just not going to be a good fit?

AP: You really have to measure and try to be as objective as possible. Is what I’m seeing realistic, valuable feedback that something in this new process isn’t as good as it should be? Or is this just absolute hard line recalcitrant or someone’s just digging in for the sake of digging in and not changing? You’ve got to make that differentiation and it is not an easy thing to do sometimes. So again, you can tell I’m being a little bit hesitant here. We’re talking about people and emotions. Even though this is often driven by business, this still becomes a very emotional decision, an emotional situation for people, and you can’t let that slip by you when you are a manager or someone driving this kind of change.

CC: I think that’s a really good perspective and like you said earlier, that a lot of this, this competency ties into their career identity, their role, it’s a big deal. So to just brush past that would be incredibly invalidating and discouraging. So I think that that’s a really good perspective to help us remember. Again, it’s about people, people are the reason behind the technology, even the business, it’s all about people. So on the positive side of times that this has gone well, can you give any examples, even if they’re unnamed examples of team members that successfully navigated the transition and are thriving in the new system?

AP: I can think of one in particular. We are working with some folks and have been for about a year and a half now, on learning content. And early on there was someone in the group who got it, who understood it and was part really, even though I don’t think he’s management, he really got the big picture and was able to help bring other people on board. He was very involved in one type of content, someone else who was involved in a parallel line of content, not quite the same, was clearly not as on board. But watching the two of them interact and then interact with some of our consultants, it was great to see the enthusiasm of this one person who got it start to get into the other people on that call, especially the one who was working on that parallel track who didn’t at first seem quite as on board. Watching her come on board with help and input from us and her coworker, that was a great thing to actually watch happen and it was very rewarding.

Again, it wasn’t just us, it was someone else in the organization who understood the big picture and was able to help communicate that and get someone else that he worked with to understand that, that was a great situation.

CC: Yeah, that’s a great example. I know as consultants, we’re brought in for this unique transition and then once the transition, the training is complete, that’s kind of the end of the project. But are you ever able to see, down the line in recurring projects, team members that you worked with initially during the transition that are now years established in either their new role or just the new tools that they’re using, I mean, you’re able to see how they’ve adapted?

AP: Oh yes, because just because we’ve wrapped up the primary implementation and the training, there’s often things that need to change down the road. Just like you change systems because of business requirements, those newer business requirements may require tweaks to the new system and optimizing it to handle new business requirements. So we’ll often come in later and help them make some changes and we will work with people who are now living, breathing the system as if it’s something they’ve been doing their whole lives. That’s not uncommon.

CC: Yeah. And it’s encouraging to hear that people do adapt, the transition can and very often is very successful. It is, though, a big change.

AP: And it’s a long-time process. You are not going to snap your fingers and have this happen in two months, you’re not. Just realize it can take months to get something like this done and you can’t rush it just to get tech implemented and forget about the people angle. That happens. You’ve got to be very careful not to just think everything is about implementing the tech and the people are secondary. I would advise not to fall into that trap. It is a very easy trap to fall into, don’t do it.

CC: Yeah, I like that. And I think you brought up a good point too, that knowing that it’s a very long process and it’s not just wrapped up in a couple of months is a good perspective to keep in mind, because even just the length of a transition can sometimes be wearing on a person or on a team.

AP: It can be, but on the flip side, I would say sometimes it can be a gift when you have the time, because it gives you the time to communicate why you’re doing what you’re doing and then build it and then train people on it.

CC: Yeah.

AP: There’s this very fine balance you have to strike. You can’t let things drag on forever with analysis paralysis, that can happen, and I have seen it happen. On the flip side, you can’t rush things and basically get six months of work done in six weeks, it doesn’t work that way either. You’ve got to find that sweet spot and let reality, especially reality based on things that consultants have already experienced, can give you a more realistic view of when things are really going to get implemented and people are going to buy into your new system.

CC: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Alan, are there any other things that are coming to mind that you want either the content creators going through a transition, managers or anyone else involved in the process, is there anything else you can think of that we haven’t covered yet that would be good to keep in mind for successfully navigating a transition to a new system?

AP: Making this kind of transition can be a pain point itself. Figure out how to communicate and explain why you’re having that pain and maybe the system or the support for the system will be better because you were able to articulate that.

CC: And I love that. Really, as we’ve talked all about this, it’s sounding to me the biggest tools that are going to set you up for success are communication and holding space to hear about and accept feedback for what people are going through. So really, it’s all about people and the approach to helping navigate the transition, is just being a really kind human to get people through this, that’s what I’m hearing from you.

AP: And unfortunately, sometimes kind humans have to make difficult decisions.

CC: Yeah. And that’s hard.

AP: And that’s hard.

CC: Yeah. Yeah. So I think these are really good tips for how you can navigate that transition even if it’s really difficult.

AP: Right.

CC: Well, thank you so much, Alan. I really appreciate you taking the time today. Anything else that you can think of before we wrap up?

AP: I think people probably have had their fill of me for this episode.

CC: Not at all, this was great. Well, thank you so much for being here and thank you for listening to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

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In episode 146 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and Christine Cuellar talk about how teams adjust when content processes change, and how you can address the question, “Why do I have to work differently?”

This is part one of a two-part podcast. 

“One of these kinds of business drivers can be a merger or an acquisition. When you end up combining two companies, you can have two separate workflows. Both of them are not going to win — they’re just not. […] But again, I mean, I have a lot of sympathy for these people. A lot of times they are asking this for legitimate reasons. ‘Why is this happening?’ ‘Why am I having to do this?’ That’s when you’ve got to help them step back and look at the bigger business situation.”

— Alan Pringle

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Transcript:

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 how teams adjust when content processes change, and how you can address the question, “Why do I have to work differently?” This is part one of a two-part podcast. 

Hi, I’m Christine Cuellar.  

Alan Pringle: And I’m Alan Pringle.

CC: Alan, thanks so much for being here today. So, I want to pick your brain about this because we always talk about how people are the “why” behind technology. So, I want to specifically focus on the people and how they adjust to a change when we come in and help a company completely restructure their content operations, because of course that’s a big transition. Maybe a company’s restructuring their content operations, transitioning to a different CMS or CCMS, or implementing one for the first time. How do teams react to the dilemma of a team member saying something along the lines of, “I don’t understand why I have to change. I don’t understand why I have to work differently. I’ve been producing good content for years. Why do we have to make a change?” Where is this coming from and what’s your experience dealing with this?

AP: In the defense of that person, they may have become experts in using a particular tool, a particular process, and really gotten their use of that tool down to a fine science. They are using it to its maximum potential. So their professional identity is somewhat focused on their competence and their ability in that tool. And if someone comes in and say, “Guess what, we got to change things up,” I can understand the disconnect. “Why? I’ve been doing this well. Why?”

Well, you touched on the whys a little bit. A lot of times it can be a situation, for example, where the current content and the way it’s put together is no longer supporting the business goals of the whole company. It’s a bigger picture thing. So, people get hung up in their world and their focus on this particular little track of content and the processes and the tools, but maybe that track isn’t fitting the big picture anymore.

So that can be one reason why things need to change. And one of these kinds of business drivers can be a merger or an acquisition. When you end up combining two companies, you can have two separate workflows. Both of them are not going to win. They’re just not. That’s redundant. That can be a reason for that. But again, I mean, I have a lot of sympathy for these people. A lot of times they are asking this for legitimate reasons. Why is this happening? Why am I having to do this? That’s when you’ve got to help them step back and look at the bigger business situation.

CC: Yeah, that makes sense. How much does their role change? I mean, I know every case is different, but what could a content creator expect in their role change? Are they minor changes? Is it top to bottom, a completely different process of doing things? What does that typically look like?

AP: It really depends on the situation and how the processes are running now. Some processes may be more efficient than others. Some may need a whole lot more help to help meet those business goals. So there is that situation. There’s this entire spectrum basically you have to look at and what you kind of need to do is figure out ways of mapping how people are doing things or that mindset to the newer, more efficient content operations. Help people understand this is going to become this, that’s going to become this, and so on. So it’s almost like a content modeling exercise. It’s more of a process model matching where you are saying, “This is how you were doing it, this is how you’re going to be doing it.”

And if you can start making those connections and explaining those things without diving immediately into the tech, because a lot of times that is a huge turnoff and runs people off. Don’t jump in talking tools first.

And there have even been some times where we have gone in as an organization, a consultancy, and maybe talked a little too high up the tech scale, and we realize and course corrected and brought things back down. You can talk about things without getting too techy, too much mired into the tools upfront, and I think that helps give more of a comfort level as you start talking about change, which is a scary thing.

CC: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Actually I feel like I’ve experienced that a little bit. I know that I’m starting to use some systems on our team, not very many, not nearly as much as our other technical experts on the team, but I’ve used Oxygen a little bit, but that was only after hearing what it does, everything we say about structured content, all the benefits and the vision behind that. So I feel like that has really helped because the technical aspect of it, I mean, when I was just trying to publish my changes essentially that I know it was such a simple thing to do, but it took me forever. I had to get help from the team. So it was a technical challenge for me. But because I knew the vision behind it and the purpose of why we were using this tool and why we write it this way versus just pulling that in a Google Doc, that kind of thing, which I’m used to, that really helped.

AP: Right. No, and what you’re describing is very much you were moving more from a model of doing collaborative authoring and reviewing in a Google Doc kind of simultaneous shared editing to an XML authoring tool, which is what Oxygen is, and you were writing things more in small XML modular chunks that then we put together, remix and put together to create different things. In the case that you’re talking about, it is a book that we have out, the Content Transformation book. Now, years ago when we were doing books, we would do it more in desktop publishing. Now we’re doing it in XML. What you’re describing, that shift, is very much what you have to do, but it was on a much smaller scale because it was really just you in this case.

CC: Yes.

AP: And some organizations, you may be talking dozens of people, and imagine what you went through times 12, 24, 36 people. That’s daunting. You have to be very careful how you approach that.

CC: That totally makes sense, and I like that you tied that earlier to you have to explain that change and explain what’s happening and the purpose behind it. Speak more at a higher level first so everyone can feel comfortable with that before you move into the technology. Because I really feel like that’s also what helped set me up for success. And I would say I use that very minimally. That’s not a big part of my role. But if this is going to change the core functions of your role, I could see how people are pretty intimidated or frustrated or feeling lots of things about a massive change like this.

AP: And again, everybody’s going to have a slightly different perspective. There are going to be some people who recognize the big picture immediately and say, “I get this. I understand why we need to make this change.” Some people may have been doing something similar in another job, so they have experience with this. If you can get these people who will act as basically proponents, evangelists, I kind of hate that word, but it’s actually a pretty good fit in this case, who can get people on board, help them see that big picture when you are making this kind of shift, that’s great because it’s not just a third party, a consultant, an outsider telling you what you have to do. You have someone that you’ve worked with and that you know, saying, “Yeah, this makes sense to me. This is what we’re going to do.” And they can kind of bring people on and turn the tide and get people to understand why this change needs to happen.

CC: That’s a great point. It builds a lot of confidence when someone you know has already done the process and then it ended up being a success, or they ended up finding their way to be comfortable in their role through it. So that’s a great point. I hadn’t thought of that. In other situations where that transition as a whole has been navigated really well for the team, what do you think the key points are that set the team up for success in either changing that mindset of why do I have to change or avoiding the mindset?

AP: I mean, basically it’s good communication. That sounds so elementary and just not helpful, maybe not a good answer, but it is absolutely. You have got to go in there with this very open communication, this very open mindset. Let me lay it all out on the table for you. Let me explain everything to you. Going in there with a more dictatorial style, “This is how it’s going to be, it is this way or the highway,” good luck with that, because you’re going to need it.

CC: Yeah. No one responds well to that and you don’t have your opinions and perspective validated. And like you said at the very beginning of the podcast, this perspective of feeling frustrated with the change or overwhelmed by the change is completely valid because change is hard, and I like that you brought it back to communication. I think communication is, it’s a very, I wouldn’t say simple, but it’s a straightforward answer that may seem like a simple solution, but so many areas would be improved with communication. It’s just hard, I think, for people to communicate. So how do you as a consultant help empower good communication?

AP: There’s a very sad truth behind consultancy, and that is you can go in as a third party and say the exact same things people in-house at that company have been saying for weeks, months, and no one’s been listening to them, but you come in there and say the same thing or rephrase it a little differently and all of a sudden light bulbs go off. I know it is maddening to the employees who were screaming, “I’ve been saying this the whole time,” but that’s just life. It’s how it is.

There’s one other angle here too where I think consultants are helpful and that is helping from the perspective in figuring out the reasons people may be resisting change. The whole competency in my tool set thing we talked about early in the podcast, that’s one of them, but there’s some other, shall we say, more negative, nefarious things that a consultant can spot from a mile away generally. There are going to be some people, and only some, this is not everybody, who may have created processes or made things more difficult to basically justify their existence to make themselves look more valuable than perhaps they are. I know this sounds terrible, but I have seen it multiple times. And they have created something sort of convoluted so they can kind of make themselves the hero.

CC: The ones, yeah.

AP: They are sometimes going to try to sandbag your project to keep things from happening because they are threatened by it. That, to me, is distinctly different from the very valid, “I’m really good at this tool. This has worked well. Why are we changing?” Those are two very distinct things and I don’t want them to be conflated because they’re different, but there can be some negative things going on when you’re changing processes and you need to be aware that that reality is there.

CC: That’s a good point because I’m sure most organizations don’t expect that. You certainly don’t hope for that. So that’s a good warning flag to know. And you mentioned that as a consultant you can see it a mile away. How are some of the ways that you can see those insights more than maybe an organization?

AP: It is because we have gone in and done it so many times. How many times are you going to change processes in your career? Maybe once, maybe twice. I guess it depends on how much you float around. A consultant, though, they will do it multiple times in a year with multiple different people, sometimes concurrently. There’s this whole, basically you build all this experience and as you build it, you can hone it and use it to help other people. That’s the difference. And even if you don’t hire a consultant to come in during a time of process change, if you can hire someone or bring someone on board, maybe even as an employee, who has been through this before and can kind of act as a mini consultant in the sense they’ve been through it before, that can also be a very valuable way to help with this kind of situation.

CC: That sounds like it. So looking at management’s perspective now, whether that’s high level management or direct supervisors that are hearing this feedback, what do you recommend they do? How do you recommend they respond when they hear this kind of feedback from the team?

AP: Again, it comes to communication. You have to explain, these are the drivers for why we’re doing what we’re doing. This is why the current things don’t work anymore. I need your help to get things more in sync with where we are headed as an organization. That’s one way you can do it. And notice, I didn’t mention tech in there at all. Don’t lead with tech if you can help it. It always comes up, like I said. People who are very good at a tool, the first thing they’re going to do is say, “What tool are we going to use?” A lot of times you may not know the answer to that question when you’re getting rolling because maybe you need to assess the situation, have the consultant figure out what’s the best fit for you. So again, don’t race to the tools and don’t let people in your organization race to tools as the primary part of that conversation. It won’t end well.

CC: That’s a good point to keep in mind that people will probably want to know that, which would make sense. I mean, if I was going through that big of a change, that would probably be my first question, too.

AP: And sometimes the answer to that is I don’t know yet. We’re working on it.

CC: That makes sense. But I like the emphasis on having that transparency, having that good communication to say even if we don’t know what the tool is yet, here’s some of the reasons this change is happening. It also sounded like there may be some proactive or preventative communication that managers can have to share the vision, or maybe giving a heads-up about the change even before the process starts, just letting them know.

AP: Absolutely, before. You don’t just announce this. You don’t. This needs to be a very deliberate, thought out process. And part of that deliberate process is the communication and getting the ball rolling. Basically, it’s like a pre-project kickoff. You have got to start talking to people before you even start doing anything with the consultant or with new tools or whatever new thing. Get those communications rolling early and make them as two-way as possible. You need as a manager, a director, you need to take in feedback and kind of synthesize it and figure out what you can do to mitigate the concerns that people are having. And there’s also the idea, you’ve got to kind of filter, are these legitimate concerns, legitimate worries people are having, or is this somebody just sandbagging things because they refuse to change? You’ve got to make that call. Again, nobody wants to believe there are people in the organization who will do that, but usually there’s always at least one, unfortunately.

CC: Yeah, that’s hard. And I’m sure that’s why it’s helpful to have a third party, like you said, whether that’s a consultant or whether that’s just another employee that’s been through the process or some kind of outside voice that can help with that, that can really take the pressure off of trying to identify that that’s going on while you’re also just trying to navigate the change. Because I’m sure there’s a ton on a manager’s task load just trying to navigate the change.

AP: Right. But even so, you can’t let communications stop. That can’t be what goes away because you’re in a jam.

CC: Yeah.

AP: Again, it won’t end well. Keep those communications up and running as long and as hard as you can.

CC: Yeah, that’s a good point. And we do have a lot of other podcasts and articles that touch on this subject. So if you look at our website, there’s a lot of change management articles because that’s kind of what this process is called, right, Alan? Change management is how we refer to how team members navigate the transition, but also how the logistics of the transition happen.

AP: Right. And another component of this is not just communication, it’s also training. People need to know how to use the new processes, the new tools. You can’t just put something together and say, “Have at it.” It doesn’t work like that. There are going to be best practices that are very specific to your organization and your use of that tool set. And you need to communicate those thoroughly to your staff. And training is one way to do that.

CC: Yeah. All right, I think that’s a good place to wrap up for now, but we will be continuing this discussion in our next podcast episode. So Alan, thank you so much for being here.

AP: Absolutely.

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.

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In episode 145 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar discuss the impact content operations has on your learning and training content, and how to make the most out of this valuable asset. 

“If the company is looking to implement something within a specific time frame for a very specific business need, and that gets delayed at the beginning when training is being developed, it’s going to snowball down. So, your six-week delay on getting content out the door might turn into a six-month delay on getting the program rolled out.”

— Bill Swallow

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Transcript:

Hi, I’m Christine Cuellar, and with me today I have Bill Swallow. Hi, Bill!

Bill Swallow: Hey there.

CC: Thanks for joining us.

BS: No problem.

CC: So we’ve been talking a lot more about learning and training content. I know it’s been coming up in a lot of new projects, client conversations, and I’d love to dig more into it and understand just from a really basic perspective, what is learning and training content? What do we mean by that?

BS: I think probably most people are fairly familiar with training content in general, so it’s content that guides you through learning something. But the scope of that is broadening quite a bit, and it’s actually been broad for quite some time. You have everything from instructor-led classes to textbooks to online learning, learning assessments. There’s a myriad of different types of training out there, and increasingly they’re looking for better ways of managing all of that information that they’re constantly churning out for a variety of different audiences.

CC: Okay. When we talk about learning and training, are we talking about the educational space or are we talking about any space that has training?

BS: It really could be anywhere. Educational space is a good one, so certainly institutions of learning, whether it’s be schools, universities, or what have you, but a lot of corporations have a good deal of training content as well, particularly in areas of manufacturing where people really need to be instructed on the correct ways of performing certain operations. Otherwise, it could risk injury or death. And then of course, you have all the regulated industries as well, whether it be in any kind of manufacturing, any kind of development, or even in finance or healthcare or what have you. There are very specific things that people need to do in a very specific way so it’s important for them to have all of this training content so that their people know what they’re supposed to do and how they’re supposed to do it.

CC: Gotcha. Okay. And then to define what we talk about with content operations, what do we mean by that? Because I know that’s a term really similar to content strategy, you see it in a lot of different industries and a lot of different places. So, what do we mean by content operations?

BS: Down to its essence, content operations is the way that you approach writing, editing, distributing, publishing your content. So it’s the how of what you’re doing. So it really encompasses the entire spectrum of working with content.

CC: Okay. So I know we’ve talked about in previous podcasts that this applies beyond just product and technical content. This applies to learning and training, this applies to marketing. Any content that you’re creating falls under content operations. So what are some of the unique challenges that you have to think about when you’re specifically producing learning and training content versus other kinds of content that we’ve talked a lot about?

BS: The most unique challenge with learning content is getting your arms around the sheer scope of information that’s required.

CC: Really? Okay.

BS: A lot of people don’t understand exactly how much work goes into producing a series of training, whether it be online, instructor-led, self-paced, or what have you. And what we’ve heard from a lot of different companies is that there needs to be a more efficient way of managing that process so that people aren’t writing the same thing five, six, seven, eight times and just freeing up people to make sure that the content is correct and not making sure that everything is formatted absolutely perfectly for every single place where it needs to go.

Likewise, there’s the case where the training might be provided in multiple different ways. The same exact training could be written down so that someone can read it and understand what they need to do. It could be delivered in an instructor-led class, whether that be in person or online, and it could be as part of an e-learning sequence where people go into a self-paced portal and take the training there. And what we’re seeing is that there’s a lot of manual work to make sure that all of the information is updated in all of those different places. A lot of times it comes down to these tools that they’re using just don’t talk to each other very well so they have to cut and paste or copy paste from one place to another. And then when something gets updated, they have to remember all the different places where they’ve copied and pasted this information.

CC: Yeah. Which is probably not going to happen. I mean, there’s probably something that’s going to get missed, or it just would take a lot longer.

BS: Yeah. Or they need lots of different steps of approval for each piece of content that they’re developing, which also takes time.

CC: Yeah. And like you mentioned earlier, since a lot of the content in these trainings have life-saving information that you need to know how to operate things correctly or do things correctly — when the scales really can be life and death, you want to be sure you have the most accurate information in those trainings, because even if you missed just one spot, I could see how that’s really crucial. And it sounds like having content operations in place to create your learning and training content makes you more scalable because you’d be able to deliver more content faster. It also helps with your delivery time because maybe you wouldn’t have to go through all of those stages of approvals if you have some of the tools taking that burden off of the writers and the managers. Is that accurate to say, do you think?

BS: I’d say it’s fairly accurate.

CC: Okay.

BS: I think what’s more important here is that content operations really is, it’s a mix of different things. It’s a process for how you’re developing your content, it’s having the right tools in place for the right job, and it’s having a very specific workflow at every stage of the content development and delivery procedure. I don’t want to say it’s an assembly line, but it’s more of a complete agreement of what we’re doing and what we’re using to do it with, and making sure that each thing that is being done in the content development and delivery process is done to maximize the amount of benefit that’s being provided. So first and foremost, it’s getting the content correct and making sure that you’re not putting wrong information in there. The other is making sure that you’re not spending time rewriting the same thing that was already written, could be not having to spend hours upon hours fiddling with a particular layout for a particular piece of delivery. And finally, it’s being able to make sure that once the content is ready to go, that it gets to where it needs to go as efficiently as possible.

CC: Yeah. I noticed that you mentioned having the right tools doing the right function is something that we focus on in content operations, and that completely makes sense but I didn’t even think of that before. People have good tools in place but they’re not using them correctly, or they could actually have a better fit that they don’t even realize. Is that a big problem that we encounter a lot?

BS: It’s fairly common. It’s not a horrible problem but it does cause a bit of churn, especially when you’re trying to share content with other people, because one person may be doing one particular thing and another person might be doing something quite different.

An easy way to look at it is developing a Word document, let’s say. One person is handed a template and they follow that template to the letter. They use every single style in there. They tag everything exactly how it’s supposed to be. And the other person just goes in there and writes and formats it and maybe chooses styles here and there based on whether it looks good to them. So they don’t necessarily follow the template. Now, if you want to move content from one document to another or you need to update the template, one document’s going to reformat very well, and the other document is going to require an awful lot of cleanup.

CC: So that leads me into another question, can you walk me through what a typical content project looks like for learning and training content when someone’s looking to get better content ops for their learning and training content? It sounds like that project probably starts once they’re experiencing a lot of pain in the process, so there’s probably a good amount of learning and training content that’s already been created and I’m assuming has to be moved over. Can you walk me through that timeline and what people can expect initially and how the project proceeds?

BS: Sure. And you’re right, the projects usually begin with someone identifying a very big problem that isn’t being solved with immediate fixes. So they’ve tried a few things, they’ve made some slight improvements, but they’re still seeing that a lot more needs to be done, and they may or may not know what needs to happen to make those changes that they need to see. So a lot of times people will reach out because they are becoming increasingly overwhelmed with the amount of content that they are producing. Other times you’ll see people reach out when they go through some type of a merger and suddenly they have training content coming from two, three, five different organizations that all need to be aligned into one particular brand, one particular focus or what have you. Or they’re just changing up their complete tool set and they’re looking at, “Okay, we have groups A, B, and C using different tools and we want to use a completely different architecture for developing our content. We need help getting our arms around this.” So there are a lot of different reasons, but a lot of it comes down to understanding that they need an efficient way to improve their processes is basically what it comes down to.

CC: Okay. And you mentioned there’s a couple people that often reach out, but it sounds like the people that are experiencing the most pain and not getting that resolved are the ones to reach out. What roles are those people who generally reach out for better content operations or the solution that they aren’t really sure exists?

BS: It does vary. We hear from everyone, from those who are producing content, who understand there’s a problem and they’re poking around for ways to make things better, all the way up to some executive level person or director level person who’s in charge of making things better and needs some help figuring out how they’re going to make this happen.

CC: Yeah. What are some of the things that they may have noticed? I’m sure they’ve heard complaints from their team, but if they’re not actually experiencing the pain day-to-day, what are some of the ways that it gets, I guess, big enough that they start to notice?

BS: I think the big one there is making sure that they are delivering content on time. So if they are constantly behind in rolling out training to various different groups, that’s certainly a problem because, like we talked about earlier, you don’t want to be in a situation where someone doesn’t know how to perform a specific operation and someone gets hurt along the way, especially in those cases. It’s somewhat easy to forgive someone for some amount of data loss or lost time or something like that, but it’s quite a different thing when you’re sending ambulances to the office or to the facility. So we want to make sure that’s not happening.

And also, it can do with being able to roll out programs and roll out new initiatives. So if the company is looking to implement something within a specific time frame for a very specific business need, if that gets delayed at the beginning when training is being developed, it’s going to snowball down. So your six-week delay on getting content out the door might turn into a six-month delay on getting the program rolled out.

CC: That’s true. So in the big picture they’re just seeing content being delayed, things starting to slow down and in turn slowing other business processes down?

BS: Hopefully they’re just starting to see it.

CC: Yeah, yeah. Hopefully it’s very, very early on. So on the flip side of that, when a company is able to implement strong content operations in their learning and training content or really throughout their whole organization, what are some of the benefits they get to see aside from just it’s less painful? Which I know is probably the biggest benefit because that’s why they’re coming for content ops in the first place.

BS: I think it really depends on what the goal of the improvements are for a particular organization. But generally what they will start seeing is things being more efficiently done and all the players involved know what they’re supposed to do, how they’re supposed to do it, where to look for things, who to contact for things, and what the next step in the process is going to be. So ultimately there’ll be a better idea of how they’re producing this throughout the entire life cycle of the content chain.

CC: Okay. Yeah, that sounds great. That sounds like a lot less burden on the team as well. I’m sure that everyone involved appreciates that. It just sounds a lot better.

BS: One other aspect to making these improvements is being able to reduce the amount of time, obviously, that a lot of this work takes because it is a very tedious process to develop all of these different types of training. So if a team can reduce the amount of time being spent authoring content, for example, by reusing content rather than copying and pasting it, so being able to take what someone else has already written and use it wholesale rather than copying, pasting, rewriting, and so forth. If they have solid templates in place and writing practices that support that template use, then they can see a lot of publishing time reduced as well. And likewise, chances are they’re probably translating all of this content as well to many different audiences. So the more they have their arms around being able to develop the source content, the easier it’s going to be to get the translation worked done.

CC: Yeah, absolutely. One other question I was thinking of was that it sounds like a big part of this is tool selection, making sure you have the right tools in place that are helping out the whole process and automating what you can. What is involved in the people side of things, as far as people adjusting to a different form of content operations? What does that adjustment look like?

BS: It can be tricky. A lot of people just in general, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but people generally are resistant to change. They’ve been working some way for five, six, seven years longer and suddenly they’re being asked to work a different way, it can be a little daunting. And at times it’s easy to sit back and say, “I don’t understand why I have to work differently. I’ve been producing good stuff for years. Why do I have to do it differently?” And sometimes what we do is we take a look at the whole picture and we try to paint a very clear picture of why the change benefits everyone.

And there has to be also a communication and understanding that it’s going to be a give and take. You may lose your favorite authoring tool or you may not get to write or rewrite the content 100% in your own way, there may be a very specific way of writing now, but the goal of the training is really what is going to drive the change. What is needed to deliver this training? Who needs it? Why do they need it? Why does it need to be, for example, completely consistent across the board no matter where it’s delivered? Looking at that bigger picture and the bigger wins is a good way of framing it.

CC: Yeah. Absolutely. If you as a listener are interested in learning more about how we do all of this at Scriptorium, we are going to be at some more learning content conferences in the future, such as TechLearn in September of 2023. So there’s going to be more opportunities for you to meet our team, talk more about this and ask more specific questions.

Bill, is there anything else you can think of when it comes to learning and training content that you want to be sure we communicate that people understand when it comes to why content ops help this content and these processes so much?

BS: I think the biggest takeaway is not so much looking for small wins but it’s looking at how you can make your training development process as efficient as possible and as effective as possible. Both go hand in hand. You can’t sacrifice one for the other. If you sacrifice effectiveness for efficiency, then you’re just really good at pumping out bad training content.

CC: That’s true.

BS: And likewise, if you sacrifice it the other way, you’ve got really good training content that’s going to be available to people at some point in the future.

CC: TBD. Yeah. Yeah, that’s a really good point. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about this and just help us understand more about learning and training content and content ops.

BS: Thank you.

CC: 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 Optimize learning and training content through content operations (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 144 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle (Scriptorium) and special guest Rich Dominelli (Data Conversion Laboratory) tackle the big topic of 2023: artificial intelligence (AI).

“I feel like people anthropomorphize AI a lot. They’re having a conversation with their program and they assume that the program has needs and wants and desires that it’s trying to fulfill, or even worse, that it has your best interest at heart when really, what’s going on behind the scenes is that it’s just a statistical model that’s large enough that people don’t really understand what’s going on. It’s a model of weights and it’s emitting what it thinks you want to the best of its ability. It has no desires or needs or agency of its own.”

— Rich Dominelli

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Transcript:

Alan Pringle: Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. Hi everyone, I’m Alan Pringle. In this episode, we are going to tackle the big topic of today, artificial intelligence, AI. And I am having a conversation with Rich Dominelli from DCL. How are you doing, Rich?

Rich Dominelli: Hi Alan. Nice to meet you.

AP: Yes. We have talked back and forth about this and I expressed I have a little bit of concern about touching this topic. There is so much bad coverage on AI out there right now. Click bait-y, garbage-y headlines, breathless reporting, and I’m hoping we can kind of temper some of that and have a discussion that’s a little more down to earth and a little more balanced. And let’s start talking about what you do at DCL and then we can kind of get into how AI connects to what you’re doing at DCL.

RD: Sure. As you know, Data Conversion Labs has been around since 1981, and we are primarily a data and document conversion company. So my role at DCL is a architect for the various systems at DCL that covers a wide variety of topics, including implementing workflows, doing EAI style integrations to obtain new documents, and also looking for ways of improving our document conversion pipeline and making sure that conversions are working as smoothly and automatically as possible.

AP: And I’m hearing a lot about automation and programming and I can see AI kind of fitting into that. So what are you seeing? How are you starting to use it? And you may already be using it at DCL.

RD: So AI is a very broad term and I feel like it’s something that’s been kind of shadowing my career since the dawn of time. Back in the Reagan era in the 80s when I was graduating from high school and looking to start my college career, I was told at the time not to enter computer science as a field because computer programming had maybe two or three years left and then computers going to be programming themselves with case tools and there won’t be any careers for computer programmers anymore except a couple of people here and there to push the button to tell the computer to go. That obviously hasn’t panned out.

AP: No.

RD: Although I feel like every few years this is a topic that starts cropping up again. But at DCL we have used what we would call machine learning more than AI. And I guess the differentiation there is machine learning is using statistical analysis to process things in an automated fashion. For example, OCR and text to speech were both pioneered by Ray Kurzweil.

AP: And OCR is, just for the folks who may not know.

RD: Sure. Optical Character Recognition. Taking text or printed words or even handwriting and analyzing it and generating computer readable text out of it, taking that image of a file and converting it to text. So as I said, Ray Kurzwell did some early pioneering work on that in the late 80s, early 90s, and eventually worked on models of the human mind and comprehension. And I think that’s what people are envisioning now when they say the word AI. But even the panorama mode in your camera is a version of machine learning and AI. It takes the ability to stitch images together smoothly and processes that automatically.

Other places at DCL where we do use AI on an ongoing basis is we do natural language processing, looking at unstructured texts and trying to extract things like references, locations, entity recognition where we have a block of texts and buried in that block of texts is a reference to a particular law, or a particular document, or a particular location or person. So that type of work we’ve done. We use it for math formula recognition. So if we have an academic journal that has a large amount of mathematical formulas, for example, we do some work for the patent office and patent applications frequently have mathematical or chemical formulas in them.

AP: Sure.

RD: Putting that information out and recognizing that it is there to be extracted out would be an application of AI that we use all the time.

AP: With the large language models that we’re seeing now, a lot of them are kind of reaching out and people can start experimenting with them. What are you seeing in regard to those kinds of situations? I don’t know if public facing is the right word, but the stuff that’s more external to the world right now.

RD: It is certainly the most hyped aspect of AI right now.

AP: Exactly.

RD: … where you can have a natural language conversation with your computer and it will come back with information about the topic you’re looking for. And I think that it has some great applications for things like extracting or summarizing text. It’s a little risky though. For example, I have a financial document, a 10K form from IBM. Buried in that document is a list of executive officers and a statement of revenue. And I ask ChatGPT, “Given this PDF file, give me a list of executive officers.” And interestingly enough, it does come back with a list of executive officers, but it’s not the same list that appears in a file. It’s a list that it found somewhere else in its training data. When I say please summarize the table on page 31, it does come back with a table, but the information that appears on it is not what is on that page of the PDF app. And in the artificial intelligence world, this is called a hallucination. Basically the AI is coming back with a false statement. It thinks it’s correct or it’s trying to convince you it’s correct, but it’s not.

AP: Yep.

RD: So that is very concerning to me, because obviously we want as accurate as possible when you’re doing document conversions. And if that doesn’t occur all the time, I mean if it came back with an accurate example, but let’s say two or 5% of the files that I throw at it, it comes back with fiction. That’s not an acceptable thing because it’ll be very hard to detect. It looked really good until I went back and said, oh wait a minute, wait, where did it get that from?

AP: We have done some experiments and I’m sure a lot of people listening have too. Like I asked for a bio on myself and it told me that I worked at places where I have never worked. So yeah, it’s not reliable. And I think there’s another element here too that scares me beyond the reliability. A lot of these models are training on content that doesn’t really belong to the person who put together the engine that’s doing this. It’s compiling copyrighted content that doesn’t belong to them. I think there are a lot of legal concerns in this regard. I was talking with someone on social media about how you can maybe use AI to break writer’s block. The group, The Pet Shop Boys, the songwriter, and the vocalist of that group, Neil Tennant recently said, I have a song that I tried to write 20 years ago and I put it away in a drawer because I couldn’t finish the lyrics.

I wonder if AI could look at the song and the kind of work I’ve done and help me figure out how to finish some of these verses. Now I may turn around and rewrite them and change them, but it might be a way to break writer’s block. And I see that being a useful thing even for corporations. Put basically all of your information in your own private large language model (AI) that doesn’t leak out to the internet. It’s internal. So then you can do some of the scut work, like writing short summaries of things, seeing connections maybe that you haven’t seen. But the minute you get other people’s content, their belongings, other people’s art involved, it becomes very squishy. And I’m sure there are liability lawyers just going crazy right now thinking about all this kind of stuff.

RD: Well, you certainly see a lot of that in the stable diffusion space, the art space.

AP: Yes.

RD: Where AI is being trained on outside artists’ work and are very easily able to mimic those artists often without their permission. I do think you touch on a very important point there, actually two. One, the fact that anything you type into OpenAI by default is being shared with,

AP: Right.

RD: … OpenAI. And as a matter of fact, Samsung, the company just banned OpenAI for all of its employees for that very reason because they had taken to using it for summarizing meeting notes and things like that, and they discovered very quickly that trade secrets were leaking because of that.

AP: Intellectual property. Not a problem, let’s just share it with the world! Yeah.

RD: Yeah. So actually what Samsung is doing is exactly what you said. They’re making an in-house large language model for their employees to continue to be able to do that type of work using that. The other aspect of what you touched on, which is where I think the real sweet spot is right now, using these tools as a way of augmenting your ability.

AP: Yes.

RD: Especially as a developer, just because that’s my space.

AP: Sure.

RD: As a developer, most developers have a stack overflow of Google when they’re trying to research on how to attack a problem properly. “What’s the best way of solving the problem?” Now you have your paired programming buddy ChatGPT, and you can say, “Hey, I need to update the active directory with this and how do I do that?” And ChatGPT will spit out working code, or even better, I can throw code that is obfuscated, whether intentionally or not.

AP: Right.

RD: … at ChatGPT, and it will produce a reasonable summary of what that code is attempting to accomplish. And that is fantastic. And you see tools like Microsoft Copilot, which they’re doing in conjunction with GitHub. Google also is having a suite of Bard tools for helping you do that and that type of thing is starting to leak into other spaces. So Microsoft Copilot, for example, is now being integrated into Office 365. So it will help you while you’re writing your memo, while you’re working on your Excel spreadsheet, while you’re working on your PowerPoint, rephrase things, come up with a better approach. In Excel, it’s great because it’ll tell you, well, this is the best way of approaching this macro, for example, or this formula and that type of thing is, I think, fantastic.

AP: Sure. And I’m more on the content side of things and we’re seeing some of the similar things that you’re talking about. For example, the Oxygen XML Editor has created an add-on that will hook into ChatGTP, PT. Look at me getting that wrong. I do it all the time. FTP, GPT, sorry.

RD: Too many acronyms.

AP: Too many acronyms floating around here. So basically it will, like for example, look at the content you have in a file and write a short summary for you so you don’t have to do it yourself. That could be a very valuable thing, but again, do you want people in the world seeing or getting input from your content? Probably not. So if you could create your own private large language model (AI) and then turn everything into that, I see there’s a lot of value because it will help for example, a lot of people who are writing an XML, it can help clean up their code like you were talking about. Or you could take some unstructured content and it could do probably quite a passable job of cleaning it up, adding structure to what was unstructured content. So I do see some very realistic uses there that could be very helpful. And do I see these things taking away someone’s job? Not right this second in this regard, but I see it basically taking something that’s not so much fun off their plate so they can focus on more important things.

RD: Absolutely. The most recent phrasing I saw for that is it replaces that junior programmer that most groups have that you’re looking to do scut work. This is the person who’s going to do the eight days of data entry to convert everybody over to a new system or that type of thing. That type of work nobody wants to do, but that’s what junior developers get stuck with.

AP: And that is very true, and there is a writer strike going on right now, and part of the concern with that strike is content that may be created by AI. Now, is AI going to write a really good script right now? Probably not. Could it write something that is the starting point, the kernel that someone can then take and do something bigger with, clean it up? Yes. And that may eliminate junior writer positions. So there is some concern, very similar to what you’re talking about. There is this situation where we have to think about how are people going to get into an industry when AI has taken away the entry level jobs. That’s going to be something very difficult to tackle, I think.

RD: I suspect you’re right. But on the other hand, you end up in this collaborative space where if you do have that writer’s block, like you said earlier.

AP: Sure.

RD: This gives you somebody to bounce ideas off of and have a conversation with about the subject, about the program, about the article, or about whatever, the song you’re trying to write, which is fantastic. Now at DCL we have had some success. We are doing some work where we’re using a large language model to associate authors and institutions, for example, out of documents. And we have great success in that. Usually we can programmatically determine it, but on those fuzzy edge cases, and I think that’s where ChatGPT and large language models fit in is when it’s a really fuzzy edge case that it’s difficult to accommodate for all things. We’re actually using it and having good success at matching authors and affiliations on a consistent basis and double checking the work that we’re attaining programmatically.

AP: That’s great.

RD: For having your own ChatGPT clone, there is a lot of work out there. There’s GPT4All, there’s Mosaic, there’s a bunch of things where you can download a large language model to your local machine and run it and the performance is not as great as this massive monolith that OpenAI has going. But it’s not bad depending on what you’re trying to do with it. It’s not quite as advanced as GPT-4. But the nice thing about the open source community and their approach to this is you’re starting to see people iterating constantly. So Facebook was working on their own large language model and intentionally or not, there’s some debate about that. It was leaked out to the internet and it became this iterative community in the machine learning space where people were constantly iterating on this model, expanding the model, growing it.

You can access it now through Mosaic, you can access it through Alpaca and you can access it through GPT4All, and you can actually have those conversations running completely local with ever leaving your PC. So for those types of things, I think it’s great. Now, is it perfect? No. For example, a very easy test. There’s actually a YouTuber named Matthew Berman who tracks a lot of this, and he has a spreadsheet of about 20 tests he gives any new large language model, and a very simple example is most large language models still fail the transitive test. So in other words, if A is greater than B and B is greater than C is a greater than C? Okay. Or if John is faster than Fred and Fred is faster than Sarah, is John faster than Sarah? A lot of them fail that test. They just come back with an erroneous answer. The other issue you see is a lot of the AI models are not being updated constantly. So they’ll still see it as 2021, for example.

AP: Right. And what you just said kind of reminds me of something. All this somewhat overblown talk AI’s going to take over the world. Well, AI’s not going to take over the world if the content that it’s basically scraping, and I know that’s really simplifying things a whole lot. If that content is not good, it’s not updated, humans aren’t putting intelligence in it, it’s not going to be that useful. We still have to provide the underpinnings for a lot of the intelligence in these systems. So are our brains going to be replaced today? Probably not.

RD: No. But the bar, or I guess the bar is getting lower and lower as time moves on.

AP: Fair. That is fair.

RD: It’s definitely getting better. For example, GPT OpenAI has updated ChatGPT where we’ll now actually go out to the net and get more up-to-date information. It may not have internalized that information, but it will actually perform a web search, extract information that way now and come back with it. And that was released recently. You have now work going into how quickly you can train a model, which is a huge thing. GPT-4 has been trained on 100 trillion parameters, which took weeks and weeks of time to train and to do a new one using that methodology would continue that curve. It would take months to train a new one, but there’s now work being done of, okay, if I have a pre-trained model, how do I quickly iterate on that model so that it doesn’t take me weeks? It may just be a question of ingesting new information on a daily basis, a little bit of news feeds or that type of thing.

AP: Sure. Let’s talk about risk to wrap up here. I brought up the copyright angle. What do you see as a big concern here, your biggest concerns?

RD: So, there’s a couple of things that are big concerns of mine. One, I feel like people anthropomorphize AI a lot.

AP: Yes.

RD: They’re having a conversation with their program and they assume that the program has needs and wants and desires that it’s trying to fulfill, or even worse, that it has your best interest at heart when really what’s going on behind the scenes is this is just a statistical model that is as large enough that people don’t really understand what’s going on, but it’s a model of weights and it’s emitting what it thinks you want to the best of its ability. And it has no desires or needs or agency of its own.

AP: Yeah, I want to make t-shirts, Large language models are not people, so yeah.

RD: The other thing is we’re starting to, and there’s some press about this where we’re talking about — bias.

AP: Yes.

RD: A good example of that or not so good example of that is when you have an AI model that hasn’t been trained for anything but western culture. It’s inherently biased towards American values, American positions on the world. What the AI will spit out may not be culturally acceptable in other places and vice versa. I mean, an AI trained in China is probably not going to give you the same response for things that you care about in America.

AP: Yeah.

RD: You can also, a lot of these companies have inherent rules and there’s actually a game going on. Microsoft’s AI started as a program code named Sydney, and there’s an ongoing game that people who are doing prompt hacking or prompt engineering to try to discover all the rules inside Sydney. It’s things like, well, Sydney will never call itself by Sydney and things like that. And it almost starts devolving to the point where you’re dealing with Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics or Robocop’s prime directives, where you have a list of instructions that are overriding the basic approaches that the AI can do. This is probably getting too philosophical for a content program, for a content transformation podcast, but I mean these types of things will color responses. So if you are asking in AI when it’s ingesting a program to emit certain key characteristics, those key characteristics may be shaded by these rules, may be shaded by this training.

AP: And that training came from a person who inherently is going to have biases, right?

RD: Exactly.

AP: Yeah. Yeah.

RD: So that type of thing is a problem.

AP: Yeah. I mean, AI in a lot of ways is a reflection of us.

RD: Yeah.

AP: Because it’s, a lot of times, parsing us and our content, our images, and whatever else. This has been a great conversation. It went some places I didn’t even expect, and that is not a criticism, trust me. So thank you very much, Rich. I very much enjoyed this, and it’s good to have a more balanced kind of realistic conversation about what’s going on here. I appreciate it a whole lot.

RD: Okay. It was very nice talking to you.

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

The post AI: Rewards and risks with Rich Dominelli (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 143 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Christine Cuellar are back discussing the common tripping points companies stumble over while implementing their content management system (CMS) and their component content management system (CCMS). This is part two of a two-part podcast.

“If you’ve got people working in a web CMS and you’ve got people working in a CCMS, and they’ve always worked separately, and then suddenly you ask them to come together and collaborate and maybe have one group or the other choose a new tool so that they can share content, but they’ve never had that process of working together, there’s going to have to be not just a tool solution to get them working together, but a people solution and a whole different mindset in the way that they work together.”

— Gretyl Kinsey

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Transcript:

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. Hi, I’m Christine Cuellar. In this episode, Gretyl Kinsey and I are back continuing our discussion about implementing your CMS and your CCMS. And today, we’re specifically talking about the tripping points that your company should watch out for and other tools to consider as you’re going about this implementation. This is part two of a two-part podcast. Thanks, Gretyl, for coming back on the show.

Gretyl Kinsey: Absolutely.

CC: So what are some more tripping points that can trip organizations up when they’re implementing their web CMS and their CCMS?

GK: Yeah, one big one is kind of what we were talking about with those competing priorities, right? So we talked about having the competing priorities between the creative side and more of the marketing customer facing side versus people who need more structure in their content because of legal and regulatory requirements. And what this often looks like at an organization is that you’ve got your web CMS people, and then your DITA CCMS people and those competing priorities. And one thing that we see a lot of times as a tripping point or something that gets them tripped up when they have to look at maybe aligning on tool selection or getting new systems working together is figuring out how to strike that balance we talked about so that they’re not competing priorities, but they’re instead aligning their priorities. So we do see a lot of common areas where they struggle to come into alignment.

And a few things, a few examples of things where I’ve seen this go wrong are where each group is choosing their own tools without communicating about it. That happens a lot of times, especially if there isn’t really proper involvement from management. People have just been told this group, this department, pick a tool that is going to improve what you’re doing. And then of course you have a whole other department somewhere else that’s being told the same thing. They’re not talking to each other about it at all. And then eventually down the road, they’ve picked their tools, they’re all established, and then something comes up where they realize that they needed those tools to be compatible for sharing content or connecting to each other, and then they can’t. Because when they were choosing the tools, they didn’t think about that. They didn’t talk to each other. So then they’re stuck in a really expensive and painful mess to fix if they need to get past that problem.

So that’s something that we have been called in as consultants to help fix several times, and that we’ve seen organizations take that path without really stopping and thinking, before we evaluate and choose a tool, we’ve got to get all the different groups who might have a use for that tool or need to integrate tools talking to each other. So that’s one big thing that can go wrong. Another one is related to how the upper management at an organization does or does not prioritize content. So one issue we see a lot is where, let’s say one type of content gets prioritized over another, and we’ve seen some examples where they have a very heavy emphasis on training content. Let’s say this organization has an educational focus. It’s all about learning. It’s about the training materials. So maybe they focus on something like a learning management system, but they don’t realize that they also have to deliver some legal documentation.

They also are going to be marketing their services, and they don’t think about aligning all the different tools that these groups are going to be working on. And once again, it’s too late, right? And so what happens when the management is really prioritizing one type of content over all the others, is that when these different groups have those competing priorities, management’s decision makes one group the winner and everybody else the losers when it comes to their priorities.

CC: Oh, yeah.

GK: And so that can make things really tricky if the groups need to work together, but there’s clearly one group being favored, and being given all the budget and all the resources while the others’ needs are being ignored. And then of course, the even worse situation is when upper management does not care about content at all. They don’t really think about content as a priority for the business. And so that’s bad for any or all groups who produce content. So if you’ve got the situation of, let’s say people in a web CMS and people in a CCMS, for example, and those groups both need to be aligning and improving the work that they’re doing, but management doesn’t care about content at all, then that just leaves it as the groups having to fend for themselves, and it kind of can turn into a free for all of the competing priorities because they don’t have any guidance for management.

So I think that’s a really important thing when you’re looking at content from more of the bird’s eye view where we come in as consultants, is we look at not just the content creators, but we look at the different levels of management and particularly the highest level and how much do they prioritize content, and how does that affect their decisions, because that obviously has an effect on the groups producing the content and really can make or break the work they’re doing.

CC: Yeah. And it also affects the business because content is a really big asset in your business, to really bring value to your customers to make your operations flow very smoothly. So I would say that the business is also losing out when you don’t prioritize content. So a lot of times, that resource does go, I guess, untapped.

GK: Absolutely. And then we also see groups struggling to align on their priorities and their tool selection because they’ve always been siloed. So that gets back to sort of what we talked about earlier where you want to avoid those silos just because this is something that can happen. If you’ve got people working in a web CMS and you’ve got people working in a CCMS, and they’ve always worked separately, and then suddenly you ask them to come together and collaborate and maybe have one group or the other choose a new tool so that they can share content, but they’ve never had that process of working together, then there’s going to have to be not just a tool solution to get them working together, but a people solution and a whole different mindset in the way that they work together.

So that can really be challenging for tool selection as well. Because if these people have never even talked to each other, and then you’re asking them to come together and evaluate some new software for one or both groups, then it’s going to make that process, I think, a lot trickier than if they had been working together all along.

CC: Okay. So we’ve seen how upper management not prioritizing content causes a lot of issues. How would you recommend upper management start to be active so that the content departments, all of them, can really feel supported, and they can get the most out of their content?

GK: Yeah. So I think it comes down to a lot of what you said, actually realizing that content is an asset for your business and making it a priority. And then within that, upper management should be taking an active role in helping these groups to choose the tools that are going to work for everyone and benefit the entire organization, and not just leave it up to an individual department to say, “Hey, make a decision.” If you are going to invest in a new system for your organization, then I think it really behooves you as a manager, or especially even at the C level, to make sure that you have a hand in that evaluation and that the tools that you’re selecting are going to benefit the entire company. And then another thing is realizing all the different things that content can do for the business and continuing to invest resources in it.

And that’s not just tools, but also people, making sure that your content creators are going to be maximizing the value and the potential of your content. And the more that you put into that content, the more you’re going to get out of it. So making it that priority. And then of course, taking a leadership role in fostering communication between groups that might have those competing priorities or those competing needs. So this is an area, where I think in particular, we’ve seen it be helpful to bring in an outside voice like a consultant, just because even if you are in upper management and you’ve got sort of that bird’s eye view of your organization, you still are not going to necessarily have the objectivity of an outsider. And so…

CC: Yeah.

GK: … it might help a lot if you’re struggling to get groups who have been, let’s say working in silos, or who are going to have to choose maybe a CMS over here and a CCMS over here. Getting them into alignment, it might just help to get a consultant in to really hone in on what some of the communication issues are, and then help move past it so that you can actually make that selection.

CC: Yeah, absolutely. Getting an outside perspective, I just feel like that always helps because they can see things that you’re not seeing or thinking of and be that third party unbiased voice that really guides you in the right direction. So what are some other tools that might need to be connected to a CCMS as well? I know we’ve talked about… I mean, the big one we’ve been talking about is a CMS and a CCMS. Are there other tools that need to be connected to a CCMS or even to the CMS?

GK: Absolutely. So one example, which I mentioned a little bit earlier, is an LMS or a learning management system. And again, if you are an organization that has a lot of training content, a lot of educational content, a lot of learning material, and that is both for in person or e-learning, or any other kind of non-classroom training, then a learning management system might be really beneficial for the process of storing and creating and managing that particular type of content. And then also another example would be TMS, or translation management system, and then lots of other related translation tools. So this is something we see really commonly if you have to deliver translated or localized content, and it becomes more and more important, so kind of focus that you put on those particular tools, the more languages that you have to translate into because this is really an area where both cost can be an issue, but then also where you have to get it right, because there are a lot of times those legal and regulatory requirements around delivering content in certain locations, in certain languages.

And so that’s something that you really want to make sure that you’re doing correctly so that nobody’s going to get into any trouble. And then another example of a tool you might need to be connected is a DAM, or a digital asset management system. And this is for storing and managing things like images, videos, other digital assets that are used in or delivered with your content. And a lot of times when you look at something like a CMS or a CCMS, those usually have the capability of storing digital assets, but where we see organizations leaning toward using a DAM is if your content is very heavy on digital assets and not just text, or if there’s a lot of sharing of digital assets that has to happen across groups. I know in particular, and we’ve seen this, where for example, if you’ve got heavy machinery and you have a lot of diagrams of not just the machinery, but all the little pieces and parts that go into it that you might be in charge of selling or doing maintenance on, that’s the kind of organization that might have a dam.

Or if material has to have a lot of screenshots and illustrations and things like that, where if you look through any documentation, you would see just as many images, if not more so than words, then that would be an example of an organization where having a dam might work. And with all of these kinds of tools, it’s sort of what we talked about with the connectivity, that you can have either the level one connectivity where they’re actually integrated, or sort of more of the level two where they’re disconnected but can still share content. And this is where it becomes really important to think about a content tool chain or content ecosystem rather than just a disconnected set of tools, right? Thinking about how you’re going to make all of these different tools that you need for different parts of your content processes actually work together as a single working ecosystem.

So if you do need a CMS and a CCMS, and then maybe an LMS, a TMS, a DAM, or any of these other things, then it’s important to think about how you can get them all working together efficiently so that you can get the best value possible out of your overall content production.

CC: Absolutely. And as you’re listening, if you’re in a similar situation trying to make these decisions or figure out what to do with all of these tools that we’ve been talking about, if you ever get stuck, there’s someone who can help, and it’s us. So if you ever have questions, feel free to contact our team. We’d love to help support and get you the information that you need.

GK: Absolutely.

CC: Gretyl, is there anything else you can think of that you want our listeners to be thinking about or understand about balancing their CMS and CCMS implementation that we haven’t already covered?

GK: I think the one last piece of advice I will leave everyone with is to take the time to plan, take the time to really think about and evaluate your priorities, and don’t rush into any purchasing decisions when it comes to these kinds of tools. Like I mentioned, these implementations are major undertakings. They are major investments. They shouldn’t be taken lightly. And if you really want to get the most out of having these different kinds of connected tools or connected systems, then it is imperative to take that time upfront and really do a proper evaluation so that you don’t get stuck with a really expensive purchasing decision that was not the best one for you.

CC: Awesome. Thanks. That’s great feedback. Well, thank you so much, Gretyl, for taking the time today to talk about this — twice!

GK: Absolutely. Thank you.

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 Balancing CMS and CCMS implementation (podcast, part 2) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 142 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Christine Cuellar discuss balancing the implementation of a content management system (CMS), and component content management system (CCMS). This is part one of a two-part podcast.

“When you have two types of content produced by your organization and different groups in charge of that, and maybe they’re in two different systems, that it’s really important to get those groups working together so that they can understand that those priorities don’t need to be competing, they just need to be balanced.”

— Gretyl Kinsey

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Transcript:

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. Hi, I’m Christine Cuellar, and in this episode we’re going to talk about how to balance the implementation of both your CMS, which is your content management system, and your CCMS, which is the component content management system. This is part one of a two-part podcast. I’m here with Gretyl Kinsey. Hi, Gretyl!

Gretyl Kinsey: Hi, Christine. How are you?

CC: I’m doing great. Thanks for being on the show. So, Gretyl, before we get started, I just want to kick off with a real basic question, and I know that we have a lot of content on this that we’ll link in the show notes. What’s the difference between a CMS and a CCMS?

GK: Sure. So a CMS or a content management system is generally a broader term, and that’s for a tool or a system that allows your organization to store and manage content. And this could be talking about a lot of different types of content storage in management and operations around that. A lot of the common ones that we see are things like storing print-based documents such as PDF files or updating and publishing your web pages. So this is really more of an umbrella term that you see for content management.

And then in a narrower scale, a CCMS or a component content management system is a specific type of CMS, and that’s used for creating, storing and distributing structured topic-based content. So, for example, we see this a lot with XML and more specifically DITA content. And the component portion of that name is talking about the fact that you have content in individual topics or chunks, and those are called components, and those are assembled into the deliverables that you send out to your customers.

CC: Gotcha. Okay. So why do a CMS and CCMS need to connect? What kind of integration are we talking about here that we need to be balancing?

GK: Sure. And I want to talk a little bit here about what exactly we mean by connect first, because there are two different angles to this that we see a lot. So one level of connection is when you have actual integration or connectivity between the systems where they hook in and talk to each other. And some systems are built actually with this in mind. So they’re designed to connect out of the box. So you might have a tool that has a web CMS and a CCMS under the same brand, and they’re designed to hook together and communicate. And then other times you could have CMSs and CCMSs that have the ability to connect with each other, but it’s not built that way out of the box. So it would be some kind of a custom connector that’s built like an API that allows them to have that integration.

And then the second level of connection that we talk about is where you have the ability to send content back and forth between two disconnected systems. So rather than that direct connection or integration, this requires a compatible content format and a process for getting that updated content from one system to the other. And this could be a one-way or a two-way connection, but it’s sort of more of a bridge rather than a direct integration where the systems are not actually connected, but they can still share content.

CC: Gotcha.

GK: And so when we’re talking about either of these levels of connectivity, either these types of connectivity, the ultimate goal is to prevent the CMS and the CCMS from becoming disconnected silos, because that is something we do see in a lot of organizations and it can have some real consequences for your content development. So one big one is inconsistent information coming out of each of those two systems. So if you’ve got all of your content in a CMS and then you’ve got a separate CCMS silo and they can’t connect or share content at all, you might have completely different processes for checking that content, making sure the messaging is the same, and if it’s inconsistent, then that looks bad to your customers at best, and then could get your organization into legal trouble at worst. So that’s one really important reason why we want to avoid those kinds of silos.

Another reason is that there can be difficulties with brand consistency and messaging. So this is not just the consistency of your content itself, but how it looks and feels to your customers. And, of course, this can be a really big headache if you ever need to go through a rebranding.

CC: Yeah, the marketer in me is just cringing right now, as you mention it.

GK: Oh, yes. And this is actually a reason that we’ve had some of the organizations who have come to Scriptorium for help is because they needed to go through a company rebranding and they had their content at a bunch of different silos and couldn’t figure out a quick or efficient way to make that rebranding happen. And then of course, that problem can and does get magnified if the rebranding is due to a merger or an acquisition because if you’ve got two or more companies coming together and they’ve all been working in silos, then suddenly how do you get everything rebranded under one name as quickly as possible and as painlessly as possible. If you didn’t have those silos to start with, that could happen a lot more effectively and with a lot less hassle and headache for everyone.

And then of course, another reason to avoid silos is that you waste a lot of time and resources creating and publishing the same content potentially in two different places. If you don’t have a way to share the content, then there may be times when a marketing group that’s working in a CMS needs the same information. So things like technical specifications, if you’re selling a product that people need to know that information about, but then also that same information would obviously be in your tech docs and if you have two disconnected silos like a CMS and a CCMS that can’t integrate or share content, then people would be writing that information twice. And that just wastes a lot of time.

CC: So when it comes to a timeline of the, I guess what we typically see when we’re implementing a CMS and a CCMS, do they get implemented at the same time? Does one of the systems typically come first? What does that standard timeline, I guess for lack of a better word, look like?

GK: Yeah, and I don’t know that there really is a standard per se. I can say that unfortunately they are almost never implemented at the same time.

CC: Oh, gotcha.

GK: If you do have that opportunity to do a complete overhaul and get a CMS and a CCMS at the same time, I would say definitely take advantage because that is pretty rare. What we see more often is having one system that’s already been chosen and established, and then you have to choose another one that will be compatible with it. So whichever one your organization has put in place first, that sort of gives you your parameters and your requirements for the other. From our perspective, we do see more organizations that already have an existing web CMS, because that is a little bit broader. It might manage some more of the parts of the content lifecycle than something like a more structured environment like a CCMS would. And so then what will happen is they’ll realize they have a need for structure and then realize they need a CCMS to manage that content and then need to choose a CCMS that will align and be compatible with the existing web CMS.

CC: Okay. So what are the pros and cons of each of those: implementing together versus separately, that kind of thing?

GK: Yeah, sure. And one thing I also want to point out about that is that there’s a big “it depends” kind of factor, which I know is the thing you hear from every consultant that it depends. But I know that one thing we always look at before we even get into the pros and cons are things like limitations that come into play. And so, one of the big ones we see at almost every organization is the budget. So how much budget do you have? Who controls that money? Are there timeframes in which you have to use it? All of that can really make a lot of your decisions for you about implementing, whether it is one system or more than one system at the same time.

And then of course, you have deadlines and timeframes that are set by your organization around their production schedule and other goals. And so that can also be a really big limitation for implementing a new system. And then of course, it’s important to think about what business needs are actually driving the decision to implement a new system or maybe more than one new system in the first place. So all of those are the big considerations that we think about first.

And then when we think about the pros and cons, like I said, if you are implementing a CMS and a CCMS at the same time, the big advantage is that’s rare. You want to take advantage of that opportunity, because you can evaluate both systems at the same time instead of already being locked into one tool and then having to make another tool fit with that. So that’s obviously the major advantage that you have is that you have more of that freedom to look at your options and maybe pick something that’s going to be a really good fit for you without sort of limitations or parameters.

But of course, that being said, sometimes those parameters can be good. So if you already have, let’s say the typical scenario, you already have a CMS in place, maybe if you didn’t have that in place, you would be looking at five or six CMSs and then five or six CCMSs as well. And you have a lot more tools to evaluate in the first place. You have a lot more areas of compatibility to assess. And so that timeframe is going to take longer to make that decision. And you can get bogged down by indecision-

CC: That’s true.

GK: By saying, maybe we have two or three options that would all be good fits for different reasons. But if you already have, let’s say your CMS in place and then you’re just looking for a CCMS that can play nicely with it, maybe you’re only narrowed down to two or three options. And it takes a lot less time to really find out what the right decision is. So there are pros and cons in that way.

CC: That’s true.

GK: Another thing to think about also is just risk. Because implementing any system is a huge undertaking. It takes a long time. You have to go all the way from the evaluation to making the selection, to getting everything stood up and ready to go. And then there’s always a little bit of experimentation and churn as you actually start getting content into that system and getting your publishing lifecycle going. And so if you’re doing that for more than one system at the same time, there is a lot more risk of

something possibly going wrong, not going according to plan. And then of course, the investment that you have to make into an implementation is quite large as well.

So there’s definitely, I think, less risk in only implementing one system as opposed to trying to do two at the same time, even if you do have the advantage of, we got to choose these together so we know they’re going to work well together. So yeah, there definitely are pros and cons for whichever way you end up doing it. A lot of times it won’t be your choice. It’s going to be limited by all the various circumstances I talked about at your organization, but things to think about just in case you’re ever in that situation.

CC: And so something that comes to mind is, I know that when you’re implementing systems, whether it’s the systems we’re talking about here, or just systems in general, a lot of times organizations can get stuck when both systems have competing priorities and that can cause a lot of problems in how things are implemented and in the timeline of how things are implemented, all this kind of stuff. So are there competing priorities for a CMS and a CCMS?

GK: Sure. And one big one that we see a lot is that when you’re talking about the people who are actually developing your content, your authors, your subject matter experts, contributors, a lot of them tend to see creative freedom in how they create the content versus consistency as competing priorities. The less structure you have for your content, the more creative freedom it gives you, but then it also introduces a lot more room for inconsistency and human error. And so there’s always that balance to strike. And if you have groups at your organization where, let’s say, one group needs that creative freedom, so maybe your marketing team, they need the ability to have full freedom of their design and what information they’re putting where, but then you’ve got another group that they need the rigidity that comes with topic-based authoring and with having information delivered in a specific way for legal and regulatory requirements, then obviously something like structured authoring is going to benefit them.

I think it’s important that when you have both of those types of content produced by your organization and you have two groups that are sort of in charge of that, and maybe they’re in two different systems, that it’s really important to get those groups working together so that they can understand that those priorities don’t need to be competing, they just need to be balanced. That’s always the challenge when it comes to those priorities is, yes, they seem like they are competing, but really it’s more about striking that balance and making sure that each group understands the importance of the other group’s needs and how they can still work together and share information that needs to be shared, but also still have the ability to work in the way that they need to work to get the content out the door.

There are tools that can help you strike that balance. So, for example, a web CMS can give your marketing team the creative freedom that they need, but also so can some types of CCMSs. So there are ones that use topic-based authoring and those smaller components we talked about, but not an XML structure like DITA. So that might be an option to look into. And then of course, an XML or a DITA-based CCMS can give other groups, like your technical team or your training team, that structure and the components that they need to create that more heavily regulated technical or legal content. So it’s really worth having these different groups explore the options that are out there and help turn what seems like competing priorities into those more balanced or coordinating priorities.

CC: Gotcha.

GK: I think it’s also worth noting that just because your content is structured, so topic-based XML, DITA XML, that doesn’t mean that it cannot be made to look beautiful when it’s published. There are a lot of things that we can do with PDF output, HTML output, all other kinds of output formats to make things look really nice. So you don’t always have to have that unstructured nature to give you the creative freedom for a really nice look and feel. And then also, it can be delivered in creative ways. So because it is componentized, because it’s in little topic-based chunks, that actually lends itself really well to having flexible delivery, to delivering personalized content to different segments of your customer base and to having a lot of different formats that they can receive it.

So yeah, I think we see a lot these days where people can log into a portal and get stuff served up to them according to parameters they’ve put in about what they’ve bought. We can see a structured componentized content used to serve chatbots, all kinds of other things. So there is a certain degree of creative freedom in structured content as well that I think a lot of people don’t always realize from the outset just because there is that structure.

CC: And I’m going to jump in on that because I think when it comes to marketing content, I feel like your freedom to be more creative when a lot of the mundane technical tasks are taken off of your workload, and that is something that structured content allows you to do. So that’s something, me standing on my little soapbox, I get excited about when we’re looking at structuring content and streamlining content operations is that, yes, you may feel like your creative freedom is a little bit restricted, or maybe it’s a little bit more complicated for you to learn how to get the kind of creativity and design that you want from your published content, but the benefits of having your workload reduced because you’re not focusing on things that you don’t need to be focusing on anymore is really massive. And in the long run, I think that frees you up a lot. I get excited about stuff like that.

GK: Oh, yeah. And I absolutely agree. I do think from the side of people working in structured content, they realize how much more freedom they have when they’re not doing a lot of manual design tasks anymore, when they are free to just write the content they want to write and realize that-

CC: Exactly.

GK: … it can be delivered and mixed and matched and put out to their customers in a lot of different ways. And so it really does, I think, take a little bit more practice in doing things to realize how much more freedom that you can get when you work in structure.

CC: Exactly. Yeah. All right. So I think that’s a good place to wrap up our conversation, but we will be continuing this discussion in the next podcast episode. So thank you so much, Gretyl. I really appreciate you talking about this today.

GK: Absolutely. Thank you.

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 Balancing CMS and CCMS implementation (podcast, part 1) appeared first on Scriptorium.