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In episode 131 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and guest Keith Schengili-Roberts discuss the techcomm job market.

Most of the jobs I see are industry experience … is helpful. Medical device is very helpful. PS, we’d love it if you had these tools. It’s common not to require the tools. It’s common to require domain knowledge and then say tools are a nice-to-have or a strongly preferred, but not an absolute requirement.

—Keith Schengili-Roberts

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Transcript:

Sarah O’Keefe:                 Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we’ll talk about challenges in the technical communication marketplace. Hi everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe, and I’m delighted to welcome Keith Schengili-Roberts to our podcast. Hey Keith.

Keith Schengili-

SO:                                     How are you doing over there?

KSR:                                   I’m doing fine. Doing great.

SO:                                     Awesome. You and I, of course, go way back, very, very far back. But for those people listening who aren’t familiar, tell us a little bit about yourself, and who you are, and what you’re up to these days.

KSR:                                   Back when we both first started in the industry, we were writing on clay tablets and hacking away with chisels into stone. But much more recently, what I do and have been doing now for quite a number of years is independent research on a website called DITAwriter.com. My main domain is for work related things, not having to do with my full-time job is actually on the DITAwriter.com website.

I started doing this in part because I was growing frustrated at various claims that I was seeing made by others, saying that such and such is happening. This is a trend, and such and such is happening here, it’s a different trend. Sometimes these things were contradictory, and sometimes people would say that … One of the first things that made me think about starting to do actual research in this area was the claim thrown about very widely at the very beginning of DITA being disseminated throughout technical writing culture is that it was the fastest growing XML standard out there.

While I didn’t necessarily disagree with that, it was kind of like, yeah, but how do we know that? So I wanted to go and do some digging to see if I could actually find some evidence to go away and ascertain if that was in fact the case or not. Arguably that answer, the answer to that is yes. That’s from a long ago. Now there’s a new and interesting twist on things. But essentially over, my methodology is basically going to indeed.com, which is the largest job aggregator website in the US and has been so for well over a decade now.

What I have done since August of 2011 is that once a month I go in and do a search looking for technical writing jobs and other keywords that go with that. Then essentially doing fairly basic statistical analyses on the results that come out of it. Well, quite recently there was the 10th anniversary of this, and I’ve started writing some blog pieces talking about what are some definite job posting trends relating to technical writing, and structured, and unstructured content within the industries.

SO:                                     So we’ll include a link to DITA Writer in the show notes, or I guess I should say it should be there if you’re listening to this. So tell us about the marketplace for technical writers. What’s going on? Is it a good market, a bad market, a buyer’s market, a writer’s market? A writer/buyer, that sounds bad.

KSR:                                   I’d put a writer’s market? Yes. Let’s just call it a writer’s market. Well, let’s say that the good times have come and gone rather quickly. As of May of this year, there was over 4,400 technical writing job posts, and that is a 10 year peak. In fact, for the most part, technical writing jobs within the states have kind of hovered around somewhere between the 3,000 to maybe 2,000 mark. That’s talking about all of the jobs across the states that have the words technical writer in either the title or the content of the actual job posting.

Up until, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody that took a significant hit back in at the beginning days of COVID, where essentially there were not only fewer hires, but things seemed to be plummeting. But then, I don’t want to say post COVID, because in many ways, I’m not sure we’re really out of the COVID era, so to speak yet. But around the time of February of 2021, things began to pick up significantly. As of, I’m just going to check this, as of I think it was May of this year …. Yeah, that’s what I was quoting earlier. So as of May of this year, we had over 4,400 job postings looking for technical writers, which is great.

I believe that a lot of that has to do with the fact that there were, essentially, the economic pressures were people starting to, and companies, I should say, starting to produce things again that actually had a requirement for people to document exactly what was going on. Now since then, and keep in mind that this is six months ago, here we are, I did latest stats for October. So again, May of this year, 4,400 technical writer job posts. Right now, 3,300 job posts. So that’s a drop of 1,000 in a rather precipitously short amount of time. I’m not sure if that’s the biggest drop I’ve ever seen in the past 10 years.

I’d have to have a closer look at it, but it’s going to be pretty darn close to that. So again, what does this say in terms of … This doesn’t exactly bode well for acquire jobs at this very moment. Having said that, it’s funny, we’re actually, at this point we’re still higher than at most points within the past 10 years. So there is a chance that if the economy does do a turnaround, that we may in fact find another climb in the stats. But to be honest, with all the doom and gloom that’s out there at the moment, I highly doubt that that’s the case. Whereas back in May, I was basically saying, “Hey, this is a great time to put yourself on the market as a technical writer,” I really can’t say that anymore.

SO:                                     Interesting. Although it sounds as though the 30 … I’m going to take the glass half full and say that 4,400 is crazy, but 3,300 sounds as though it’s still a good number. It’s not a terrible number.

KSR:                                   Yes. if you consider that the average has been around 2,000, again, that’s still fairly high. But the trend is most definitely going down and quick. That’s the thing that I’m remarking on, really.

SO:                                     So you’re looking at this rollercoaster and wondering if it’s hit the bottom and it’s going to start back up, or if it’s just, we’re all going to … Nevermind. We won’t make a rollercoaster analogy.

KSR:                                   Keep screaming while you can sort of thing. Because I’m sure we haven’t hit the bottom yet.

SO:                                     So within these limited job postings, what are you seeing in there? I mean, you’ve been looking at DITA and DITA Writing trends, so what kinds of structured authoring trends are in there or not, as the case may be?

KSR:                                   Fair enough. Yeah, well, so I’ve been keeping an eye on all of the major XML based standards. So I keep track of how many of these job postings, again, specifically for technical writers, not programmers or anything else, mention things like, say, S1000D, SGML, DITA. Of course, and also just plain, old XML. There does seem to be one sort of fundamental change that’s occurred over the past 10 years. It appears as though jobs that are looking for people with experience with XML have in fact gone up. What’s more, more than the number if you add up all of the numbers of people who are jobs looking for just DITA, SGML, S1000D, DocBook. You add all that together, and the number for job posts looking for just XML experience is still significantly higher than that.

Now, there are some trends, the ups and downs of the overall job market sort of define the overall number of these things. But it’s interesting to see that XML, and also a cure topic come up in a lot more technical writing jobs than for any of the individual standards in and of themselves. Now there’s another story here though, and this is, now, as someone with a domain name like DITA Writer, this is a wee bit concerning. This has nothing to do, it seems, with the recent dip in the number of technical writer job postings in general. It appears as though DITA is waning in terms of, again, overall job postings.

So at its peak, to be fair, DITA essentially was mentioned in something like maybe four and a half percent at its peak of all job postings. They tended to be the same people, like the same crowd. So more often than not, it was the larger companies that have a real advantage by using DITA in terms of cost savings. If you do any sort of translation to multiple languages, DITA, it’s hard to beat that, really, to be honest. But what I’m seeing now is it’s been getting to be a little bit more in the doldrums. It’s actually at roughly half that at about 2% of all job postings across the states.

Now that having said that, that’s still a substantial enough number. But it’s dropped, and I’m sort of racking my brains as to what has changed to make that happen. I have some ideas, but again, I can’t say that I’m 100% sure that that’s the case. But here, I’ll present my ideas to you and please, I would love it very much if you could just let me know what you think.

SO:                                     I’ll shoot it down. You’ll be fine.

KSR:                                   Okay. So as I said earlier, there’s … My experience is that DITA tends to be used by the largest companies, like companies that typically have 5,000, or 10,000 people, or more working with it. The reasons for that is that there are essentially economies of scale when working with DITA. I mentioned the localization aspect of things before. But if you have a lot of products and you can share content between those products in the technical manuals or engineering manuals, again, the efficiencies that you can get from using structured authoring like DITA, again, looking at this purely from a business perspective rather than from a writer’s perspective makes a whole lot of sense.

But having said that, another interesting trend that I notice that goes along with the drop in DITA is, to me, the rise in FrameMaker in this. Not too long ago, I think I was saying a couple of years ago, I was seeing that the trend for FrameMaker was that it was steadily going down. I’m pretty sure I did a post saying that, I mean, not that FrameMaker was dead. But that it wasn’t very healthy at this point. My thinking at the time was that, well, maybe DITA is coming to the fore and structured authoring tools, such as, say Oxygen are coming more to the fore.

But the recent resurgence in FrameMaker and the decline in DITA makes me think that, and again, here’s my theory, that what we’re seeing is that there’s more of a push for technical writing jobs at the moment within smaller companies, for which having standalone FrameMaker licenses working on the desktop, as opposed to, say, working within Adobe Experience Manager. That’s a whole other subject. I keep track of that as well. I suspect that what’s going on is that we’re seeing a lot of hires of individual writers within smaller firms rather than larger firms who are looking for people with experience with DITA. So that’s my thinking. Any thoughts on that, Sarah?

SO:                                     Well, of course, you have the data and I don’t, so unfair advantage. But a couple of thoughts. One is that I would be interested, I don’t know, I don’t think this is going to be in your data. But it would be interesting to speculate around the question of whether the turnover is actually higher in, let’s say, FrameMaker based jobs than DITA based jobs, which would then account for more FrameMaker jobs. The obvious anecdotal speculation would be that the FrameMaker people are retiring and need to be replaced.

KSR:                                   Oh, that’s an angle I hadn’t thought of. Yes.

SO:                                     Well, and again, I have zero evidence, so you make of that whatever you want. But it might be interesting to go back and look at, instead of looking at percentages, to look at the raw numbers. So 10 years ago it was 100 DITA jobs a month, and now it’s still a 100 DITA jobs a month, but there are more jobs. There’s FrameMaker jobs, and markdown jobs, and this, that, and the other thing. I’m also very curious as to the percentage of jobs that don’t specify tools, that just say we need someone who can write these kinds of things.

Most of the jobs I see are industry experience in thing is helpful. Medical device is very helpful. PS, we’d love it if you had these tools, but usually … Not usually. It’s common not to require the tools. It’s common to require domain knowledge and then say tools are a nice to have or a strongly preferred, but not an absolute requirement. But yeah, I mean obviously you’ve got this data that shows things are going up, and down, and sideways. But in terms of FrameMaker specifically, I do wonder if that’s a case of these groups have been chugging along quite happily and now they’re losing people to extra attrition.

KSR:                                   Yeah, I can also say that what was interesting, and again I’m talking from personal experience here, but what I have seen is during COVID there were some people that either I worked with or that I knew in other companies that were working, essentially they were planning to retire when COVID hit. Then they were asked, essentially to look, could you just stay on a little bit longer until we get through this? As you say, maybe that’s part of what’s going on there.

SO:                                     Maybe, yeah, I mean-

KSR:                                   Though, I don’t know why that would necessarily hit FrameMaker job posting specifically, because you think that would be across the board, but yeah. It’s interesting.

SO:                                     Yeah, I don’t know, but I’d be interested to find out more. What about some of the other tools that are out there? I mean, of course your focus is on DITA specifically. But if we’re going to talk about not DITA, then Markdown, Flare, Paligo what do those look like?

KSR:                                   Yeah. Now the interesting thing is that, and this sort of echoes what you were saying earlier, is that … Again, I’ve been doing this actually, not fully for the 10 years, but for probably something like half of it. I’ve been throwing in the names of major tools. So that would include things like say Oxygen, or Webworks, or back in the day, Dreamweaver, and so forth. More specifically looking at things like Astoria, SDL, which of course is now …

SO:                                     [inaudible 00:17:16].

KSR:                                   Oh actually, what is it? Sorry, what is SDL?

SO:                                     [inaudible 00:17:21]. Yep.

KSR:                                   I should know this offhand, but I don’t. Anyways. Now also very recently things like Paligo, and [inaudible 00:17:29], and Vasant. But the interesting thing is that, much as you were saying earlier, the trend in job postings is very rarely to talk about or specifically mention tools. So those numbers are very typically in the numbers that you can count on one, occasionally, two hands, and very rarely higher.

What does come up much more often is job postings that are looking for experience with a, and I’m going to say a CMS as opposed to a CCMS. The numerical difference between the two is significant. So some sort of CCMS mean … Sorry, CMS meaning some sort of a structured authoring tool. But again, the numbers are not huge. So I don’t want claim that a significant percentage of all tech writing jobs require or are asking for CMS experience. Again, it’s in the low single digit percentages, but it is there.

But if you come to the other vendors, yeah, almost … Not almost never, but it rarely comes up. However, as you were saying earlier, if you do have the experience, like please, if you have experience with particular tools, mention them in your CCMS, as a former and still current hiring manager where I work full-time, those things matter. But from a job posting perspective, we have to be a bit more, have to cast the net wider, so to speak. So on the whole, you don’t see a whole lot of those things. Of interest, just very recently I am seeing Paligo coming up in the number of CCMS things. So clearly they’re beginning to make a dent, much more so than long established players in the market, for example. So I just find that interesting.

Of course, Sarah and I, we both know that Paligo works with its … Oh-

SO:                                     DocBook.

KSR:                                   DocBook. The thing is that if I look at the number of times DocBook is again mentioned, I pretty famously declared that DocBook is dead, like from a hiring perspective only, because nobody is looking for people with that experience. Yet here comes Paligo, and they have done such a good job with the interface for their particular CCMS that I suspect that many people using it. I’m sure this almost never gets to the HR people who are cobbling together the job postings that, do you have actually experience with DocBook, but because in a way it’s more the CCMS that they’re interested in this particular case than the standard.

SO:                                     All right. Well, that’s a really interesting point, right? Because you’ve been looking at, are the job posts asking for DITA? So to a certain extent you would then say, “Okay, well what about DocBook?” Except no, because it’s been, I don’t think rebranded is exactly fair. But let’s say subsumed in the sense that that is what underlies Paligo, but it’s not really a topic of conversation. Are there any other conclusions that … I mean we always want to know what the CCMS market share is. That’s like the first question anybody asks. Are there any inferences you can draw from what you’re seeing about … So it sounds like Paligo is doing well. Is there anybody else out there that’s doing well or not so well from a posting point of view?

KSR:                                   No, not really in terms … Yeah, no, the numbers are just not high enough to really come up with any sort of strong conclusion as to what the marketplace is when it comes to job postings. Now for that sort of thing, I have done some research, but not recently. But I have done research using LinkedIn information, and people saying what sort of CCMS they’re using, and compiled the list of companies that are using DITA, which is also on the DITA Writer website based on that information.

But I’ll admit, I’ll be the first to admit that that information is beginning to get a little bit out of date, because I was paid to do that type of research before, and now that I have a full-time gig, that’s something take that takes a lot of time that I simply don’t have anymore. So I have no additional insights into the CCMS mark at this point in time, at least not from this data.

SO:                                     So what about Markdown?

KSR:                                   Ah, now that’s also interesting. Now I think one of the ironies that comes up is people are saying, “Well, Markdown is the new shiny thing, so to speak,” which is funny because it’s actually been around longer than DITA. Of course, it’s also an unstructured format. So there’s the continual sort of dynamic of structured content, that it requires more upfront efforts to make it work. But then the payoff is being able to do some really interesting things with it. There are all sorts of interesting buzzwords that come around structured content you simply don’t get with unstructured content, such as Markdown.

Having said that, there has been a real interest in, again in job posts, technical writer job posts that are looking for Markdown experience. Quite recently, in fact, I think within about the past year or so, the request for people having Markdown experience now exceeds that of DITA. I think at least in part that has to do with the fact that the DITA numbers are, at least at present, going down. So yes, in the graph there is that moment where they intersect. Then Markdown continues to grow. Now I say that given that the entirety of the job market has fallen down rather precipitously in the past couple of months. The Markdown numbers as absolute numbers go down, but the percentage certainly continues to increase.

SO:                                     So I guess in kind of wrapping this up, the question that probably everybody wants to know is if I’m out there in the job market or I’m trying to get into technical writing, but if I’m looking for a tech writing job, then you mentioned make sure, do you include any CCMS type of experience on your resume because you just never know. But what would you advise people if and when they are looking, what’s that thing that you would say, “Look, if you can prove that you have this, your job search will go well?” Are there a couple of things that people can and should focus on?

KSR:                                   I would say that one of the best tools out there is definitely going to be LinkedIn. More specifically, so I mentioned earlier the companies that are using DITA, that’s on the DITA Writer website. So if in fact you do have DITA experience or you want to get experience, go through that list and see if there is any companies listed there that are in your area. That would be a good one to start with. Then once you’ve done that, use LinkedIn’s search and capabilities, such as AR, to see if you can narrow down things further.

Find out if there are technical writers who are working at the location that’s local to you, and then try to figure out what are the tools that they’re actually using. More often than not, they will say what they’re using. Then from that you can construct a resume that targets specifically the tool use and/or standards that they might be using. Similarly, if there’s any potential, it also helps to be a member of any sort of technical authoring organizations that can also help you with things like networking. But that’s a couple of, what I hope, are practical tips on how to go about that.

SO:                                     Awesome. Well, Keith, I really appreciate this. I think we could keep going for a very long time.

KSR:                                   Part two.

SO:                                     Part two. But I’m going to, I’m afraid, cut us off there. We’ll come back next year and see where your numbers are.

KSR:                                   Sure thing. Yeah.

SO:                                     So thank you, and thank for your time.

KSR:                                   Thank you.

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

The post Jobs in techcomm (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 130 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Sarah O’Keefe talk about the challenges of replatforming content from one system to another.

Links are always a problem, especially cross-document links. Reusable content tends to be handled differently in different systems, or almost the same, but not quite, which is almost worse.

—Sarah O’Keefe

Bill Swallow:                     Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about replatforming: the process of moving content from one system to another. Hi, I’m Bill Swallow.

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

BS:                                      And I guess the best place to start here, Sarah: what is replatforming?

SO:                                     My definition of replatforming is that it is when you decide to move your content assets from one system to another. You may or may not change the file format, but when we talk about replatforming, the focus is on the idea that both systems support the same format, whether it’s DITA or HTML or anything else, and we’re changing the authoring and the publishing systems. So we are changing the platform that the content resides on, but not necessarily the content itself.

BS:                                      Okay. So, given that the content’s not changing, it’s a pretty straightforward process, right?

SO:                                     Sure. It’s great.

BS:                                      I’ll start with a loaded question,

SO:                                     Right. It is easier than the alternative. So if we’re comparing replatforming to something like taking completely unstructured, ad-hoc-formatted Word files or InDesign files and moving them over into structured content in some rigorous approach for the very first time ever, then yes, replatforming is easy. But with that said, you still run into some really annoying and costly complications when you do replatform.

BS:                                      What types of things?

SO:                                     Well, the usual suspects, right? Links are always a problem, especially cross-document links. Reusable content tends to be handled differently in different systems, or almost the same, but not quite, which is almost worse. Variables, conditionals, metadata…

So for example, if you take metadata, if you have your existing structured content in some sort of a component content management system, a CCMS, then there are at least two different places where you can store your metadata. There are probably more, but we’ll start with two. And the two typically are inside your content at the element level, so maybe a paragraph or a section or a topic; you could apply metadata to that element, to that paragraph element or section element or something like that. Also, in most CCMS, you can apply metadata at the CCMS level so the CCMS itself has a way to manage, govern, and apply metadata at the CCMS object level.

Now, the object level in the CCMS could be a lot of things. We maybe could assume it’s a topic, but if you’re talking about a reusable object, it might just be a little paragraph or it could be a variable, et cetera. And what you run into is that your old system, your legacy system where all your content currently is, has a certain way that is optimal to apply metadata and to manage metadata. And your new System B also has an optimal way of doing things, and the two are not exactly identical. Oh, and there’s a non-zero possibility that when you implemented System A eight or ten years ago, you maybe did some things that weren’t optimal.

So your metadata is stashed using a certain approach. Well, actually we hope there’s a certain approach and a certain system, because of course, option C is that it’s all over the place. But even if you did everything exactly right in the old system, there’s a decent chance that in the new system you’re going to have to make some changes.

BS:                                      Right, and mapping metadata from one system to the other, they may not even handle the same types of metadata fields that System A had versus what you need in System B. So you may end up having to either create a lot of metadata in System B from scratch, or have to somehow port the metadata over and make it fit where it may not be optimal to use, which I would not recommend. But there’s some degree of legacy carryover that you need to maintain when you’re switching these systems.

SO:                                     And I think it’s worth noting that the baseline metadata: who is the author? When was it last updated? All the administrative stuff. That will carry over well enough. The problems you’re going to run into have to do with places where you’ve done customized metadata, which almost certainly is the metadata that has the most business value for you.

BS:                                      Right, right. Even things like profiling metadata may be handled completely differently in a new system.

SO:                                     Yeah, I mean, in theory it’s DITA, and so it should just carry over, but, well, here we are.

BS:                                      So given some of these gotchas, what are some of the best practices that you recommend for replatforming?

SO:                                     Well, of course you should plan. Plan the project and don’t just jump in. At the same time, and in total contradiction to “you should plan”, it’s also worth trying it, doing a little proof of concept, pulling some files over just to see what happens. But expect that things will go sideways, and then you’ll need to plan some more to figure out how you’re going to do this.

BS:                                      Right. And there’s a difference between the various different types of assets that you might be moving over. So you might have some content files that might be different, some different types of content files that would be handled differently. And then you have other things like images, videos and so forth that may have a completely different approach to being stored and managed.

SO:                                     Right. So definitely figure out what’s going to change, and what does it look like to move this stuff over, and how are you going to do it? In many cases, our clients are taking a replatforming as an opportunity to also do content-modeling updates. So let’s say that 10 years ago you put in place a system based on DITA 1.0, and now you’re moving into something new and at this point you look at, well, we could move it up to DITA 1.3, take advantages of keys and some other fun things that we can do in that system. I do think it’s useful to separate the replatforming, the systems work, from the content-modeling updates. The content-modeling updates, in theory, you could do in the old system, assuming it supports the latest and greatest, but there’s value in doing the content modeling, even if you’re not replatforming. And the challenges you have in replatforming are different from the challenges you have in doing content-modeling, information-architecture updates.

BS:                                      When we’re replatforming, it really is an ideal time to do that level of content modeling and restructuring. Okay. So aside from setting up your project and planning properly, giving it a few test goes and taking the opportunity for content modeling, are there any other recommendations for replatforming?

SO:                                     I would look for places where you can get wins, especially if they’re easy wins. Find the things about the current system… Or sorry, you don’t need to find them. Put out a message to the team that works in the current system, and ask them what annoys them about the current system.

BS:                                      Oh, boy.

SO:                                     Yeah. And then after the deluge, read through them all and figure out whether and how you can address those issues. Can you make the new system better? Can you improve on the things that are in the old system that are just long-standing annoyances that people are unhappy about and fix them? Because if you can go through and fix that stuff and get some wins for your team on the new system, that’s going to go a long way to helping to make the transition go smoothly. People are going to be much happier about switching systems if there’s a win: “I’ve always been super annoyed by how this particular thing works or doesn’t work, and oh, it is so much better in the new system.”

BS:                                      And it’s not just the authors in that case. There are a lot of other groups and people who are using the system in one way or another.

SO:                                     And there may be new groups. It’s common, for example, that old systems people are still doing review outside the CCMS: PDF-based, email-based review, that kind of thing. Most of the new systems, you’re going to be doing reviews in some sort of a review workflow that is built in. So there’s a big transition there, and you may be talking about bringing in dozens or hundreds of new review users that were not there previously.

BS:                                      So there’s likely also a good deal of planning for not just change management among those who are using the system for authoring and managing content, but a wider scope as well.

SO:                                     Right, exactly. And this is maybe the most critical one. One of the biggest… Sorry, folks. I’m going to say mistakes. One of the biggest mistakes that we’re seeing in making these transitions is what we call the burning platform problem. So this is jargon for, “I have to get off of Platform X because it’s burning.”

Now, software typically does not burn. So what we mean here is: my software, the contract expires December 31st. If we’re not off it by December 31st, we have to pay maintenance for another year or another quarter, or the software is going into some sort of end-of-life status. It is rare that you reach the point where the software is actually being turned off, in the sense of on December 31st, this particular vendor will cease to exist and our software will cease to work. That’s not usually the case, but we have seen numerous, numerous projects where clients are telling us, “I need you to finish this by December 31st, because that’s when our maintenance contract expires.”

That is a cart-before-the-horse approach, and of course, these conversations are always happening on September 17th. “We have to get this done by December 31st.” “Well, but it’s a six month project.” And they’re like, “I don’t care. Make it happen.” Well, no, we can’t, and neither can you as the customer. And when the project is driven by an external deadline that really doesn’t have anything to do with the actual project… We have a project that’s going to take six months and you’re telling me to do it in two and a half, or three and a half.

Well, that’s going to increase cost. It’s going to increase risk. There are going to be mistakes. There are going to be problems where somebody who needs to sign off on something is out on PTO or vacation or maternity leave or a trip around the world, or they’re at an onsite and can’t be reached. And so there’s delay. And what we’re doing is we’re putting pressure on the project in order to meet an artificial deadline that is not really critical.

And so I think that it makes a lot more sense to plan ahead, pay the maintenance for an extra quarter or maybe even an extra year, and get it right. You may end up running in parallel for a bit, running both the old system and the new system so that you can validate that everything’s working and we didn’t miss any edge cases and that type of thing. But going live on a system that isn’t ready because of some, I’m going to say artificially imposed deadline that did not allow for a proper project cadence is risky.

BS:                                      It asks for trouble. Exactly. So not only is it risky to have a ticking time-bomb on your legacy system, but it also invites opportunities to not exactly implement things the way that you ideally should in the new system. So we could probably talk for hours on this bit of squeeze-time, but I think this is probably a good place to wrap this episode up. Sarah, thank you very much.

SO:                                     Thank you.

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

The post The challenges of replatforming content (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 129 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow discuss the prerequisites for efficient content operations and the pitfalls from not following them.

Mayhem, chaos, cost overruns, work, rework, delays. I mean, these things, they’re expensive. And they’re not just expensive, they’re soul sucking for everybody involved in the project. And it doesn’t have to be that way if this thing is planned and executed at the right level.

—Sarah O’Keefe

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Transcript:

Bill Swallow:

Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about the prerequisites for efficient content operations. Hey, everybody, I’m Bill Swallow.

Sarah O’Keefe:

And I’m Sarah O’Keefe.

Bill:

And I think, before we jump in, we should probably explain to everybody what we mean when we talk about content operations.

Sarah:

Content operations is the people, the processes, and the technology that allow you to make content happen. And some people will say that content operations only counts if you’re actually working efficiently. So it’s like a best practice. But I would argue that content operations is all the things. So, in a world where you’re writing things in Notepad and converting them into WordStar, and from there, through WordPerfect into some ancient version of PostScript for print, that is in fact content operations. It sounds like pain, but it is content operations. So what we’re looking to do in general in all of our projects is produce better, good, efficient content operations.

Bill:

So within content operations, you generally have four areas that we tend to look at to see how best we can optimize those things. One would be requirements. One would be having a roadmap. Another one is actually planning based on the roadmap and the people involved.

Sarah:

Right. And it gets very tricky very quickly because content ops sits in between the publishing content production world and IT. And so, the temptation is to say that, “Well, content is just a weird type of data,” which, well, that’s a whole other conversation. It’s a whole other podcast. So we’ll just set that aside for the moment. But the major point here is that, when you start looking at content ops, when you’re looking at content at scale, huge volumes of content in lots of different languages, globalization requirements, you have to think about delivery platforms. You have to think about video streaming, audio issues, transcripts, accessibility. And the volume of content that passes through a content ops environment can be, I think, surprising to a traditional IT group. If this is your first experience with content and content ops, the amount and the complexity of information that we’re dealing with tends to come as a surprise to people that are not specialized in the space already.

Bill:

Right. There’s so many different facets to content in so many different ways that those facets can get leveraged and need to be leveraged. It’s not just a raw data store, even though many would argue that XML is just a raw data store.

Sarah:

When you start looking at content operations, what you’re going to find is that there are a number of components to your content ops that are unique to a content ops environment. Yes, you’re familiar with content management systems, but in particular, are you familiar with component content management systems, headless CMSs? Are you familiar with localization issues, what it looks like to do Unicode across 40 or 50 different languages? When you look at XML, XML for content and XML for data are in fact not at all the same thing. So you need people that understand this tech stack from a content perspective. And since 80 or 90% of the work that we’re doing is actually DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, keep that in mind. A lot of tech people struggle with understanding DITA. And I mean, to be fair, a lot of content people struggle with DITA initially. So there’s a lot there, and it’s complicated.

Bill:

There’s usually an assumption that is made that, “Oh, well, DITA is just XKL. XML is just data. So we know how to handle data, so we know how to handle DITA. And the two just couldn’t be more different

Sarah:

Yeah. And requirements. When we start talking about requirements, what are we talking about here? Not so much the tech stack, right? I mean, there’s a tech stack requirement, but what’s the baseline that you start from when you start building requirements?

Bill:

Right. And that baseline really does come down to the business drivers for why you are doing the things that you’re doing. And fundamentally, if all of your tech requirements do not meet those business goals, you’ve just wasted a ton of money.

Sarah:

I mean, I’ve told this story before, but a long time ago, I was working on a project and we were busy trying to justify the build, the system, which was going to be pretty expensive. We were trying to justify it because we were going to have more efficient formatting. We were going to save money on formatting, formatting automation, get away from a very manual at the time in design and I think unstructured frame maker process, both of which were time consuming. And I’ve never forgotten. I went into a meeting with this VP and we were explaining some of the cost savings, which were really very much efficiency-driven. And he stopped us and he said, “Look, we’re a company. We’re doing,” whatever it was, “$10 billion in revenue per year.” And of that 10 billion, at least half is international revenue. So $5 billion a year in international revenue.

And he said, “Right now, we have a six month delay on localization in getting any… And so, we can’t get any international money.” You can’t get international revenue when you can’t ship your product with content in German, or French, or Italian, or Spanish, or Thai or whatever it was they needed. He said, “Can you promise me that you can chop one month off of our six month delay in localization? Because if you can, we can easily justify this whole thing and you don’t need to talk to me about this other complex stuff.”

Now, we knew that it’s actually pretty easy to get from six months down to, say, two months without really trying very hard. Now, getting from two months to two days, that’s hard. But all he wanted from us was-

Bill:

Very hard.

Sarah:

Six months to five months, which we said, “Well, yeah, I mean, that’s easy. We can do that.” And he said, “Great. Where do I sign?” So, ultimately, the requirement in that particular case, because all of their growth was coming from international revenue, non-US, non-English customers, so they wanted to focus on that. They wanted to deliver better and more efficiently and faster so that they could get that revenue more quickly. And my misunderstanding of the business case could have gotten us in real trouble had it not been for this person in a meeting who said, “Let me stop you right there because you’re focused on the wrong thing. Tell me about this thing,” which was easy.

Bill:

Actually, that was a good example of having the right people making the right decisions, and talking to the right people in order to inform the right decision.

Sarah:

Right.

Bill:

Yeah. From your perspective, you were doing the right thing because you needed to build efficiency and all this other fun stuff. Meanwhile, you talked to another person who’s looking at the right thing as, “We need to expedite our sales in a foreign market. How can you help us do that?”

Sarah:

Right. And we were able to do that, but we had to get refocused on that correct baseline fundamental requirement for what they were trying to do. So I guess then the question becomes, what happens when you don’t have the right people asking the right questions?

Bill:

Right. Because that really is one of the linchpins here. First of all, you have a huge learning curve for anyone who is not the right person doing the right type of work. They’re starting from ground zero, and they need to basically escalate their knowledge and build their proficiency in the work that they need to perform out of the gate. And generally, you don’t have that kind of a runway when you’re doing any kind of an implementation project of any kind.

Sarah:

I mean, it’s common to come into these projects where there’s not… And for us. We’re consultants. We get brought in when that knowledge internally is missing. So it’s really, really common for us to come in and have to build out a knowledge base and a set inside the organization so that the stakeholders inside the organization can make good decisions and can carry this thing forward. Related to that, once we’ve done that, once we’ve built a group within the organization that has this knowledge and these competencies, we want to hang onto them. There are very, very few things worse than losing the people that have that knowledge because they move on to something bigger and better and more exciting. And we have to start over with a new group. And again, build all that foundational knowledge to make sure that they know what they need to know in order to make good decisions because when you come into a new area of practice, whatever it may be, you don’t know what you don’t know, and so, you make bad assumptions. And if you make bad assumptions, you make bad decisions. And bad decisions are expensive and time-consuming.

Bill:

Very much.

Sarah:

So I think if I’m a director or a VP looking at launching one of these content ops digital transformation kinds of efforts, look around your organization. Do you have the right people in place with the right skillsets? If not, do you have people that can learn this stuff, that you can, I don’t know, not dedicate to, but assign to the project for the long term, couple of years, to build that community of practice, that knowledge inside your organization? That’s something that we spend a lot of time on, we spend a lot of time focusing on, but there will have to be that core group eventually. Unless you’re playing to black box outsource this stuff, which is very, very rare, you need a group internally that keeps track of this stuff and manages it for the long haul.

Bill:

Building that into your team, it really is critical. Like you said, whether you bring someone in initially to get the team up and running and have them learn, or you have people with those core competencies already in house, if you’re missing those people, that your project is going to very likely run over budget, run over time, and generally just be absolute chaos.

Sarah:

Mayhem, chaos, cost overruns, work, rework, delays. I mean, these things, they’re expensive. And they’re not just expensive, they’re soul sucking for everybody involved in the project. And it doesn’t have to be that way if this thing is planned and executed at the right level. And I will say that, typically, the people who get blamed for this are the people on the ground who are doing their best to try and do this stuff. But ultimately, folks, I blame you, the senior leadership. It’s your job to plan this thing, to give people what they need to make sure that they have the right skill sets. And if they don’t have them, that you support them in acquiring those skill sets, that you support them with outside experts who come in and can deliver on those skill sets, contribute to your project, and do all of the things. The lack of planning, magical thinking is the thing that kills these projects. And then, the people on the ground get blamed for it. “Oh, why didn’t my tech writers do this better?” Well, because you put them in an impossible to succeed position.

Bill:

Right. And to say that it’s senior leadership’s job to plan everything, that’s a little misleading, I think. But it’s their job to make sure that the right people are involved at the right points in the project to make the decisions and help plan the effort because they are the ones who have the leverage to bring the right people in and make things happen.

Sarah:

Yeah. It’s enablement. And we don’t enabling as a verb because it sounds terrible, but that’s really a leadership job, is to make it possible.

Bill:

Clear the runway, get the right people in.

Sarah:

Yeah. Apparently, I have some feelings about process and wrong processes. The most common thing that happens here from our experience is that people pick the software, the technology stack first or too early, and then let that drive all the other decisions. Now, there are legitimate reasons why the tech stack might be a constraint in the sense of we’re in group B over here and groups A, C, D, E, and F are all using the same tech stack and we need to fit into that. That I get. But what’s actually a lot more common is, “Ooh, I like this. I used it in a previous job, so let’s just go with it.” And that’s really not a good reason to pick anything specific. So what happens?

Bill:

Congratulations, you pick the box that you can’t work outside of. And not every box contains every single solution to every single business need. So if your business drivers require very specific things and the box doesn’t have it, you’re never going to get there.

Sarah:

Yeah. Okay. Hopefully, you picked the correct box, or actually you did your requirements properly, and then you said, “Hey, this looks like the right kind of system for what we’re trying to do.” What are other things in the process as you move along in one of these builds that cause problems?

Bill:

A lot of it comes down to pretty much the same type of focus. Whether it’s a big box or a little box, you’re still picking the wrong one. For example, if you are combining content sets from multiple different groups into a brand new system and you spent a very long time choosing the right system that meets the right business needs, but you don’t do any upfront content modeling to see how all of these different groups content will fit together in this bright, shiny, perfect box, you’re going to find a lot of missing pieces along the way. You’re going to find a lot of edge cases. You’re going to have to do a ton of rework just to get this content to all interact.

Sarah:

Did you just tell our audience that they have to think inside the box?

Bill:

If they have a box, they should think inside it. Yes. If you don’t have a box, then think outside of it until you find the box that fits wherever you ended up going.

Sarah:

Yeah, the content model, I mean, it’s such a point of contention because if it’s too strict, it won’t work and people will do weird work arounds. And if it’s too loose, it doesn’t really help you because it doesn’t constrain things in any useful way. And if you build it out and then later you find edge cases that you weren’t thinking about, you have to stick a bolt on the side of the box, and it’s just bad. So there’s the content model, then you convert your content into the new content model, at which point you find all the things you missed.

Bill:

Exactly. That is really the aha moment. When you start converting content, you go, “Oh, wait a minute. We didn’t account for this thing that this group is doing over here. And they say it’s really important.”

Sarah:

Yeah. I mean, that’s a tough balance because you want to build out a content model, start doing some prototype proof of concept conversion, refine it as you go, do the rework that’s necessary. I mean, no matter how much upfront planning and analysis you do, you will find edge cases. The problem is, the later you find them, the more expensive it is to either rework the content model or, my particular favorite, to just hack around them.

Bill:

Yeah. The number of times I’ve seen output class used as a means to an end, it’s [inaudible 00:17:49].

Sarah:

I mean, we’ve spent a really long time talking about all the terrible things that happen, but how do you do this right? How do you make it such that your content ops project is as painless as possible? What are the best practices?

Bill:

Well, we talked about getting the right people involved at the right stages in the right project, but I think that’s something that needs to happen regardless of what you’re doing. But as far as content operations is concerned, first and foremost, you need to have your requirements nailed down. And we’re not talking about your requirements like building out an agile framework or something like that to build things out and it iteratively progress, but what are the high level requirements that are driving this entire initiative?

Sarah:

So we need to go from six month delay in localization to five month delay, or less would be better, but a one month improvement. Our system… We talk about language support. We need to be able to localize into 40 or 50 or 75 languages. I’ll add to that, that one unusual requirement that will rule out a number of tech systems is multilingual authoring. So we’ve seen a few cases where the content is being created in… Most everything we see is being sourced in English. But English and also French, or German, or Chinese, or Korean. And you have to then have a system that will support authors working in those languages as they are creating content. It turns out that a number of CMS systems make the assumption that you have a single source language and many downstream target languages that you localize into. So it’s a one to many relationship. If what in fact you have is a many too many or a few too many, you need to really pay attention to that.

Bill:

Yes, absolutely. So, other things that you really should do is start looking at your publishing requirements as well. So it’s not just the authoring side, but it’s where you’re going. We’re talked about being able to publish out to 40, 50 languages, but what about seven, eight, nine, 10 different types of output? Are you able to get there easily? Is there a limitation in the tech that you chose that prevents you from developing a critical delivery point?

Sarah:

Yeah. So, multichannel publishing, integration with some sort of an omnichannel world. Incremental publishing is becoming important. I have a library of 40 or 50 or 100,000 chunks of content, but what I actually want to be able to do is update one and publish it, and not have to push the entire system or the entire document that that one chunk lives inside of. Integration with other systems is becoming increasingly important. The ability to take a chunk of content, push it to Salesforce, push it to the main website where we’re working in perhaps a TechCom world, or push it to eCommerce system so that it can be reused there.

Bill:

And not only iterative publishing, but iterative translation as well because some systems, they’re really great about you being able to gate very, very small chunks of content or very, very discreet files for localization at any point in time. This is separate workflow for each individual file. Other systems, they gate things by publication. So if you have 90% of your content hardened for a particular publication, you still can’t start the localization workflow for that content until the last 10%’s completed. And if we’re talking about getting from that two-month to the two-week point in the translation turnaround, you’re not going to get there if your system is gating by the publication level.

Sarah:

I think, overall, I’ve seen a lot of lists of requirements. What you want to do is focus on the ones that are unique. We need version control is not interesting to me. Everybody needs version control. And we want to be able to reuse content is a little bit interesting, but not really. And we need variables and we need localization support, those are all basically prerequisites to the requirements. They sound like requirements, but not really. What I’m looking for is, what are the unique requirements in your organization?

For example, we make medical devices and we need traceability because, if we don’t have that, we get in trouble with the regulators. We have a very complex content structure. There’s a reason it’s set up that way, and we need to reflect that in our operations. We need personalization. We need high velocity, really high velocity. Those are the things that you want to find that make your content unique within the landscape of generalized content operations. And once you’ve identified that keystone, that keystone requirement, that if we can point to this and make that successful, then we’re good, that’s what is going to help you drive the entire project and always look at that fundamental foundational requirement and make sure that you’re focused on it and meeting it.

Bill:

All those little bells and whistles can be added later. They can be configured later. But yeah, if you’re not meeting those high level requirements out of the gate, you’re doing the wrong thing.

Sarah:

The summary of this very lengthy podcast is you should plan. Planning is good. Planning is your friend. And if you don’t plan, some very, very bad things are going to happen.

Bill:

Very much so. And while you’re planning, make sure you have the right people doing it.

Sarah:

Plan well.

Bill:

Well, I think that will be a wrap for this one. Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah:

Thank you.

Bill:

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 Prerequisites for efficient content operations (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 128 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe talks with guest Chip Gettinger of RWS about why companies are replatforming structured content by moving it into a new component content management system (CCMS).

I find there’s some business change that’s happened to spark this replatforming. One is mergers and acquisitions, where two companies get together, there are two CCMSs, and one basically is chosen.

—Chip Gettinger, RWS

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Transcript:

Sarah O’Keefe:                 Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about replatforming with special guest Chip Gettinger of RWS. Hi, I’m Sarah O’Keefe. Hey Chip, welcome back to the podcast.

Chip Gettinger:                Hi Sarah, it’s great to see you.

SO:                                     Yeah, you too. Chip, tell us a little bit about yourself and who you are, and what you do at RWS.

CG:                                     Sure. I manage our Global Solutions Consulting Team here at RWS, and it’s our product is Tridion Docs. It’s a data component content management system. So I work with customers and partners on technical business requirements for their CCMSs.

SO:                                     So you are in many ways the in-house edition of what we do over here at Scriptorium, on the outside, looking in.

CG:                                     Yeah, I’m in the sales side of things, but we have very, very detailed solutions that I get to work with some really wonderful customers.

SO:                                     Yeah, and so for the audience, Chip and I go way back, we’ve known each other for a long time. And so if this degenerates that that’ll be why, and we apologize in advance. I wanted to focus on replatforming today. We’ve had a lot of projects recently that involve this, I think both of us. And I guess I need to start with a definition of what replatforming is. So in my world, I define replatforming as moving from one component content management system, from one CCMS, to another. And I suppose technically, if you start with a collection of word files out in space and you moved to a database CCMS, that would be replatforming. But really, that’s a new platform and building out structured content. So when we talk about replatforming projects, typically we’re talking about a situation where a client already has structured content, and they’re moving it from system A into a new system, into system B. Does that match how you handle it?

CG:                                     Absolutely agree, Sarah. I have seen new Tridion customers coming from other CCMSs, and typically I find there’s some business change that’s happened to spark this replatforming. One is mergers and acquisitions, where two companies get together, they’re two CCMSs, and one basically is chosen. So the other group will move their content over into a CCMS like Tridion Docs. The interesting part is, is I also see people who are upgrading from really old systems. We have some customers 12, 14 years, and we had one customer still using the IBM DITA, if you remember that from the early days. And really, that was a real replatforming into DITA 1.3, and other new aspects that they had no exposure to.

SO:                                     So what’s the breakdown that you’re seeing. I mean, in terms of replatforming in your potential client base. When people come and talk to you, is it mostly replatforming or is it mostly going into DITA for the first time or is it kind of a 50/50? What does that look like?

CG:                                     It’s a great question. And I would say it’s 50/50. And I find this, and my team very much gets involved in evaluations and workshops where companies come in and want to try out Tridion Docs before they move. And what I’ve found, Sarah, especially over the last five or six years, is we have more DITA-educated customers, users coming in. They understand it. But perhaps one trend I’ve noticed is that when they set up the original CCMS, let’s say, 10 years ago, they really didn’t think about a reuse strategy, they didn’t centralize libraries, they didn’t set up [inaudible 00:04:22], and all the things that you’re team at Scriptorium does a great job with. We’re finding organizations. Just, I’ll tell you the worst-case scenario. They took their FrameMaker files and they used a composite DITA topic, and guess what they did, they made it one big, big, huge topic. That’s the worst case. But most people are doing generic topic typing, or the composite DITA topic. They didn’t really think about reuse. And now here they are many years later and they have a new group coming in, or something like that, that’s causing this change.

SO:                                     Yeah, that sounds like what we’re seeing. Additionally, we’re seeing a lot of companies that aren’t using keys because, for example, when they built out their initial system 10 years ago, keys didn’t exist.

CG:                                     Exactly.

SO:                                     It wasn’t a mistake, it was just that now we have some additional features, and we’re also seeing a lot of, well, we specialize to cover these kinds of use cases, which are now part of the newer DITA, DITA 1.3. And so we look at, do we keep that or do we despecialize down and get them into the standard DITA element that’s now available for what they’re trying to do? So you’re right. I mean, it’s an opportunity to revisit the content modeling decisions that were made.

CG:                                     Exactly.

SO:                                     And I think make some improvements there, which that’s not really part of the replatforming, it’s just, we’re going to replatform anyway, so let’s do some cleanup.

CG:                                     And do some cleanup and alignment. And yeah, getting back to the replatforming, when, let’s say, we’re converging two groups together, they’ve got different metadata and attribute models, and they probably have different topic models and bookmaps versus DITA maps. And it’s a great time to make alignments when you’re going to be cleaning up and trying to reuse this across these different systems. One customer I worked with, there are three or four different mergers of different companies, and they did eventually, they chose to centralize on Tridion Docs. But they decided to maintain their existing content models because the marketing wasn’t really recombining new products, and so forth, they were still kind of siloed with their products, but they were able to have their own publishing DITA Open Toolkit chains and so forth. And it worked okay, but I wouldn’t want to try to reuse across the content. But the interesting part was just two years ago, we came out, we redid our content importer application and we rebuilt it. And it’s been quite popular with our customers who are replatforming and moving content around, and so forth.

SO:                                     So yeah, that’s really the question for me. What’s the biggest challenge? What are the biggest problems that you run into in these replatforming projects?

CG:                                     I think it’s gaining acceptance on alignment. Governance is hard enough to agree to, and then you come along and you’re going to change it, especially if you have a company that’s being acquired by a larger company. So the typical governance and other issues we have are problems. I think the other challenge that I see are more technical, where people are really running old versions of software out there, they’re really outdated. And for example, I mention the DITA Open Toolkit, there’re versions of Java that aren’t even really officially supported people are still running with. And then, as your team knows at Scriptorium, you have to then, sometimes you have to rebuild scripts and publishing, and so forth. And sometimes companies don’t really take that into account, they just think, “Oh, DITA’s DITA, I’m going to move it around.” And generally, the DITA content does move around. But there’s supporting things that go into it that do have some costs associated with that replatforming.

SO:                                     So you mentioned mergers, and I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me, that if you have two or three or five companies that merge, that have two or three or five different CCMSs, that just broadly from a total cost of ownership point of view, even if they’re not sharing content, it makes sense to consolidate. What are some of the other things that you’re seeing that push people into replatforming? You mentioned old systems too.

CG:                                     Right, right. Well, sadly I’ve seen, when you’re old systems, you’re also more vulnerable to security issues. And you just look at what’s happened the last several years as far as vulnerability of data. And if you’re running on a Microsoft platform that Microsoft doesn’t support anymore, you can get into trouble. Especially, we had one customer in a regulated industry, and they were technically out of compliance with their own internal regulatory groups. But the team had never upgraded their system, they just had gone along for 10 years. So compliance can be very much opportune time. The second area I see is the move to cloud. It’s amazing, Sarah. I mean, I would say a majority of our business now is Software as a service, cloud. And we have many customers that are on premise and their IT group goes, “Well, got to move to the cloud because all those server guys, they’re not here anymore. We’re just going to be outsourcing services.”

So you suddenly can’t just go along with the way the system had been set up. And moving to cloud is actually a program that we brought into some of our customers, and we’ve been pretty successful in planning it.

SO:                                     Yeah, that’s an interesting one. And I would say also, more broadly, we’re seeing a lot of environments where the system, the CCMS, was essentially customized and purpose-built for a particular use case.

CG:                                     Yes.

SO:                                     And then that customer either, their use case changes or the external situation, something changes. And they’re faced with this thing that they’ve customized to a point where they can’t get out, they can’t change it, they can’t fix it, they can’t modify it. The person who wrote the code is long gone. And it’s just that has been very, very difficult. You get this sort of, “But that’s how we’ve always done it.”

CG:                                     Well, Sarah, you brought it up. One of our customers spoke at the recent ConVEx conference around replatforming, and that’s exactly what happened. The person who had written a lot of the customizations left the company, and the team that was left with these customizations did not know how to support them. And there was a lot of analysis, and she talked really well about they took it as an opportunity to modernize the infrastructure. And sometimes I see modernization, in your content modeling, because you think of what did you and your team teach 5, 10 years ago versus today. We’re doing chat bots and all these other applications that really didn’t exist years ago. Voice-activated, it’s another one. So replatforming can also be a time to have new digital strategies that your company wants you to support instead of putting those huge PDFs out in the website.

SO:                                     Oh, everybody loves huge PDFs. So on that note, when we talk about terrible PDFs, what makes a replatforming successful? What are some of the factors that lead, that will make it successful? And for that matter, what are some of the red flags that you see, where somebody comes in and says, ‘We want to accomplish this’? Or what is it that they say that gives you concern?

CG:                                     Right, right. I think a real success factor to me is that it’s like when you originally purchased your system, and now you’re replatforming, is you have clear business goals and objectives, you set timelines. And I think a real success factor is you meet those factors. And because you’re spending money and that money to budget, and your managers and executives want to know how you’re doing. So a real success factor to me is you’ve made your goals, and then many of those goals should have included performance improvements. For example, we’ve seen customers, their PDF publishing has dropped 50 to 70% from older hardware, older Windows, older systems. And we also, we rebuilt our publishing platform a few years ago. So suddenly you’re starting to say what used to take 20 minutes is now taking 4 or 5 minutes. So your users really gain benefits from it. And then I think the other thing we were talking about earlier is the taking advantage of new, let’s say, new DITA topic types, the troubleshooting has been very popular. MathML formulas, it’s a lot easier to do that.

And being able to take advantage of new content types for new groups and so forth that are coming in. So that’s the cool thing. Now you brought up what’s the downside. I think the downside, especially when two groups merge is they think they’re going to be able to do content reuse, but they just did a hack job of information architecture to get the DITA content into the same CCMSs. As you well know, we’ve talked earlier about attributes and other things that you need to align, it doesn’t need to be perfect, but some of the mistakes people make are the assumptions that, “Oh, DITA is so transformed. I can do this and that and this.” Well, 10 years ago, we all made mistakes and did some things in DITA that made it more, let’s say, proprietary or unique. Those things surface in not great ways when you’re trying to merge different groups together. So you have publishing failures and things like that, that just aren’t seem to work. Those tend to be rare, generally, but I think where I’m going.

SO:                                     Yeah. I mean, you mentioned governance earlier, and I think there’s a really interesting balancing act in that alignment, because on the one hand, a given company, an organization, has some unique DNA and unique features, and they need to preserve those things to make sure that the content that they’re producing is compatible with who they are and what they’re trying to accomplish. At the same time, when you replatform from anything to anything else, it really doesn’t matter. Any given piece of software that you look at is going to be good at some things and not so good at other things. And it has a certain way that it’s designed, and you have to work within that design. If you try and do things the old way in the new system, very, very bad things will happen. And yet, so you have to figure out what makes my content unique and special and interesting, and how do I preserve that going forward?

But separate that from what design decisions did we make because old software worked a certain way, and how do we address that or mitigate that, or transition out of that, and take advantage of the things that new software gives us, without, again, losing our, whether it’s DNA or culture or whatever you want to call it, but that overall feel of your content?

CG:                                     Yeah. Sarah, that’s a really great point. And I just last week was having a conversation with one of our professional services experts who’s done replatforming, and he reminded me that DITA originally was built on a file system. And there’s still things there that when you look in a CCMS that we take it for granted on a file system. And people did things 10 years ago that today you don’t have to do it that way because the CCMS automates so much more of it, things like virgining, commenting, notes, metadata, and so forth.

So one of the things we did, and one of the replatforms we did last year, customer had very pretty good DITA content. We also were able to move over a lot of their CCMS metadata into our system. So sometimes they replatform for reasons, but they had, let’s say, it’s a good platform, but they outgrew it or something. So replatforming can also incorporate things that are outside of your DITA content and the metadata, and even things like, oh, who the author was who made that change in June of 2019 and everything. And it was pretty impressive to see that history inside of our CCMS that they had preserved. Because again, they were a regulated organization.

SO:                                     Actually, that brings up another interesting thing that we’ve run into, which is the question of what do we keep and what do we not keep?

CG:                                     Right.

SO:                                     At what point do you just say, “You know what? Anything pre-1980, we have a PDF, we’re good. We’re not preserving it as editable content.” Now, depending on who you are and what kind of products you produce, you might very well need that 1980 content to be still editable because it’s still being maintained. But most of the time, you can pick a cutoff point somewhere, but you’re never going to be perfect. There will always be that outlier.

CG:                                     Yep.

SO:                                     Nothing past 1995, except for this one product.

CG:                                     Yep, yep. Yeah.

SO:                                     Yeah, no, go ahead.

CG:                                     No, that’s a great point, that it’s really a time, a great time to take inventory of what do you really need to move forward, and what’s legacy. And perhaps you just archive it and leave it around just in case it ever is needed. But yeah, it’s that 80:20 rule of what content is the most active that you want to work on and continue on and updating and so forth.

SO:                                     So if I’m someone who’s thinking about replatforming, what would you tell me? I mean, what is the number one thing that people need to do to increase their odds of success as they move into this pretty complex project.

CG:                                     It is, Sarah. And my number one advice would be to clearly define your business objectives and goals. You’re going to be making an investment, and you’re going to have to ask for budget and funding to make this happen. So you have to have clear business goals to be able to achieve this replatforming. And an example might be, and again, to take advantage of new digital initiatives in your organization, because even your approach today is more document or even a [inaudible 00:20:18] viewer kind of approach. So you’re going to replatform, we’ll be able to take advantage of new systems that you’re integrating with. Another example we see is people are moving to Jason quite a bit for interactive applications on mobile devices. And we have some really great Jason outputs that are being driven from DITA content that was written years ago. And so you can create some new output types that might fit into a more modern infrastructure, instead of just publishing out some 15-year-old chunk files or HTML and things like that.

SO:                                     Yeah. And I mean, I think that’s really good advice to look at the business objectives and figure out what you have. And then from a technical point of view, I think it’s worth thinking really carefully about what is a platform deficiency that you can address, and what is, I guess, a choice that’s been made, that may or may not be able to be unwound. There’s all these issues you run into around culture. And you touched on this earlier, that if the culture is a certain way, then swimming against that, it is just pain.

CG:                                     It is. I’ve seen hardware related companies merge with software companies, and just different development methodologies, waterfall versus agile. And you have to realize your business could be different too, and when you’re trying to combine or replatform.

SO:                                     So if you combine waterfall and agile, you get wagile.

CG:                                     I like that.

SO:                                     Which is the worst of both worlds, it’s not good at all. But yeah, it’s an interesting process though, of really understanding, when we replatform, what can we fix? What will we just get? Because our new software will do these neato things that our old software didn’t do, and what things are kind of baked in? And what kind of decisions do we have to make to it all work?

CG:                                     Yeah. One last bit of advice I would offer is you can also learn as you’re going through this replatforming. So learn from the experts, learn from consultants, like your team, learn from the vendor. You’re going to go in with certain assumptions and so forth. So if you’re going to come up with a new governance model, pay attention to some of the experts. And finally, attending conferences and so forth to see what is going on. I noticed, I love this term replatforming and I saw at ConVEx, I saw some people talking about their next generation CCMS. So this is pretty cool, pretty cool trends.

SO:                                     Yeah. It’s fun that we’ve lasted long enough to see not just platforming, but replatforming.

CG:                                     Yeah, it’s great. It’s great, Sarah. Kudos to you and your team for keeping up all this work.

SO:                                     Well, yeah, and I mean, same to you because I think there’s a small group of us. We’re small but mighty, and we’re going to make it happen.

CG:                                     Yeah. And I’m constantly amazed at the executive alignment that we see in many of our organizations. Again, 10 years into it, their executives are still great. The things that we promised; automation, translation, integration, reuse, all those things have blossomed well within organizations. And it’s great to see it continue to grow.

SO:                                     Yeah. And I think that’s a great place to leave it on that optimistic note, since we spent most of our time talking about challenges and problems. So with that, Chip, thank you so much, it’s great to see you.

CG:                                     You too, Sarah, thank you.

SO:                                     Thank you. 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 Replatforming your structured content into a new CCMS (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 127 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Alan Pringle talk about the challenges of aligning learning content with structured content workflows.

We’ve seen a little bit of a trend where we think about learning content and structure almost as mortal enemies, and we see some degree of resistance to wanting to use structured content for learning and training materials. And we want to dig into a little bit of why that might be.

—Gretyl Kinsey

Gretyl Kinsey:                  Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about the challenges involved with structured learning content. Hello, I’m Gretyl Kinsey.

Alan Pringle:                     And I’m Alan Pringle.

GK:                                     And we’re going to be talking about our experiences with learning content and structured content and how they come together and sometimes how they don’t. So where I want to start is with talking about how they don’t always come together sometimes.

We’ve seen a little bit of a trend where we think about learning content and structure almost as mortal enemies, and we see some degree of resistance to wanting to use structured content for learning and training materials. And we want to dig into a little bit of why that might be.

AP:                                     Well, I want to be clear here, it’s not necessarily because of the trainers and the instructional designers. In a lot of cases, I think it’s because the tools that are targeted for those kinds of content creators are frankly not the best in the world. I think objectively we can say PowerPoint may be the worst tool for content creation of any kind.

It just encourages all sorts of bad behavior. The way that you, “Okay, I need to add text here. I need to add an image here.” It’s like how many frames can you possibly draw on a slide? Well, a lot based on some things that I’ve seen. So I mean, really, let’s take a look at the tools.

PowerPoint is not a great tool. It’s very freewheeling, gives you possibly too much latitude in how you put things together. So I think it’s fair to point that out. And then you look for example, at some of the learning management systems, and some of those systems are really good, but they have very narrow capabilities that are focused specifically on training.

So they’re very closed systems. And for example, it may not be super easy to import content into the system, export it out. So they’re closed and there’s just not a lot of interaction between systems. And then when you don’t have that level of interaction or those capabilities for systems to play together, that’s when you start seeing things like copying and pasting and other things that are, shall we say, not the most productive or free of error.

GK:                                     Absolutely. And I think it’s really interesting too that you brought up PowerPoint, because there are all those limitations that you talked about. The way that it’s really, there is no structure to it whatsoever that you can do anything you want on any slide and it is really hard to keep that templatized and consistent.

And yet PowerPoint is a very popular tool for learning content because when you think about how training is often delivered with a presentation style, that really lends itself to being one of the optimal ways to do so.

And so then what you said about having instructional designers really not having a lot of control over the fact that structured content and learning content are sort of moral enemies or don’t mesh very well.

I think a lot of that is because PowerPoint is something that they need to use because it does lend itself well to what they’re trying to do. And the same I think is true with learning management systems, they need that to be able to deliver their e-learning content for digital learning platforms.

And whenever you’ve got tools like this with these sorts of limitations that are really not conducive to structure and that go against what structure does, it really puts them in a difficult position where maybe even if they wanted to have more structured learning content, they really can’t because of the types of tools that are best suited to delivering training materials are really just not well suited to structure.

AP:                                     Sure. And then when you’re dealing with really ridiculous aggressive schedules, you’re having to do constant course updates, you are not in the frame of mind to be thinking about, “Oh, how could structure make my life better?” It’s completely understandable to me. But there are compelling use cases to have structure content for your training content.

GK:                                     Absolutely. And I think there’s a growing demand for that. As we move more and more into a digital world, we’ve seen that over time. I would say definitely in the last decade plus that I’ve been at Scriptorium, and especially in the last couple of years with the pandemic, there’s been more of a necessity and a demand for digital learning environments and e-learning. And I think that’s where structure really can come in and help with things.

AP:                                     Sure. And if you think about content creators in general and all the different places that they are, structure has pretty much moved well, very well into the product content TechComm area. Those folks have been using structure for quite a while now. We have also seen a shift in MarCom.

I have seen marketing content that is now driven by structure. So if you think about the flow of information, it kind of makes sense by extension that training content, learning content may be the next logical extension of where structured content can go.

GK:                                     I agree with that completely. And I know that even with some of the clients we’ve worked with, we’ve seen that as a use case that a lot of these companies have where they have a need to share content, like you were mentioning, get things out of closed systems and have the ability to reuse and share across systems and across departments. Right?

So you’re talking about TechComm and MarCom, I’ve seen several companies where there’s a need to have some common core information that’s shared across TechComm, MarCom and training and then maybe some other departments as well. And structured content is the obvious go-to way to do that.

AP:                                     Exactly.

GK:                                     And there are a lot of benefits too, when it comes to having your learning content in a structured environment. So one is that it’s easier to build an intelligence. When we think about e-learning environments and we want to have something like automatic grading and scoring that shows up as you’re going through and doing the activities or taking quizzes, that’s something that’s possible when you’re learning content sources are structured.

AP:                                     Yeah, very much. And a lot of the reasons and compelling use cases you have in TechComm and MarCom and elsewhere they apply here too. Consistency is greatly improved when you are working with structure.

And another big one is reuse. Everybody, regardless of what kind of content you are writing, is going to have some kind of reuse scenarios where basically having this modular structured content that you can basically refer to and plug in wherever you need to, it reduces you having to write the same thing over and over again and it reduces the number of variations of that same content.

For example, in training, one thing that immediately comes to my mind is the kind of housekeeping stuff you do before a course, whether it’s in person or you do it online. There’s certain things you want the students to know. This is where your sample files are to do these exercises, this is when we’re going to have a break, this is how long this is going to take.

All that kind of stuff that you’d want to communicate upfront. In a lot of cases, that is very, very structured, templatized, whatever word you want to use. And it’s a matter of sometimes just picking and choosing certain bits of that housekeeping content and putting it together to explain all those things you want explained upfront. That way you don’t have to write them 400 times and have a zillion variations of them stored away somewhere.

GK:                                     Absolutely. And I’ve seen just that, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen learning materials that don’t start with that housekeeping information, but I have seen some cases where the learning materials were in PowerPoint, for example. And so they each had a copy of that same slide and sometimes the wording would be different or sometimes there would be some different images, when it really should have just been one consistent reusable piece of housekeeping information.

AP:                                     Yeah. And it’s got to be just so frustrating to have to go through and touch a bunch of files just to change a word or two and a paragraph that appears in housekeeping information. I mean, to me, this is absolute low hanging fruit on why structure can really help you out in a training environment. And like I said, that’s a low hanging fruit. There are so many other things that go well beyond that, that are probably worth discussing as well.

GK:                                     Yeah, I know one example that comes to my mind is thinking about the ability to have student versus teacher versions of the same course.

AP:                                     Yep.

GK:                                     From the same set of source materials so that you don’t have to have, for example, a copied and pasted version of an entire test just so that you can have an answer key.

If you are in a digital and structured learning environment, you want the ability to switch that key with the answers on and off so that you can have one version that’s for the teachers and one that’s for the students. And that’s something that structure allows you to do.

AP:                                     Yeah. And I think we also have to note, there are ways to do what you just described that are not based on structure. There are ways to do them, they’re just a lot more painful. I think we have to be careful and not say absolutely structure is the only way to do these things, it’s not. But it streamlines and makes doing these sorts of things a lot easier and it takes the burden off of the instructional designers and the content creators.

GK:                                     Definitely. So I want to talk about one possible solution for getting your learning content structured in a way that we’ve seen with some of our clients, and that is the DITA Learning and Training Specialization.

And this is basically a set of DITA tags that is designed for learning content. And so it comes with a really robust and flexible set of tags. You have different map types that you can use for gathering your course materials and organizing things into different modules and lessons and entire courses.

You have different topic types that are designed for learning material including things like test questions and assessments. And there are a lot of different options that are included in that set of DITA Learning and Training Specialization tags. And you can also customize those further if you need to.

AP:                                     And let’s back up just a little bit and explain what a map file is because a lot of people may not know.

GK:                                     Sure. So a map is essentially the equivalent if you think about published content, it’s similar to your table of contents, it’s the backbone or the overall hierarchy of a publication.

So if you have a course for your learning and training materials, then the map would say, here are all of the different lessons and modules and materials in that course in the hierarchical order and structure in which they appear.

AP:                                     Yep. And I think it’s worth noting what you said about the Learning and Training Specialization having a tremendous amount of options. I think that that particular specialization, just based on my experience with it, is so wide open, you’re going to have a hard time not finding something that’s going to help you out in it.

It is an enormous set of elements and it is very robust like you mentioned. And it is so robust, in some cases you may actually want to constrain down the number of elements and basically say, “You know what? Our instructional designers don’t use this particular set of elements.

They really don’t write these kinds of topics. So we’re going to hide those so they don’t show up when people are authoring.” There are ways to take the DITA standard and shrink it down just to the tags that you use to streamline your authoring and course design efforts.

GK:                                     Yeah. And we’ve seen that a lot of times where, for example, if you are delivering training in a school classroom, and maybe the only things that you need are your actual learning material. So that would just be learning content. And then also if you need some assessment questions for tests.

And maybe let’s say all you need is multiple choice and true and false, and you don’t even need the other types of test questions, you could narrow that specialization down to where you only have your learning content for the courses themselves and then those two types of test questions and that’s all you need.

And then on the opposite side of the spectrum, if you need more than what comes with the DITA Learning and Training Specialization, which I think is pretty rare because it does come with so much. But if you do for example, need a type of test question that does not exist, then that can also be specialized.

And I know that Scriptorium has done that before where we had someone who needed a couple of different types of questions besides what was already available. So we created I think two or three new ones. And yeah, that level of flexibility is 100% possible with the Learning and Training Specialization.

And it really can help you get your learning content into that type of structure that you might need for an e-learning environment or for doing something like a split where if you’ve got in person and e-learning and you need all of that delivered from one set of sources, DITA Learning and Training is a really ideal way to do that.

AP:                                     Yeah. And I think it’s worth noting too, even if you use the specialized set of elements that are specifically for learning content, people in other departments who are creating content, for example, people in your product content department, people who are creating the marketing content, if they are also using DITA and they are creating topics for example, that have very good explanations of concepts around your product or service or have the specifications for your product, you can take those and refer to them, borrow them.

Pull them into your content and reference them so you don’t have to recreate those specifications that another group has created in DITA. So there’s a lot of cross pollination and sharing that can go on to, again, give your company, not just your department, but your entire company, all content creators will have a much more consistent voice and be sharing things out to the public, to the customers, to their clients that are much more consistent in messaging and the information being shared.

GK:                                     Absolutely. And it makes updates easier as well. Because if you think about a company who needs to train new employees and the products are constantly going through upgrades, it’s a lot easier to get the training materials updated to reflect those product upgrades if all of the information is structured and connected and your learning content is pulling in and reusing information from your product content that automatically gets updated alongside of those product upgrades.

AP:                                     Exactly.

GK:                                     And just one thing I wanted to point out about learning and training as well is that Scriptorium has a website called learningDITA.com and all of the course material on there was created using the DITA Learning and Training Specialization. So if you want a real world example to get an idea of what some course material that was created, what that structure looks like, that is a really good place that you can go and all of it is free to access.

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.

AP:                                     Yeah. And it’s worth noting that site is just one way that content could have been displayed. We hooked it up to a learning management system that’s based on the WordPress platform. But you don’t have to do that. We could have taken that content, we could have created printed study guides with it.

We could have done all kinds of things. We could have ported it into a different learning management system. You are really not limited in the ways that you can transform your structure source content into whatever. It’s really, the possibilities are nearly endless.

GK:                                     Absolutely. So we have talked about a lot of those possibilities and the benefits with using structured content for your learning material. But there are some common challenges that we see with this as well when it comes to moving to structured learning content.

And one of those is that it goes back to what we talked about in the beginning with the tools limitations. It can be really difficult to find a good learning management system that is both going to meet your training team’s requirements and allow you to work with a structured content like DITA. And that goes back to what you said earlier, Alan, about issues with close systems and difficulties with important export and connectivity.

AP:                                     Yeah. And those issues around tools of course, affect people’s perceptions and how they’re going to view things. If they’re really overworked and who isn’t these days? Frustrated with continually updating things, their mindset may be, I can barely handle what I’m doing now, can I manage this jump to structure?

And one way to kind of handle that I think is to really take a look at your pain points, what things are making things really hard for you. And listing out those pain points. And then having either someone in your organization who’s familiar with structure or even hire a consultant like we are to come and say, “Okay. Let’s take a look at your pain points.”

This is how structure could help address those pain points. And the thing is, you don’t have to go in a hundred percent at first. Do a small proof of concept. There are ways you can bite off a small section of what you need to do and focus on that because you can kind of grow and build upon things.

Start with one kind of training content, start with one particular subject of your training content, whatever. Break off a manageable amount that still reflects kind of the overall structure, the overall process that you’re going through. And then use it to do basically a test to see how things can work for you. You don’t have to do it all at once upfront.

GK:                                     Yeah. And another thing that I see as a challenge when it comes to moving to structure is that we talked about reuse and we talked about how that could really help bring some benefit to when you’ve got different departments like TechCom, MarCom training and others that need to share material that reuse can really help them out.

But reaping the benefits of that reuse is going to require collaboration across all the departments involved. And that’s definitely a challenge that we see because it’s a change in the way that people work. And to the point that you just made, when people are already overwhelmed and stressed and overworked, then getting them into a mindset of collaboration when they’ve previously been working separately can be a pretty big hurdle to cross.

AP:                                     Yeah. And this is when it can be very helpful to have someone come in who has seen this and done it, whether you hire, bring someone in who has had these experiences or you bring in a consultant. That can really help you focus and identify those pain points, figure out ways to address them, and then do your proof of concept testing.

GK:                                     Yeah. And I think that’s also going to really help show just how much time and cost can be saved if you’ve start reusing content that you have not been reusing before.

AP:                                     Yeah. And this gets into the return on investment. This is a very important part of doing structure for any content. Or it’s not even content that I’m talking about here, this is for any business initiative. You need to figure out what your return on investment is going to be on making these changes.

You don’t want to invest a tremendous amount of time, energy, frankly, pain into something for which there is no return on an investment. It just doesn’t make sense. So again, this is part of why you want someone who has done this before to come in and help. They can help you figure out what that return on investment is going to be for reuse and other aspects of your content.

GK:                                     Yeah. And I think that gets into what I see as one of the biggest challenges for moving to structure is you have to invest to get value. And because of that, you have to know what that return on investment is going to be.

And budget and resources tend to be one of the biggest limitations when it comes to making a change like moving to structure. So that is why it’s so important to be able to demonstrate, improve that return on investment before you dive in.

AP:                                     Yeah. And this sounds ridiculous, but you need to invest before you invest. You need to invest some time and money into doing a really good strategy and then think about how you’re going to implement that strategy. Don’t just dive into the tools, that is one of the worst mistakes you can make. And that is not just training content. Trust me.

GK:                                     Absolutely. So I think the overall question that we pose at the beginning or the thought that we pose at the beginning about learning content and structure being mortal enemies, is it possible for them to stop being mortal enemies and for you to get good structured learning content at your organization? And I would say yes, but it does take a lot of work, time and money.

AP:                                     Yeah. It’s a loaded question and maybe a little unfair, but it’s a valid point. You are not just going to go into in a new system, a new way of doing work and expect it to magically work. That is not how it works. It does take some analysis, it takes money and it takes time and patience to get these things to work.

GK:                                     But the good thing is if you do prove that return on investment is going to truly benefit your organization and it’s going to resolve your pain points, then you’re going to know that that investment will be worth it.

AP:                                     Yeah. And we do have clients who have been working in structure for years for their learning and training content. We know it can happen, they know it can happen. So it is possible. Yes, truly.

GK:                                     And I think that’s a really good place to close things out. So thank you so much, Alan.

AP:                                     Thank you, Gretyl.

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

The post The challenges of structured learning content (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 126 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Stefan Gentz of Adobe discuss Industry 4.0.

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Transcript:

Sarah O’Keefe:                 Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we’ll talk about Industry 4.0 with Stefan Gentz of Adobe. Hi, I’m Sarah O’Keefe. Stephan, welcome tell us a little bit about yourself and your job at Adobe.

Stefan Gentz:                   Hi Sarah. Yeah, I’m Stefan Gentz and I’m the Senior Worldwide Evangelist for Technical Communication at Adobe. I’m working for Adobe like six years, six and a half years now, almost seven years. And it has been a great journey and it’s a great company to work for. So, I’m happy to look into these topics like Industry 4.0 to drive that forward and help our teams also to get a better understanding for that and develop solutions that the Industry actually needs.

SO:                                     The Technical Communication portfolio at Adobe includes, I’m going to list a few and then I’m going to forget some things and you’ll fill in the rest, right? But it includes FrameMaker RoboHelp, AEM guides which did a CCMS AEM product and what did I forget?

SG:                                     For the Technical Communication part that’s mostly it, RoboHelp is brand new product since 2019, where we completely revamped it. And of course, with the good old workhorse FrameMaker that you can use for structured content and XML editing and DITA authoring, et cetera. And yes, for a couple of years now we have our own DITA CCMS Component Content Management System, which sits in as you said Adobe Experience Manager it’s called Adobe Experience Manager Guides, formerly XML Documentation for Adobe Experience Manager, which was a very long name.

SO:                                     It was.

SG:                                     Yeah.

SO:                                     So, I wanted to ask you about Industry 4.0, it’s a term that I hear a lot in the European market and it seems to be used more there perhaps, especially in Germany, because Germany has so much heavy industry, so much machinery, that kind of thing but when somebody talks to you about Industry 4.0, how do you define Industry 4.0?

SG:                                     Yeah. I mean, these two terms around there’s IoT, the Internet of Things, which is more a north American thing and industry 4.0, which is something that roots deeply in the German industry. And it’s actually not a new term goes back until I think even 2011 when that started. And in 2013, the platform Industry 4.0 was founded by German Industry Associations like Bitcom, VDMA, and ZVEI. And they were coming together to develop further and implement the industry 4.0 idea as part of the high tech strategy of the German government. So, the German government in 2011 was inventing that term industry 4.0 as a future initiative to drive digitalization in the German industry and that what was picked up by these industry associations and then companies like German Telecom, Robert Bosch, Siemens, Festo, SAP, and others joint that platform Industry 4.0 and started to create a framework for that.

And that’s all happening on the platform Industry 4.0, which is indeed very German and very rooted in the German classic manufacturing industry. And that is probably the reason why that term Industry 4.0 is usually heard more in Europe than in North America where the industry is talking more about internet of things but in some way, the same idea and roots into the same concepts, but Industry 4.0 is more about classic manufacturing industries and production processes and what we call the smart factory. And it refers to intelligent networking of machines and processes in the industry with the help of information and communication technology. That’s more an industry thing while IoT is very often also about the end consumer Smart Home and things like that. And that is Smart Home and things like that are not so much in the focus of Industry 4.0 there we really talk about things like smart factories, smart machines that can communicate with each other and where content and data is used in new ways.

SO:                                     Right. So basically, I mean, it sounds as though, Smart Home is internet of things more or less and smart factory, the industrial equivalent is Industry 4.0 to terribly oversimplify.

SG:                                     Yeah. Very simple set. We could put it like that. Yeah.

SO:                                     Yeah. Okay. So, we make a smart factory where we’re going to wave our hands and make a smart factory where everything starts to be interconnected and have some intelligence in terms of what’s going on with all the machines, talking to each other. What does that then mean for? You and I both live in the content world. What does that mean for us? What do, what are the implications of Industry 4.0 of a smart factory for content people?

SG:                                     Well, I recently talked to someone and he said, or actually she said data and content are the new raw material in the Industry. Of course, well in the future also have other raw materials to turn them into products but one important factor that is basically a deciding factor for success or failure is data and content. And when we think about the use of data, data on the production process and the condition of a machine and the product are combined and evaluated by algorithms, by software and data analyzes provides information on how a product can be manufactured more efficiently, like you’re monitoring the production process and then trying to optimize it. But more importantly, it is also the basis for completely new business models and services. For example, let’s think of elevator manufacturer, they can offer their customers. Things like predictive maintenance based on content and data.

The data is maybe produced by the machine, by the motor of the elevator, for example. But that data itself is not useful. It needs to have some context and that context is something that is coming from engineers. And for example, technical writers or engineers, let’s think of a classic manual for an elevator where you have some part about maintenance. And then there’s a table of how often does this elevator need to be maintained and maybe the software needs to be updated, whatever. And this is content that usually is created by human beings. And that is something changing where in the future… For example, elevators can be equipped with sensors that continuously send data about their condition and what to do with that information. That is something that we as human beings, as tech technical writers, for example, put somewhere and classically it’s put in a user manual or in the maintenance manual.

And that then there’s a disconnect between the data and the content and the idea of Industry 4.0 is also to bring this together and have a new way of consuming and using technical content like stuff that is a content that is in a maintenance manual and use that the machine can use that. And there are already examples for that in the German industry. Like there’s a big company that produces big machines for a wood processing. On the one end, you put in a big tree and on the other end of the machine window frame comes out of that machine simply said, and how often this machine needs to be maintained, the machine is actually pulling that data life through an API, from the system where the data content is hosted and the maintenance data is created as XML as data and there’s a maintenance table and in index in one topic and the machine can pull out the information, when is my next maintenance cycle from the data topic that is created by a technical writer.

And that means we also need to think about how we create content and how we offer that content and how we make that content accessible. And if you think about it from a technical writing perspective, traditionally, the idea of technical writing was to explain a complex product or a complex process for a human reader so that the human reader understands how to use the machine or how to use the software or how to use the elevator or whatever, or a service engineer who has to maintain such a machine or product. So, the target audience of content created by technical writers was usually a human being. And in that Industry 4.0 context, and also in the IoT context, we need to think about content, new ways.

We need to create content in ways that it’s consumable by both human beings and machines and that is something where we need to not only from the words and phrasing and how we explain content, but also in terms of attributing content and say, ‘This is content that is for a human reader, one paragraph for the human reader and one paragraph or one table of data for the machine that is going to consume that content to pull out, for example, maintenance cycle data.” And that means we need to approach technical writing in a new way in the future and already today actually, and also need to use technologies that make it possible to implement what we as technical writers produce to implement that into an Industry 4.0 or IoT scenario. Yeah, it’s a complete new way of what we need to do with content that we produce and how we store it, et cetera,

SO:                                     I’m terrified of your wood machine. So I’m going to go back to the elevator cause. So what you’re saying is that you have an elevator and in the Non-industry 4.0 world, you have an elevator and the elevator goes up and down. And after every, let’s say 100 hours of operation, there’s a particular maintenance procedure. You need to go in and lubricate some things or check a belt for wear or something. And by the way, no idea how elevators actually work, so-

SG:                                     Neither…

SO:                                     Yeah, okay. So we have an elevator every 100 hours, there’s something that you should be doing. And so, the implication of Industry 4.0 is that the elevator itself has sensors which count operational time, right? So it would measure, Hey, I’ve hit 100 hours. Yeah. And at the point, and it knows that, or it has what amounts to a clock or a counter inside the system, inside the elevator.

Okay. So it hits a 100 hours and normally at a 100 hours, the dumb elevator, right? It has the sensor, but the dumb elevator just turns on a red light and says, “Hey, hi, you need to do my maintenance.” Right?

SG:                                     Exactly.

SO:                                     And then the maintenance technician shows up and says, “Oh, the red light is on. I have error code 57. Let me go see what that is. Oh, that means I need to go pour oil on this thing over here.” Fine. And presumably they looked up error 57 in the documentation, some horrible PDF that’s like 100 of pages long. And it has error codes for days. And they go in there and under 57 on page 685, they eventually find something about machine oil, but in Industry 4.0, it kicks off that message or that error that says, “I’ve hit a 100 hours. It’s time to do some things.”

And then essentially it has access to the documentation, right? It’s like contact sensitive, help. It just says, “Hey, Stephan, my friend, the mechanic, you need to do this procedure.” Right. You don’t have to look it up. You don’t have to provide that connectivity between the system, the error code or the maintenance code. And then the documentation that explains what that maintenance code is. Now, somebody did the work, right? I mean, to your point, some human being created the content and presumably some other human being built the framework that connects all those error codes to the relevant information.

And then somewhere along the way, we have to display that content in a human readable form so that the service technician can do the procedure. Now, to your point, that doesn’t get into the question of what about automated procedures or the machine automatically going into service mode and I guess servicing itself in some way. So, when I think about this and we look at what we’ve been doing for the past 15, 20 years with topic based content, that seems like the first step in this direction, right? That we have to have individualized units of content that cover these specific procedures so that when the machine says, “I need this service, we can connect. I need this service X, Y, and Z to the relevant instructions.”

SG:                                     Yeah. And Sarah, we can think it even a little bit further. Imagine that it’s not about oil in the elevator, but about a certain part of that elevator that needs to replace every hundred hours of operation time. As you said, classically red light would light up and someone looks at that red light and needs to call the elevator company. You need to send someone there’s a strange red light. And then the service technician comes, sees, “Oh, that’s this red light with this arrow code. Okay. I need to replace that part.” Good. That don’t have that part with me. I need to go drive back into the company and order it in SAP or wherever. After a couple of weeks, it comes back. The part is delivered. He again, needs to go to the elevator, replace the part, et cetera. So it’s a very time consuming and cumbersome process where maybe even the elevator will not be available for a certain amount of time.

And people need to walk the stairs, which could be healthy, but could also be that. And the idea of Industry 4.0 here is that the elevator can look up. For example, by being connected through the internet with the central data center of the elevator company can look up what that error code actually means. And in a list of error codes or whatever could send, for example, a short message or an email or something to the service technician, informing the service technician that this part will needs to be replaced in 20 hours of operation time, predictive maintenance, and when the 100 hours are actually achieved, then the survey technician can already see, “Okay, based on data. So many hours per day, the elevator running probably on August 15, this part will fail and needs to be replaced.”

And then he can also already come to the elevator with the right part and replace it and he already knows, or she already knows that how to replace that part, because that information is already there. It’s already pulled from the technical documentation coming maybe to the iPhone or Android phone or whatever or smart pet that this is the part that you need to re replace. It’s maybe already automatically ordered from the supplier of the replacement part, along with the information, how to replace that part. So when the service technician arrives at the elevator, he or she already knows what to do and what to replace and doesn’t need to go forth and back and then order and then wait for the part to come, et cetera. And that makes the whole process much more efficient and makes it much more stable for the people who use the elevator because the elevator company can take care of such replacements and maintenance things before in German, we say before [foreign language] fallen into the-

SO:                                     Well-

SG:                                     Yeah.

SO:                                     Oh, there’s a terrible lassie joke in there, but we’ll let that slide. So, okay. So let’s say that I work for some an industrial company producing service and maintenance documentation. Now, if my organization has already started an initiative like this, then this is all not new information, but let’s say what about for the people that are in these organizations that at this point are still producing dumb PDFs. I mean, good maintenance instructions potentially, but just in locked up in PDF or locked up in a way that is not interconnected with the systems.

What would be your advice to those people? What are the first steps to start thinking about this? If I’m the tech writer and I know that my company is moving in this direction, doing more service management, predictive maintenance, trying to add some intelligence into my products, then what are the implications for me as a content creator? And what kinds of steps should I be taking proactively to make sure that I’m ready when eventually the director or the VP of something shows up on my doorstep and says, “Guess what? We’re doing Internet of Things, we’re doing Industry 4.0, and we need your content to be ready.” What do I do?

SG:                                     Well, you will not go very far with traditional ways of producing content in Microsoft Word as a long Microsoft word document so what do we basically need is what do we call intelligent content and intelligent content basically is something like structured content XML based where you can add metadata, where you can attributes to the strengths of content that is readable so to say. So you could have attributes on a certain table with maintenance data, like the audience is the technician, or the audience is the machine, and then attribute the rows in the table to certain, to these two certain audiences. And this is something that this additional intelligence on top of the text strings themselves, this is this additional layer of intelligence that you can attach to the content. This is only possible today with XML and this is why Industry 4.0 Scenarios or IOT scenarios are always based on content that is produced in XML.

And one great language to produce XML based content is of course DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, this language makes it possible to put that in additional intelligence into the content or on top of the content or attached to the content. This is one thing. So, structure content is there’s no discussion about that. If you want to be future ready, if you want to be Industry 4.0 already with your content, you need to work with XML preferably with DITA. And then, you need to also host that content somewhere so that it can be centrally managed, but also centrally consumed and centrally delivered. And that is something where you need a CCMS. You will not be able to achieve that with only RoboHelp or only FrameMaker, but you need a component content management system. And that CCMS also needs to have APIs so that external content consumers can access the content through an API and pull out the information that they need.

And from that CCMS on the other end, you can also deliver that content to what you say, call Omnichannel. So basically the good old PDF yeah still very relevant, but you can also produce push that content into other systems, like let’s say Salesforce or Zendesk or your own help portal or support portal or [inaudible]-

SO:                                     Service management system. Yeah.

SG:                                     Or in some other management system or some machine system where can inject certain informations from the CSMs side. But APIs are a crucial part there with system, without APIs that are accessible from the outside. You will not achieve a lot without APIs. So basically, XML plus CCMS and the CCMS with APIs. These are the things that you definitely need to have as a technology stack to be Industry 4.0 already. And then of course, you need to think about how to create that content, how to write content, how to migrate content legacy data, because you don’t want to start from the scratch with everything, right? You want to migrate that content and have a content suggestion engine where you can push your existing unstructured, non examine content into a CCMS like Adobe Experience Manager Guides and get it migrated into XML and transformed into XML, and then enrich it with these new possibilities that such system offers like attribution of content, metadata, taxonomy, et cetera.

SO:                                     And, we talk about the world being more and more interconnected and more and more interdependent and really, it seems like what you’re describing is a world where the content is an integral part of not just the product talking to it, but the product operations in the sense of the maintenance tech, the service people, all these different people who actually are looking at both the product, our elevator, and also the maintenance and connecting those together in ways that make them better, make the product better, make the product safer in that we have, as you said, predictive maintenance rather than after the fact maintenance and potentially more efficient, right? Because, well, let’s just replace it 98 hours instead of a hundred, instead of waiting for it to stop.

SG:                                     Yeah. And it’s also the personalization of that content. If you think of a car, let’s say you’re a car manufacturer and you have a model of your car, but this model is in hundreds if not thousands of variants in the market with this seen on light or with this other light, or with all kinds of parts in the car that you can customize as a customer. But when you buy that car, traditionally, you get that super big bot manual where all possible variants are described.

And of course not only that’s raise of paper and not good for the environment. It’s also very unfriendly for the customer who wants to access information because the customer doesn’t care about all the variants. The customer cares about that one configuration that he or she has bought this kind of configuration and having a personalized bot manual for your car in two variants, even one in the screen, in the car, and one in the human machine interface there, and one in the maybe printed manual for security, backup reasons, and this kind of personalization of content and maybe even having two different ways of representing the content, maybe in the technical manual that is shipped with the car, it’s legally approved proper content.

And maybe in the onscreen, in the human machine interface, in the car, in the display, it’s a completely different content. Maybe it’s like, “Hey, Sarah, the oil in your car needs to re be replaced or whatever.” And this, this, this kind of personalization of content for that you also need a CCMS. And to put that a step further, personally, I think in the future, we will approach content in a new way from delivering content to hosting content. In the past, we were always thinking about the output channels. We were always thinking about how can we create a nice looking PDF or how can we create nice looking web help portals and you also talked a little bit about that in your presentation at DITAWORLD, about content as a service.

I think in the future, companies will much stronger focus on having a central place for their content a CCMS and then from there, the content is just pulled or delivered as necessary and needed by the different scenarios where their products are used in, and this idea of not thinking about the output, but thinking about how to host the content and in which format to host the content, et cetera, that is some a new way of thinking about content. And I think this is where the future is going to that companies are more and more focusing on centralizing that content in a platform that can be used by all kinds of content consumers.

SO:                                     And we’re already seeing some of this in the projects that we’re doing exactly that model and in a really interesting move away from focusing on delivery endpoints and rather focusing on, I guess, enablement and making content available but not necessarily being a 100% focused on where it might be going. I mean, of course delivery is important, but it’s more the idea that we want to make sure this content is set up in such a way that it can accommodate today’s requirements, but other requirements, the requirements we don’t know about, you know the future stuff. That’s a really interesting, I think, challenge to the people that are listening. And so, I think I’m going to wrap it up there’s an enormous amount of, I think, food for thought in here. So, Stefan, thank you so much for coming in and sharing all this wisdom with us and all these exciting new possibilities for our content.

SG:                                     You’re welcome.

SO:                                     And 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 Industry 4.0 (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 125 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Amy Williams of DCL talk about digital transformation projects and how structured content provides the foundation for those efforts.

If, as a company, you start to think and plan and build processes with the digital innovation, you really start to future-proof for yourself, because you’re going to become more agile, more flexible.

– Amy Williams

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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 with guest Amy Williams about how content structure provides the building blocks for innovation. Hey, everybody. I’m Alan Pringle. We have a special guest here today.

Amy Williams:                 Hi, Alan. This is Amy Williams. I’m here from Data Conversion Laboratory.

AP:                                     Hey there, Amy. First, let’s do some introduction so people know who you are and what your company does. So tell me a little bit about yourself and about DCL.

AW:                                   So I’ll start with DCL. We’ve been in business over 40 years.

AP:                                     Good for you.

AW:                                   And, yeah, I think we have you beat. I think we’re 1981.

AP:                                     Yeah. We’re ’97, so you have.

AW:                                   Right. Essentially, what we do is provide data and content transformation services and solutions. We use different technologies to provide those services and different various AI technologies that you probably hear a lot about, but machine learning, natural language processing and ultimately, we use those to help our customers structure their data and their content so they can use them on different technologies and different platforms. That’s essentially what we do. I’m the Chief Operating Officer at DCL. I’ve been here for 24 years. I come from a management consulting background.

AP:                                     Wow.

AW:                                   I know, it’s a long time. I was so shocked when I say it myself.

AP:                                     But hey, that means you know what you’re talking about. I think you’ve given us a good springboard with that introduction into what you and I want to talk about today. We’re going to talk about how structured content is the building block, the basis, whatever you want to call it, for doing these digital transformation and innovation projects. Would you give me what your definition of digital transformation is?

AW:                                   So really, I’d say, at its core, digital transformation is using digital technologies to create or modify business processes and your customers’ experiences. And the goal here you’re trying to meet, business needs are changing all the time, you’re trying to meet those changing business needs and the market requirements. But I would say it’s really the re-imagining of your business in a digital age. So, I guess, if you think about it, most companies really started this transformation a long time ago. We used to have analog processes. People started to go digital. So that was sort of the first step in the digital transformation. But if you think about it, we had filing cabinets full of paper and ledgers were built to [inaudible 00:02:47] their books. And then to digitize things, we went to word processors, and spreadsheets, and scanned hard copy.

I guess, when I’m talking about digital transformation, I’m talking about taking that next step and changing the way you’re doing your business, from your internal systems to your customer interactions. If, as a company, you start to think and plan and build processes with the digital innovation, you really start to future-proof for yourself, because you’re going to become more agile, more flexible. You’re ready to embrace these new technologies. Basically, everyone has to keep up with the times to succeed, so that’s really how I see digital transformation. That’s what it is.

AP:                                     Yeah, and that fits with kind of our, at Scriptorium, we of course, have a very content-specific view of digital transformation. And our shorthand description I think can be summed up as something like using technology to enrich the delivery of information to customers. I think you hit on a lot of good points there, especially in regard to future proofing. But let’s dial it back, go all the way back, and let’s talk about from… You’ve got this big overarching idea, but, at the core of it, you’ve got to make some changes about the way that you handle information, the way that you handle content. And really, that pivot, from my point of view, and well, not just mine, but a lot of people’s point of view, is that structured content is at the core of doing this future proofing so you can do this digital transformation. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

AW:                                   Yeah. I totally agree. Obviously, we’re in sort of the same business here. To me, the same thing, it’s a key building block for digital transformation, is structured content. I mean, there’s other pieces, obviously, of it. But from my perspective, and we’re both a little biased here, that structured content is that key building block here. I mean, I could talk a little bit about structured content if you, I mean, want me to do that.

AP:                                     Yeah, we might as well. Why don’t we go ahead and just define it again. This digital transformation, people have slightly different definitions, so let’s hear yours.

AW:                                   Okay. From my perspective, I mean, obviously, all companies, organizations, everyone has archives of content, and it’s different across industries. It could be historical documents, photos, industry standards, research. It just depends what industry. The problem is it’s not all in searchable format. I was just talking a little bit about digitizing as that first step to the transformation. But people think as a PDF, I took this, I scanned it, I’ve got a PDF. It’s a digital document. Well, obviously, it is digital, but it’s not really, because it’s not true searchable format. So that’s where the structured content comes in. We have to take that image-based PDF, take it to the next level. So you can run it through an automated OCR engine.

AP:                                     And tell people what that is.

AW:                                   Oh, so OCR is an Optical Character Recognition engine. And when you run it through the OCR, you get text behind that. So it’s not always beautiful text. It can be searched. But sometimes it doesn’t come out exactly right. Is and ones and Ls might be mixed up. It depends what the source format and what the quality is. And so it could be searched. The problem is if you don’t know the structure of that text, because basically you just have a bunch of text behind that image, it’s not going to be a very efficient search. So that’s where the issue comes in. And really most of the content that people are producing now for the most part is not structured. People are using Word and Google docs and it really produces unstructured content.

And what’s happening here is, when you’re writing these things, authors that are typically writing a Word document or Google docs or something like that, they’re really concentrating on the way the content looks, instead of what that content actually is. So for example, if you’re writing something and you have an introduction to a journal article and you say, “This introduction is going to be bold,” well in XML or in structured content, you would say, “This is an introduction.” You would actually say what this is. So when we talk about a searchable format, I’m really talking about XML here’s. That’s what we’re talking about.

AP:                                     Sure. And like you said, we’re both kind of biased. I would agree with you. XML is really the way to do structured content. And when I say structured content, what I am saying is it is a publishing workflow that lets you define very consistently organized content in your documents, programmatically, so a human being doesn’t have to do it. So it sets up. You’ve got to have an introduction that has these types of elements. You’ve got to have a procedure that has this kind of structure. So all of that is programmatically enforced. And on top of that enforced structure, this is the critical part, and I think you may agree with this too, because again, we’re both biased, that you can add a layer of intelligence on top of that, that is really necessary from this delivery perspective, in particular, from my point of view.

AW:                                   Right. And I’m assuming you’re talking about a metadata layer, right?

AP:                                     Exactly. Exactly. Yes.

AW:                                   Right. So in time that will facilitate an even a more efficient search in your content management system or your website. Basically, if you can’t find your content, it’s really not usable, so that’s really the key here.

AP:                                     Exactly. And it goes both for the people who are creating the content, because if you have all of these bits and pieces of structured content inside a content management system, the people who are creating the content need to be able to gather all the bits that they need. And if they can’t find them, they’re going to probably rewrite it, which is what you don’t want to do. Plus on the delivery side, you may need that intelligence to personalize that content so you can send out something that is very specific to a region, or to the audience, or whatever else.

AW:                                   Right. You sort of touched a little bit, then because to me, one of the biggest benefits of structured content also is content reuse, the infrastructure content facilitates content reuse. So basically, instead of creating and recreating, copying and pasting content, you’re creating that XML once, that instance once. And then other people in your organization can use it or reuse the content, but you’re also going to be able to publish it everywhere. So different apps that need it, or integrated systems that can use that XML and render it for different devices and generate PDFs for distribution, create eBooks, all of those things that can happen once you have that structured content in place. And really, I guess, the opportunities are endless as far as I see it. But it all comes back to that building block of structured content.

AP:                                     Sure. I’m glad you brought up reuse, because when people hear digital transformation, they may think of big, shiny, beautiful marketing things and all the fancy technical ways that you can deliver content. But that reuse angle lets you basically give a very common voice or give clients your customers the same information regardless of where they are, if they’re in the sales cycle, or if they’re using their product, or whatever else. By reusing that content, you are giving consistent messaging. And yeah, it’s not as glamorous as some flashy kind of personalized distribution scheme. But that really, I think, is super important when we’re talking about digital transformation.

AW:                                   Right. I agree. And you hit the nail on the head. It’s not super fancy. They say content is king. It’s true. It is.

AP:                                     Yeah. Absolutely. So your wheelhouse, like ours, is structured content. So why don’t you tell me what you’re seeing out there right now, as far as trends go with structure helping these digital transformation scenarios?

AW:                                   Right. So there’s a few different things that we’re seeing. I wanted to talk a little bit about the pharma industry, because we’re seeing a real big uptick in the use of structured content in that area, in life sciences and pharma. And really, what’s drawing that is, you can imagine, there’s a lot about documentation required to bring new drugs to a market. So here in the US we have a market language called SPL. It’s for structured product labeling that the FDA’s mandated. But what we’re seeing now is the pharma companies looking past that and worldwide. I mean, where we’re dealing with companies all over the globe right now. And they’re starting to look at where they can implement other tools and technologies that are using that structured content.

And the types of applications we’re being asked to support are things, it’s really streamlining the content around product labeling in the pharma industry. And you know what the goal there is, is they’re trying to improve the way that the content’s created and managed and delivered. It’s a full end-to-end. And they’re connecting at the end that product contact with the graphic templates. And they’re really putting together a fully-automated workflow around labeling. I mean, it’s really amazing. It’s really transformation of that whole internal publishing process for pharmas. It’s the same kind of thing that we’ve always done in tech docs. And really, the pharma industry is starting to come around to that end-to-end process and using structured content underneath. So it’s really, really exciting.

And the other trend we’re seeing actually in the pharma industry is they’re also starting to use structured content for a direct end user consumption, like through mobile apps. We just recently worked on a pilot, still around labeling. You know the labels you get when you get a prescription drug and there’s pieces of paper that you fold up? So they’re really going online and digital with those things. And they’re looking at ways for the end user and you as a consumer to go and get the most up-to-date information about those products. So that’s really interesting also.

AP:                                     So this integration you’re talking about, it kind of is an integration in two ways. You’re integrating your processes that really assist with this automated delivery of content. But you’re also integrating things in regard to delivery and making it much easier for people to get information, your consumers, to get information, because it’s no longer just on a piece of paper. Not everybody wants to read a piece of paper in the 21st century anymore.

AW:                                   Right. Right. And the piece of paper may be out of date.

AP:                                     Exactly.

AW:                                   And that’s really important. It’s a liability issue. I think that a big reason why they’re being embraced in the pharma company, I think is part of liability and risk and minimizing risk.

AP:                                     Yeah. And I’m glad you brought that up. Again, digital transformation is not just about the shiny stuff. It can really help with regulatory compliance, a lot, and give you all of the basically, intelligence you need to keep track of things, the archiving and whatever else, because you’ve got that really nice integrated process in the background managing all that information for you.

AW:                                   Right. And it’s interesting, Alan, the legislation, that was the other area that when you asked me about trends that I wanted to hit on, that we’re seeing now. We’ve worked on a few projects now where we’re harvesting this complex legal and regulatory content and from public websites. And we’re seeing this trend in several industries. I’ve seen it in the financial industry. We’re seeing it in insurance and legal and accounting. And what’s going on is there’s all this information that appears only in public websites, this legal and regulatory type information. And their sites are constantly being updated with new content, modified content. It’s just so hard for people to keep track of it, for companies especially to keep track of it. And it’s extremely valuable, but there’s no standard for it or anything. And it’s a real challenge for companies that need that data so they can be in compliance.

And so what we’re seeing now is a bunch of projects where we’re developing applications that are just harvesting that information on a continuous basis and then structuring it, putting it into some form of XML, feeding that XML to their downstream system. So it’s streamlining that compliance process and back to avoiding the risk of non-compliance. I mean, they’re really, really important applications.

AP:                                     Yeah. And that’s certainly better than keeping 1,400 filing cabinets full of musty old paper, isn’t it?

AW:                                   Right. Right. And I don’t think they were really doing that. I mean, they have the information. They’re on websites. The problem is, how efficient is that? If you have up to 150 legislative websites that you need to keep track of and comply with different laws, it’s very difficult. You can have a whole stable of attorneys or legal aides sitting there working on this, but it’s just not efficient, unless it’s in a structured format and a consistent structured format. You can look at one website and it’s one way, and another website’s another way. And we’re talking documents here. It’s a little different than in an Amazon, your product details, that type of thing, but you’re talking about full legal documents.

And then you have to know what changed and what got updated and what got deleted. And you need to know that on an ongoing basis. And you need to follow those. So, I mean, it’s a lot of really valuable information that needs to come out. So we’re seeing a lot of these harvesting projects happening, and with structured contact being the outcome.

AP:                                     Are there any other projects that really show some, I don’t know if surprising is the right word, but uses that you may not necessarily consider as being a digital transformation project that you want to talk about?

AW:                                   I think mostly everything we get involved in is as a digital transformation project. I mean, we have some, I think, some particular interesting projects. But there’s one that we’ve been doing. We’ve been working for over 10 years now with the US Patent and Trademark Office. And I mean, it’s another good example of digital transformation. So you can imagine the USPTO receives a massive volume of patent application materials on a daily basis. And it’s a lot of different document types. And this is a lot of information. And they did have this process to digitize the incoming material. They had a whole scanning process going on, but they’re scanning to TIFF images. So it’s back to that same thing, you’ve got this information in sort of a static digital-

AP:                                     It’s a picture, essentially. [inaudible 00:17:57], yeah.

AW:                                   It’s a picture. Right, right. So it was taking the patent examiners way too long to go through the material. They had a multi-year backlog, when we started this, of reviews and approvals of patents, which obviously, is not acceptable to anybody. So at DCL, we developed a, there’s a fully automated system for them that transforms that high volume of scanned images to their XML schema. So they have their own XML schema. And what’s interesting about this… Well, the volume is interesting, because this is a totally lights-out, no human hands are touching this process. And we’re processing about a one and a half million pages a month. And the turnaround’s under 10 minutes. So it’s fully lights-out conversion. And even the volumes in some months have gone to two and a half million pages in a month. And it can scale to several times that.

But what the really interesting part of this is the way that we were doing the OCR, because we talked a little bit about OCR and how you can scan something. And then what you’re getting behind is not so great. Sometimes the OCR doesn’t work very well with tables and things like that. So the process that we developed now, it uses a computer vision technology. And it automatically detects that content that isn’t suitable for OCR. So things like math and there’s a lot of chemical equations. You can imagine in patent applications, they have a lot of those chemical… I don’t know what they’re called, equations? Or the pictures, the chemical pictures, the formulas, that’s what they are, and tables and things like that. So this process will extract those artifacts before it actually runs that OCR process.

So you’re running the OCR process just on text. So you get a better result. It’s removing those pieces that won’t OCR properly. And then we transform the content to XML, repackage it, the XML, with those artifacts that were removed. And you do that based on that page coordinates. So we did that computer vision to figure them out, we kept the page coordinates. And then you put them back together. And then they get delivered to USPTO.

AP:                                     Okay. I’ve learned something today. That is absolutely fascinating.

AW:                                   This is really interesting.

AP:                                     That is fascinating.

AW:                                   Yeah, it’s very interesting. And the result, it was a great result. It significantly improved the patent examination efficiency and the productivity of the patent examiners. At USPTO, they’re taking the structured contact. They have automated analytics that they use. They’re generating these claim trees. They report on different claims. There’s term and phrase identification. There’re all types of things they’re doing with the structured content. And it’s really amazing. I mean, they’ve significantly reduced their backlog. I mean, I don’t think they have these multi-year backlog anymore. It’s been a really successful project.

AP:                                     And if you think about it, this is the kind of thing that you can pandemic proof or help reduce the risk of events like a pandemic. Because if you have these digital automated processes, you’re not as reliant as people getting together and being together and doing this kind of work.

AW:                                   Right. Yeah, it’s a pretty cool project. The other one I thought might be interesting is one for NYPL, the New York Public Library. I’m a New Yorker. Everyone knows what NYPL is, New York Public Library. So they obtained from the US Copyright Office this catalog of copyright entries. And it’s basically this huge, vast collection of digital copyright entries dating back to 1891. And it’s really old material. So what’s in there is just the copyright status of millions of works. And so when you think about what the page would look like, I mean, they have about 450,000 pages of this stuff. But each page, they’re very dense pages. It’s three or four column. And they’re just these little catalog entries, columns of catalog entries. So each one could have a hundred entries on one page.

When NYPL came to us, what they wanted to do was create a database so somebody can quickly get in online and determine the copyright status of a specific piece of work. So they’re trying to benefit the publishing and scholarly communities, so they understand what’s within copyright, what’s not within copyright. So we developed a process there also to extract the text again, using this page coordinate data, which we’re seeing a lot in these systems. So the page coordinated data, in these systems that the end users are using, they want to show the page as it was scanned. So they want to show that image piece. And then they want to show the extracted text that’s fielded. So we use the OCR engines that use page coordinate data to be able to facilitate that type of a display for the end user. It’s interesting.

It’s based on funding for NYPL. So we’ve done three different tranches of this work. And as they get new funding, we do more. But really what’s happening is the users are able to search across these hundreds of thousands of records with a very high degree of confidence now. And they can search by specific fields. They can identify records relevant to their search. Like I said, they can use the machine readable text and the image record. I love this one. Actually, NYPL refers to this project as unlocking of American creativity, which I think is great. But that’s really what it is.

AP:                                     Because if something doesn’t have a copyright, that means someone else can take it and use it as a building block, perhaps.

AW:                                   Right. They can use it. I mean, I think that in the end, eventually if it’s a book that is no longer under copyright, maybe they’ll be able to get an ebook on demand. Or there’s just so many different applications for this. But it is unlocking all that creative, whether it’s some music, records, books, all the different types of things that people can have free access to, if it’s not under copyright anymore.

AP:                                     And again, this is metadata. At the end of the day, copyright or not, that is a piece of very important metadata.

AW:                                   Yep. So we’re back to structured content and metadata as the key to digital transformation, from our perspective.

AP:                                     Yeah. But those two case studies were really fascinating. And to wrap up, do you have any advice for companies who were wanting to maybe do something a little more innovative and consider structured content?

AW:                                   Right. So, I mean, I think, like we said, the structured content is one building block of that digitization strategy. I always have a hard time with that word, but digitation. There I go again. Anyway, I mean, my advice would be, I think you need to start with an overarching digitization strategy, that needs to be well thought out before you’re going to take on a structured content project. That’s from my perspective. And I think you need to answer some larger questions here before you say, “Oh, I’m just going to create XML.”

What kind of a content management system are you using? Or are you’re going to use a component content management system and go to data? Or what downstream systems are you going to use for your structured content? What are you doing with the content? How’s it going to be utilized? Who’s going to update it? And who’s going to use it? And how will the content be created and structured? New content, how are you going to create that in a structured format? So this is a few other questions.

But again, my advice, because again, we’re biased, I would suggest working with consultants and partners, not only just because I’m biased. It’s just because I think it’s a great way to get started on drafting that overarching strategy, because part of the advantage is you’re drawing from the experiences across different clients. Both of us have experiences working with many clients and many projects. And we can draw on those experiences. So first to me would be create that overarching strategy.

And then this is one’s that’s going to be near and dear to your heart more, Alan, would be, once you decide on a structured content project, you’re going to want to develop a content model first. And that’s you. And you want to make sure it’s supporting a good representative set of content. So if you’re in the pharma industry, you want to make sure that you’re covering different drugs and products and different localities, because they’re global, different document types. With journal content, you want to make sure you’re looking at time spans, because just like we talked about for NYPL, something from the 1800s, it’s going to look very different in the 1900s. And then, I think the content model is key, which is where you guys come in.

And then you’re ready for your actual conversion. Once you have that content model, that detailed content model, I think, then you’re ready to go into a structured format and start with a pilot and some samples. And I would suggest significant testing with downstream systems before you begin a conversion of a full set of data, because you don’t want to have to go back if you have a large volume of content and redo anything. But again, once again, I would suggest working with a company that does it. But again, not only will you able to draw from the years of experience, which I already said, but like I just talked about in a couple of these examples, we can apply some automation to the conversion process, which is going to produce a higher quality and more consistent data set.

AP:                                     Absolutely. And I will say one thing about conversion, why I think it’s really wise to use a vendor. If you are doing one of these big, innovative digital transformation projects, there’s going to be some change management you need to do to get people moved off the old way into the new systems. The absolute worst way you can introduce a content creator, in particular, to a new system and a new way of doing things, is to have them manually convert from the old system to the new system. You will gain so much hate and so many despondent, unhappy people, that right there is another perfect example of why you need to consider hiring professionals to do your conversion work.

AW:                                   Yeah. A lot of our work nowadays, are we still calling it re-platforming?

AP:                                     Yeah.

AW:                                   That’s really what it is.

AP:                                     [inaudible 00:28:41] the word, actually, yeah.

AW:                                   That’s what we’ve been doing. We take a lot from one platform, your content in one platform and move it to another platform. And sometimes we’re doing conversion from one XML to another XML. But we do a lot of re-platforming. And it’s a big, messy job. This is what we do, I mean, Data Conversion Laboratory, that’s all we do, so yeah.

AP:                                     Exactly, exactly. Amy, this has been a really interesting conversation. I cannot thank you enough.

AW:                                   You are so welcome. Thank you for having me.

AP:                                     You are most welcome. 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 Structured content: the foundation for digital transformation (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 124 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Kevin Nichols of AvenueCX discuss omnichannel publishing.

“Omnichannel involves looking at whatever channels are necessary within the context of your customer’s experience, how your customers engage with your brand, and then figuring out how to deliver a seamless interaction.”

– Kevin Nichols

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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.

SO:                   In this episode, we talk about omnichannel publishing with special guest, Kevin Nichols of AvenueCX.

SO:                   Hi, I’m Sarah O’Keefe. Today I have Kevin Nichols joining me. Hey, Kevin.

Kevin Nichols:                   Hey, everybody.

SO:                   How are you doing over there?

KN:                   I’m doing well. I am hailing from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, so it’s nice and sunny here today.

SO:                   Excellent. Before we jump into omnichannel, tell us a little about who you are and who AvenueCX is and what you all do.

KN:                   I’m Kevin P. Nichols. I have been doing digital and content strategy now for, God, almost probably 25 years or in digital and user experience content strategy, that type of work.

KN:                   I started this company with my business partner, Rebecca Schneider. We co-founded it in 2015, actually 2016. We specialize in enterprise content strategy solutions. Those can then dovetail into omnichannel content strategy personalization.

KN:                   We do a lot of taxonomy work. We do solutions like federated search or cross-channel customer journey content solutions, or integrated customer experience content solutions.

KN:                   We work with large scale global brands, in standing up their content solutions across the enterprise. All of our clients are global. They’re all large brands. They all have for the most part, very complex content issues that we are working to help them solve.

SO:                   What is this omnichannel thing? You hear about omnichannel and also multichannel and single channel. Are those all flavors of the same thing or is omnichannel something different?

KN:                   It’s completely different. Let’s start with omnichannel. The way that I define omnichannel in 2022 is from the customer experience, because it needs to start with the customer experience.

KN:                   I would define it as seamless interaction from one customer touchpoint to the next, throughout a brand’s customer experience.

KN:                   That means the customer has seamless interaction, whether he, she or they are engaging with one touchpoint or another, throughout that brand’s customer experience.

KN:                   It comes from the Latin root omni, meaning all. So, think omnivore, omnipotent, omniscient. It can also mean every, and then with channels.

KN:                   Channels here are not just digital channels. It’s not just a website or a mobile app or a mobile device. It’s also analog.

KN:                   We have, for example, in-store is a channel. Television is a channel. Radio, believe it or not, is a channel. Print is a very important channel.

KN:                   There’s a lot of research, for example, on the importance of print, because print is permanent. There’s a permanence to print. There’s all this research that has been going on now for a while.

KN:                   Sappi, if you can get your hands on it, has an incredible book or research report they put out, called The Neuroscience of Print, or The Neuroscience of Touch, rather, but print is another. Direct mail, for example, is a channel.

KN:                   So omnichannel looks at whatever channels are necessary within the context of your customer’s experience and how your customers engage with your brand and figuring out how to deliver them a seamless interaction, as they go from one channel to the next.

KN:                   Now, when did this concept start. The term originates around, well, actually in 2010. If you really want a good reading of the history of omnichannel, Savannah Louie in 2015, at NectarOM, publishes a brief history of omnichannel and positions its beginning at 2010.

KN:                   What happened in 2010, is you really get the proliferation of smartphones and the necessity of people to be able to pull up. You also have the technology to support smartphone functionality.

KN:                   So, people want to be able to engage with brands on their smartphones, as much as they are their desktop experiences, particularly in the west.

KN:                   This means that they expect similar functionality to that, as they do their websites.

KN:                   If you go back though, even further, we see in the early 2000s, actually, Best Buy kind of pioneered this concept of developing a website that could also… When the customer’s in store, they had a website that would offer functionality, that would recognize what the customer did in store and then tie that into their customer support. They wanted to rival Walmart and compete with Walmart.

KN:                   We called this assembled commerce. This is kind of where it has its origins.

KN:                   I’m even going to go back further. I’m going to go back to Martha Stewart, Omnimedia. She named her company Omnimedia. From a storytelling narrative structure and product placement perspective, I call Martha Stewart the mother of omnichannel.

KN:                   She did cross-referential advertising, where she took a cookbook and referred to it in her magazine, and then did the same on her television show. Created hooks and then created cliffhangers to tie it all together, from the narrative and storytelling perspective. Did it in this omni experience, before anybody else did, and then built a whole platform around that. And then tied that into the website, once web started getting big.

KN:                   So, I really credit hers creating this branded customer experience around omni, way back when. This is where the foundations of omnichannel begin.

KN:                   Now there’s key concepts that comprise omnichannel. One of them is called single view of the customer.

KN:                   Single view of the customer means that no matter where the customer is, the brand or the organization or business has data points. They’re going to be able to know what that customer’s doing and how they’re engaging with the brand.

KN:                   So from a data perspective, you know what they’ve purchased, or you know what is in their shopping cart. So, if they’re in store and they add something to their shopping cart and then they decide to check out online, you’re able to track that.

KN:                   If they purchase something, you’re able to make recommendations for what you might be able to cross-sell or upsell. You can offer support, based on their previous purchases. If they have done one piece of support, you’re able to offer them support, based on what you previously supported, et cetera.

KN:                   There’s also integrated product inventory. They add something to shopping cart at home, they’re able to pick it up in store.

KN:                   Unified customer journey is another concept. So, regardless of where they are within their customer journey, you’re able to give them what they need, and then push them from one stage of the customer journey to the next. Those are key concepts in omnichannel.

KN:                   Capabilities that we’re able to deliver upon in omnichannel, self-service checkout in-store. So, self-service checkout in-store, curbside pickup, which became huge during COVID.

KN:                   So note, everybody during COVID, put their supply chain management in the cloud, which necessitated the need for content in the cloud, which necessitated the need for things like self-service, contactless types of engagement with the customer. This all sort of proliferated omnichannel capabilities, obviously.

KN:                   The notion of BOPIS, Buy Online, Purchase in Store, contactless payment options, these are all things that existed in the omnichannel realm, that have all kind of been fast tracked because of COVID-19.

KN:                   Show store inventory online in real time, for example, that’s all omnichannel capabilities and functionality. You see this getting more and more sophisticated, but I think COVID-19 definitely brought it much more into fruition.

KN:                   I’m going to go back to the definition. It’s a seamless interaction, from one customer touchpoint to the next, throughout a brand’s customer experience.

KN:                   Now, multichannel just means you’re able to deliver content to more than one channel. I can deliver content to a website. I can deliver content to a radio. It doesn’t mean I’ve integrated that customer experience to where they’re all interconnected. I forget what else you asked about.

SO:                   I mean, that’s really the interesting point here, is that when you talk about multichannel whatever, what we’re talking about is a publisher or an author-centric view of the universe. I made this content, and I can publish it to multiple channels.

SO:                   What you’re talking about is a holistic view of everything. Not just content, but customer interactions and eCommerce and all the rest of it and what that looks like across all these different potential platforms.

KN:                   Yes. The omnichannel lens takes it from the customer experience and works backwards from that. In order to execute omnichannel correctly, you need to understand the customer journey and then from that, specific customer tasks and what they’re going to need. And then you’re going to have to build a content operations model, to be able to deliver against that.

KN:                   So, you need things and it’s complicated, because it’s not just from a content perspective, but you need omnichannel order fulfillment, for example. You need warehouse management systems. You need supply chain management optimization. But there’s a lot that goes into it, and so these systems are complex.

KN:                   One thing I tell people when I’m speaking on omnichannel… I’ve been speaking about this before anybody in content strategy was talking about it. We go way back. Sapient, where I worked before I started this, was kind of delivering some of the first omnichannel experiences out there.

KN:                   I think in 2012, we did one for… Well, we were doing this for clients, but big box and big retailers.

KN:                   One of the things I say to folks is, you may not be able to do this. A lot of people that are smaller or smaller companies cannot do this, but there’s lessons that can be learned from it.

KN:                   You can all understand your customers and try to build more customer-centric experiences. But it certainly isn’t for everyone, because it does require a level of technology sophistication that not everybody’s going to be able to execute.

SO:                   Yeah. I think most of the people listening to this podcast are in the content world. So, what does that look like?

SO:                   I mean, I kind of envision a scenario where we’re talking about people that are like, “Yeah, yeah, I’ve done multichannel. I get that. But I’m being asked to take that next step and become more customer-experienced focus and start thinking about these omnichannel issues.”

SO:                   So what does it look like to establish or to plan content strategy for an omnichannel client or an omnichannel world?

KN:                   So let’s go back to… and I forget when they pioneered the concept, but it mid-2000s. So APR pioneering the concept of create once, publish everywhere. It’s kind of being able to actualize that, but take it a step further. So, not just create once, publish everywhere, but create once, publish everywhere, so that it’s optimized for the customer and his, her, or their needs.

KN:                   For example, you’re able to anticipate what the customer needs in that particular channel. You don’t have to boil the ocean. You can say, okay, let’s start small. Let’s look at the customer journey, and let’s do some customer journey modeling.

KN:                   Let’s figure out what that customer needs, if she comes into the store, from a content perspective. Let’s deliver upon that. Let’s create content specifically, that’s optimized for the channel. Let’s create a publishing model that can support that.

KN:                   So let’s go beyond the small, medium, large messaging that needs to support the channels. Let’s develop some channel-specific messaging, that’s optimized for that customer need. So that’s what that looks like, if that gives you a little bit more of a flavor.

KN:                   Maybe using personalization and advancing that and being channel-specific, based on the customer. And then doing some audiencing and figuring out how to layer persona or customer targets and customer target messaging onto it.

KN:                   Personalization can be a powerful tool to help you advance your omnichannel strategy as well. And if you have any type of personalization engine or personalization tool built into your content management system, whether that’s a headless CMS or whether it’s more of a si-core Adobe Experience Manager. You can really execute some of this quite well.

SO:                   Right. I think that leads quite nicely into the next topic, which is, what about content operations? I mean, what does it look like to be worried about content ops in an omnichannel context?

KN:                   You really have to understand your customer. This is where insights becomes important, so it’s not just a… And data, so getting your data cleaned up.

KN:                   I’m hearing more and more from data folks about, it’s not just data. It’s structured data. It’s the right data, and it’s understanding how to leverage that data.

KN:                   So it’s like having a data strategy similar to a content strategy, and then understanding those insights, qualitatively and quantitatively, in order to be able to make informed decisions around who your customers are and what they need. And then being able to figure out how to model a content operations around that, to support that and stand that up.

KN:                   From a content operations perspective it’s, how do we publish in a way that’s going to be able to give our customers the content they need?

KN:                   This is what I talk about, customer-centric content operations, to be able to publish in a way… Rahel Ballie has noted before, you’re not going to ever…

KN:                   I mean, she’s not the only one that does this, obviously. You can’t eradicate silos, but you can ventilate them. It’s really important to think about…

KN:                   This is really, really tough. I just talked to Tony Byrne or was in a meeting with Tony Byrne. He talks a lot about this because. He’s Real Story Group. They evaluate CMSs and cross-CDPs and other types of technology solutions.

KN:                   But just the difficulty in doing that and getting all the different folks in the room and having them play nicely together, to rally around the customer experience, it is a challenge.

KN:                   But in order to do this correctly, you’ve got to get those people in place across the different organizational units, to figure out how to build an operations model that’s going to be able to support that unified customer experience.

SO:                   So who typically leads this? I know the answer’s you, but if you’re going into an organization, you have a client and let’s say it’s a… It sounds as though retail certainly has been on the leading edge of some of this, but you go in there. Who’s the executive that has the span of control to manage all of this?

KN:                   That’s why I laughed. I wasn’t laughing because we go in and help businesses do this. It’s kind of like, hmm, a good question. Here’s the reason why.

KN:                   This gets into who owns the budget. Who owns the budget, interestingly enough, a lot of the budgets for all of these types of engagement, shifted out of marketing. They’ve moved to customer experience.

KN:                   We’re seeing them co-owned by CIOs, CX and CTOs. It’s really interesting how this is going to play out.

KN:                   So, you get into personalization. You get into CDPs. You get cross-data platform. You get into all these types of things that are facilitating the necessity of all these different groups to be brought together.

KN:                   The jury’s still out. I mean, I think it’s going to be a hybrid between customer experience and technology.

KN:                   I mean, obviously, technology shouldn’t own it, and data. I mean, it’s interesting. The jury is still out. CIOs are making a play for this as well.

KN:                   Forrester and a lot of the analysts… McKinsey did a report on the advancement of CX. There was a lot of reporting that came out a couple years ago, that budgets were shifting to customer experience from marketing, as the emphasis was placed on the importance of customer experience.

KN:                   This elevated, by the way, the role of technical content, technical documentation, self-service content, help content, all this kind of stuff. Which was great for us, but it also meant that the waters got really blurred.

KN:                   When you start laddering in all of this cross-functional technology, cross-functional business requirements and needs for things like omnichannel, it becomes difficult to say, who does own these budgets?

KN:                   We do a lot of enterprise engagements. We are being asked to do more and more. So, when you get into something like governance, who owns governance across the enterprise for content? It’s a really good question.

SO:                   I mean, that sounds like one of them. But what are some of the biggest obstacles that you run into, other than apparently, let’s see, a problematic diffusion of responsibilities across executives and some questions about ownership? That sounds plenty challenging on its own.

KN:                   I was going to caveat this. In traditional retail, most of these larger… Some of them have a Chief Omni Officer.

KN:                   Okay. The ones that have been doing it for a while, like Macy’s, Nordstroms, they actually have departments that do this. They’re situated, and they stand it up well.

KN:                   But in newer ones, that have had the traditional organizational matrices, they don’t have a chief digital…

KN:                   It’s not just digital, by the way, because there is that other element, like I said. But the ones that are coming from a brick and mortar structure, that adopted omnichannel early on, they’ve kind of set it up so that it can be successful and they’re doing it well.

KN:                   It’s the ones that are the later adopters that are seeking real challenges with us, I think.

KN:                   A lot of marketing does have omnichannel departments, in a lot of bigger companies, but it is definitely a challenge.

KN:                   I think the biggest challenges are silos. Data is another huge, huge challenge. A lot of companies are moving away from data warehouses, data lakes. They’re trying to do these more integrated data solutions.

KN:                   But being able to harness data from all these different systems, report out on it, have clean data, have structured data, have a good data strategy that integrates across the platforms and then execute that, that’s a huge challenge for a lot of companies. That’s another really key challenge.

KN:                   Integrated content strategy across the platforms is a huge challenge. Personalization remains a huge challenge. To do this successfully, you need to be able to adopt strong personalization capabilities, if you want to take it to the next level, because you got to personalize content and offer that within your customer experience. So, I would say those are key challenges.

KN:                   And then there’s an infrastructure challenge, if you’re going to be really mature about it and it’s expensive.

SO:                   What do you see as the biggest opportunities? I mean, what things are you seeing that are new and different and interesting, that you’re excited about, that you’re looking forward to working on over the next bit?

KN:                   I think the biggest opportunities, I think the emphasis on customer experience. I think the emphasis on loyalty, customer retention, a shift from just customer acquisition, to one on really helping stand customers up so they’re successful.

KN:                   Havas does Meaningful Brand index. They’re the ones that came up with the concept. I’ve been following them for over a decade. I talk about them all the time. I think they’re up to, 73% of consumers could care of brands were to go away tomorrow.

KN:                   They’re important because one of the things that they also do is they talk about, well, what makes brands meaningful? The buzzword of 2022 is help content, self-service content and content that’s going to help people benefit or improve their lives, but also, anything out there that helps them.

KN:                   Whether that’s self-servicing their needs or whether that’s improving, something they need to improve, help content is really important.

KN:                   So, I think this emphasis on the customer and their growing their relationship with the organization, has made organizations realize they’ve got to do more investment in how they think about their customers and their customer experience.

KN:                   This is exciting, because they are doing more of an emphasis on customer journey and more of an emphasis on content, that’s going to be situated around positioning the customer to be successful.

KN:                   Omnichannel is getting bigger. You’re hearing it more and more. It has definitely gotten traction after the pandemic. So, businesses are taking seriously, even ones that can’t execute all…

KN:                   I gave you sort of the ideal omnichannel model. If you look at Nordstrom, if you look at Walmart, Nordstrom, Best Buy, I mean, some of these… Sephora always ranks in the top 10 for doing this really well.

KN:                   These are brands that have infrastructures in place, that are set up to do this remarkably well, but smaller companies are taking lessons learned from it and learning how to adopt that.

KN:                   Even B2B’s are taking lessons learned and developing mechanisms, to develop a more long tail strategy from a business perspective, to develop a more singular view of the customer.

KN:                   I’m excited about all that. I’m excited about the emphasis placed on the customer journey and understanding how they can use that to develop more optimized content solutions, to develop that.

KN:                   I’m also really excited about the emphasis placed on content operations. When supply chain management got moved into the cloud, for a lot of businesses and contactless became an imperative, it elevated the role of necessitating a content operations that was going to support that.

KN:                   So, businesses started investing more and more in on that. I’m sure you saw an uptick of that as well.

KN:                   This all means that we’re taking content more seriously, throughout the content life cycle and value chain for businesses.

SO:                   Well, on that optimistic note, I think I’m going to close us out. Kevin, thank you for being here. That was really, really fun. Thank you to our audience, 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 123 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Gretyl Kinsey wrap up our series on content ops stakeholders and continue their discussion about content authors.

“When you are trying to get executive buy-in on something as a content creator, don’t focus on the tools and the nitty gritty of the tech. That is not the way to get the attention of executives. ”

– Alan Pringle

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Transcript:

Gretyl Kinsey:                   Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. This is Part 2 of a two-part podcast. And in this episode, we will continue our discussion about content creators as stakeholders. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.

Alan Pringle:                   And I’m Alan Pringle.

GK:                   I want to talk about another common challenge that we see for content creators, and that’s the lack of decision-making power, or sometimes a lack of support at the management or executive level, when something needs to change. So if they see that there is some inefficiency in the workflow, or if they can see whenever a merger has come into play, that something is making their lives harder as a result, if they can see that some part of the localization process is broken, if they can see that cross-departmental silos are a problem, a lot of times it’s the content creators who can see that happening, and they can see the results of what it does to their workflow. But they are the ones who have the least power to make that change.

AP:                   What to me is so interesting, and possibly ironic, that might be the right word to use here, is the content creators are the ones that recognize the flaws. Yet sometimes, they cannot articulate the business case to get those things fixed. So they’re the ones that understand it and see it, but then they can’t communicate to the audience at the executive level about how to fix these problems, either through some kind of return on investment argument, basically there’s some financial implications and things you have to figure out and explain, to get that funding, to fix these things. And despite these professional content creators’ ability to communicate with their end audience, sometimes they have a more difficult time communicating with the people who basically control the funding that flows into their department.

GK:                   Yeah, and I think that stems from a couple of different things. I think one is just that a lot of their focus is already on the content creation process. And so it does involve extra thought, extra time, extra research to prove that there is a loss of time and money in the inefficiencies that they face. And then I think the other piece comes from just the fact that if they are entrenched in one department, they don’t really have that bird’s eye view of how these inefficiencies are affecting the company as a whole. And so communicating that to a management level or to an executive level, to someone who can get them more budget, can be really, really difficult, especially if the company already doesn’t value content as much as it should.

AP:                   Yeah. And I think it’s also worth noting, a lot of these people know that when it comes time to make change, the content creators are going to be the ones who basically are on the receiving end of the brunt of the change and the pain, because they’re having to change tools, they’re having to change processes, all that stuff. This is where I think executives, on the other hand, need to be very much in tune with the importance of change management, and making sure that people just aren’t thrown into a new tool set, without the proper preparation, training and whatever else. Just merely putting a new process in is not nearly enough. You’ve got to get that cultural buy-in and an understanding of how these tools work, how they’re going to improve work life, otherwise you’re going to be probably flushing money down a toilet.

GK:                   Yeah, if you have a writer who comes to you and says, “Here is what is making our work inefficient for my department,” but then all you do is just throw a brand new tool at them and leave them alone, then that’s just going to make things worse. That’s going to increase the inefficiency for a long time because every time you change processes and change tools, there is a major learning curve. So instead, the better way to approach it is when you have someone coming to you and saying, “We’ve identified these inefficiencies, and we have figured out that here’s what would be the best way to get past that and to make our lives easier,” that you do provide all of the support that those writers are going to need to get through that change, that you provide all of the right training, the right follow-on support, the right resources, maybe a little bit of extra help.

GK:                   Because when you make those process changes, the writers are still going to have to do all of the work that they’re already responsible for, on top of putting these new systems in place, and getting up and running. So making sure that you not just give them the tools that they need, but also the guidance to get through that process change is what’s really going to help clear that inefficiency out of the way that they initially complained about, and get them to the point where they are working more efficiently and saving your company more cost and time.

AP:                   Yeah. And one last point I want to make in here in regard to these business challenges, as a content creator, when you are trying to get executive buy-in on something, don’t focus on the tools and the nitty gritty of the tech. In general, that is not the way to get the attention of executives. That’s my piece of advice in this regard. You’ve got to look at the return on investment, ROI, you’ve got to look at the business case, and demonstrate how the problems that are going on with your content creation processes, how they are in direct conflict with the goals, the business goals of the company, that’s the kind of language, that’s the kind of viewpoint you need to be bringing to those discussions. Not this tool is inefficient because I’m copying and pasting. That may be completely true, but that is not the way to get off on the right foot with executives when you’re having those kinds of discussions.

GK:                   Yeah, if you just start by saying, “We’re copying and pasting a lot,” that doesn’t really say much. But if you say, “We are spending X number of hours copying and pasting each time, there’s an update cycle, and that is costing the company this many dollars, then that’s going to get you a lot further and getting some type of a change made. And I think it’s also worth pointing out that if it’s difficult to have that conversation, if your company doesn’t maybe place as much value on content, or isn’t willing to listen to someone who’s in a content creator role, then that may be a time when you would want to bring in an outsider. That could be a consultant like us, it could even be just somebody in another department, to collaborate with you, who could maybe help give your argument a little bit more weight. But that might be a way to really get through to the people who have the purse strings at your organization.

AP:                   Yep, exactly.

GK:                   So we’ve talked a lot throughout the series about all of the different other types of content stakeholders besides the creators at an organization. And I want to talk about how those other stakeholders might be able to support the creators.

AP:                   Sure. And we just touched on this point in the previous conversation. The collaboration and listening angle, it’s important to speak to each other in some kind of common language. And I’m not talking about English, French, Spanish, I’m talking about speaking to someone in terms they are going to understand, hence the whole conversation we just had about don’t go in there talking about all the nit-picky things that are wrong with your authoring tool. Talk more about how the process doesn’t fit the business requirements. That kind of conversation is what’s going to get you further. And that’s how you can really ramp up the collaboration and the assistance from those who really have the money.

AP:                   You’ve also got the issue of the siloed information that we talked about. There are ways to basically take, shall we say, a more format or presentation-neutral process, and then you can take that information, which is often some kind of structured content, an XML for example, and then transform that content into the different kinds of information that you need. A good example of that is if you’ve got specifications for a product, if you have all that information collected in one format-neutral place, you can then pull it and put it in your online user guide, you can put it in a marketing slick, you can put it in some training material. And it’s only been written once, and you’re giving everybody the ability to connect to that central chunk of information, and use it in a way that provides that very critical, consistent messaging to people who are reading and consuming that content.

GK:                   Yeah, I think having not only central chunks of information, but also unified terminology, unified style, unified look and feel for your information, is the other piece of it. Because the more you unify your information, once you have all that in place, the more accurate your content will be when you deliver it to your customers, you won’t have issues like I’ve seen at a lot of organizations where people will say, “Oh, our marketing materials say this, and they use these words to describe the product. But then when the user gets the technical manuals, it describes everything completely differently and they get confused.” Or maybe if we send users to our training website, the look and feel is completely different from what you get on our main site. So the more that you can unify and get everything to have one collaborative look and feel, the better that’s going to be for your organization as a whole.

AP:                   Absolutely. And part of that, looking at things as a whole, is taking a look at what are the obstacles for the different content creators, and how can you remove them, and make their work more efficient. Not just in one department, but across the organization because what works in one place may be helpful in another. So try to take a more bird’s eye view, as you said earlier, about how changes can be something that can occur in multiple writing groups, content creation groups, to really unify that efficiency across the board.

GK:                   Yeah, absolutely. And that’s what we talk about a lot at Scriptorium when we mentioned enterprise content strategy, getting one content strategy for the entire organization, instead of just having each department with its own way of doing things. And I think that cuts into another area where stakeholders can support the content creators, which is also something we’ve touched on a little bit in some of our previous discussion. But that’s understanding the value of content, what content brings to your organization, and being able to communicate that and prove it with numbers. And I think that is a really critical way that, for example, if you’re a writer and you have maybe some people in management, in your department, or even in some other content producing departments, who need to go to bat for you, that’s especially one thing that they can do, is being able to prove here is what we save by having better content, more efficient content, more accurate, and more unified content. Here is what content does to make the organization look better to our customers, to make our organization serve our customers better.

GK:                   And that information, that proof of what the content actually does for your business is going to be what gets you the resources to continue making better content.

AP:                   Exactly. Executives are much more amenable when you’ve done that legwork that you just mentioned, and get some numbers to explain lack of efficiency and so on.

GK:                   So I want to wrap up by talking about some advice that we have as consultants, as people who’ve seen a lot in this industry, for those who might want to work as content creators.

AP:                   I think we’ve talked a little bit about some of the bigger picture things. And the big one is, it’s not just about writing, keeping your head down and cranking out the content. You’ve got to understand how your content feeds the bigger picture, the business goals and requirements for your company. Those two things need to work hand in hand. So the sooner you realize that you are contributing to a bigger picture, the better off you’re going to be. That’s my primary piece of advice.

GK:                   Yeah. I think another one to really keep in mind is to always be prepared for change. And that’s something, again, that we’ve touched on throughout this conversation. We’ve talked about the world becoming more global, more digital, more connected. And I think that as technology evolves, as we keep seeing companies take advantage of that to grow and scale their operations and their processes, that that is going to have an impact on what you do as a content creator. So it ties back also to the point about being not just about the writing, but about all of the other things. If you also know that your job is not going to be the same from one year to the next, that things are going to evolve and change, then that’s going to put you in a better position to be ready for those changes so that you can roll with the punches.

AP:                   Exactly. Basically, you need to be as adaptable and nimble as the systems you put in place, because you never know what’s around the corner as far as content creation and delivery goes.

GK:                   Yeah. And I think one area that we’re really seeing a lot of change and a lot of evolution, particularly in recent years is, again, around having more personalized content delivery, content as a service, being able to allow your users to pull specific pieces of information on demand when they need that, that that type of content creation and development, to feed into those types of systems, requires a different thought process than what you might have done 5 or 10 or 15 years ago, if you were just producing PDF manuals.

AP:                   Exactly.

GK:                   So I think we’re going to go ahead and wrap things up there. So thank you so much, Alan.

AP:                   Thank you, that was a great conversation.

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

The post Content ops stakeholders: Content authors (podcast, part 2) appeared first on Scriptorium.

In episode 122 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Gretyl Kinsey talk about content authors as content ops stakeholders.

“I think it’s really important to note here, a lot of these resources are not human people. They are systems or databases that provide information. You pull information from these multiple sources and put it together to provide a really dynamic and personalized user experience for the people who are reading your content.”

– Alan Pringle

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Transcript:

Gretyl Kinsey:                   Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we continue our series on content stakeholders, this time focusing on content creators. This is part one of a two-part podcast. Hello, and welcome everyone. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.

Alan Pringle:                   And I am Alan Pringle.

GK:                   And we’re going to be wrapping up our series on content stakeholders by talking about the people who actually create the content. So to start out, what types of content creators might you have at an organization and what are some of their roles and responsibilities?

AP:                   Well, we’re going to start with the most obvious, and that would be your full-time professional content producer, writer, information developer, whatever you want to call. There are many, many titles over the years for that. But that group in general will create the bulk of the content that a company puts out, and we’re talking about all kinds of content. We’re talking about your technical/user/product content. We’re talking about training and learning materials. We are talking about marketing information, legal risk management type content. So it really crosses the spectrum. And a lot of those people are employed full-time to crank out that content.

GK:                   Yes. And then there’s another category, which is part-time contributors, or sometimes that will be called subject matter experts. And these are people who also create some content, but that’s not their full-time job. So maybe they are just writing some small pieces of content here and there that are specific to the areas where they have a lot of knowledge or expertise or experience around the company’s products. Maybe they are reviewing the content that’s being produced by the full-time writers and making sure everything is accurate, everything is consistent. And these are people who typically do have another primary role in the organization. They contribute the content as needed, but their primary responsibility is going to be focused on something else. And sometimes they may even be volunteers in the industry. And in the case where we have something like Content as a Service, sometimes these contributors or subject matter expert type sources are not even actual people.

AP:                   Exactly.

GK:                   It might be getting information out of an inventory database, that type of thing. So there are a lot of different ways that that really nitty gritty information that’s needed for the content can be contributed to what the full-time writers are developing.

AP:                   Yeah. And I think it’s really important to note here, as you talked about the database and inventory information, a lot of these resources are not human people. They are systems or databases that provide information, and you pull information from these multiple sources, put it together to provide a really dynamic and personalized user experience for the people who are reading your content.

GK:                   Absolutely. And I think that’s a great evolution of the industry because it takes pressure off of some of these people who have lots of other responsibilities. So if they have put information somewhere once in a database, it can be used over and over again and not have to keep going back and bothering some of those people as a subject matter expert going forward.

AP:                   Yeah, it’s a situation where a lot of these people who have “other real jobs,” they are brought in to review a very small slice of content or offer their expertise because they might be a product designer for something that’s being written about. It’s always good to keep in mind, they have other primary job responsibilities, and anything you can do to narrow that focus and get their contributions in as quickly and painlessly as possible is really a benefit to everybody.

GK:                   Absolutely. There are a couple other responsibilities that I want to talk about, and these may be something that a full-time writer or content creator would do, or it could also be something that falls on more of a part-time contributor. But one of them is reviewing and editing, and that’s usually the last holdout part of the writing process. You need someone to take a look at that content before it goes out the door, before it gets published and distributed to the end users, and make sure that everything is accurate and everything is correct. And that’s usually some type of a role in whatever content ecosystem you have, that someone will be assigned to that particular responsibility. And it’s that person’s job to do that final review and make sure that everything is ready to go.

GK:                   And then the other responsibility is depending on what types of content you produce, there may be some assets, things like images, things like video, audio, other things aside from just text that would be a part of your content. So at some organizations, if that is a large portion of your content, if it is something that’s very graphics heavy, if there is a lot of audiovisual stuff in your content, then there may also be a person or a team that is in charge of creating that information. And sometimes that’s outsourced as well.

AP:                   It is. And I think this is a very good place to really drive home the fact that to content creators to remember that people have different ways they like to absorb and take in information. So don’t always assume someone wants to read something. They may want to hear it. They may want to see it. You’ve got to give people those choices, and content creators can’t … I think it’s a really, really bad idea to take this narrow view, “You’re going to take what I give you and like it.”

AP:                   There was a time years ago, “I’m going to put a PDF up on a website and that should do it.” In the 21st century, it does not do it. It does not cut it anymore, and we still see that today. So remember that the people who are your consumers really may not want it in the content and the format where you think it is the primary format. So you need to think carefully about how you’re providing that information to the people and not make assumptions that because you crank it out in this format, that people are automatically happy about it.

GK:                   Yeah. I definitely agree with that. And I also think that there’s an accessibility angle here, because if you are just providing your content in one way, that may not be accessible for your entire audience. So the more ways that you can provide that information and the more that you can make that information able for your audience to personalize and get just the pieces that they need, that’s really going to help your customers respond better to it, use your information, and be more loyal customers, be more likely to buy more of your products going forward.

AP:                   Yeah. I even mentioned this in a previous episode when we were talking about the content consumers as stakeholders. It’s important to remember that not everybody takes in information like you do. Everyone is not the same in that regard, and content creators need to keep that in their heads when they’re talking about delivery formats.

GK:                   Absolutely. So speaking of things that are not always the same and that vary greatly across the spectrum of the industry, I also want to talk about content creator team sizes, because this is an area where we see a lot of variety in our work as consultants.

AP:                   A lot. And it’s a situation where you can have a very large team, but you would also be amazed at the amount of content that a small team or even a one-person shop can create and crank out. So it really depends on the size of the organization. And also, how diversified are those content types? Because in general, and like I said, this is in general. It is a broad generalization. The more different types of content an organization’s pointing out, you usually have different departments. So you’ll have a team of instructional designers creating training material. You’ll have a team of people creating your user enablement, user experience, user guide content. And then you’ll have a team creating marketing content, for example. So you may have different people creating those different types of content, and each one of them is their own department with one to ever how many people. So it really depends on the size of the company. And also, I think it’s also a nod to how serious or how well invested that company is in their content and how much time and money they spend on it.

GK:                   Yeah. And I think it’s really interesting that you mentioned the departments, because we do see a lot of variety there as well. We might have some lack of balance. So for example, if one department gets a whole lot of the organization’s resources and budget, then that department might have a lot more people involved in creating content. And then you might have another department that also has to create content, but maybe they’re not valued as much by the organization, so they don’t really have as large of a team or as much of a budget to work with.

GK:                   We also see a lot of issues with content silos across departments. I’ve been in this industry for over 10 years and I’ve seen it the entire time I’ve been in the industry. And Alan, you’ve probably also seen it for that long, if not longer, that there is just this issue where even though we’re in an increasingly collaborative and digital world, we still have a lot of departments that work very separately, even when there is a need to collaborate across departments.

GK:                   And so we do see a huge variety where at one company there may be more of a spirit of collaboration and all of the different content producing teams might work together and they might share their content across departments. And then we’ll see other companies where they are all very much sequestered off from each other. They never communicate, and there is a lot of opportunity for content sharing and reuse that goes completely unaddressed.

AP:                   The good news is I think we are seeing more and more the blurring of some of these departmental lines, and companies are starting to realize that there’s a lot of overlap in this content, and they do make an effort to find ways to reuse content. Because at the end of the day, when you’re reusing content as a content creator, you are offering your readers, your end users, content consumers a uniform, consistent message, and that is a huge, huge win. And it is a necessity to really make it in this super competitive global world.

AP:                   You need to be telling your customers the same thing and be very consistent in how you communicate specifications, anything in regard to marketing messages. You need to be consistent in how you communicate, because that’s the key to success with your content, from my point of view.

AP:                   And the good news is, like I said, some places are already addressing it by having people collaborate more, but as we move more toward this Content as a Service model, even if you’ve got these silos and they’re super embedded and you’re going to have a hard time breaking them down, you can find systems that will pull information from all of these different sources and combine them together to create that personalized delivery to your reader, your content consumers.

GK:                   Yeah. And I think it’s worth noting that as this world becomes more digital, more global, and you’ve got more options for how to create and consume content, that if your organization is not doing everything that you can, there will come a point where your audience will notice. And we’re seeing that exact thing happen a lot of times, which is why there’s so much more of a demand for that personalized content.

AP:                   Yeah. And the whole globalization angle, too. Think about how many clients we’ve worked with and how many companies out there are multinational and have presences in multiple countries. And they are having these challenges about creating this unified message, unified content. And we’re seeing that, like I said, with our own clients. We have clients who have presences in multiple countries. And we often talk to these people in different countries about helping them. For example, if we’ve helped them with an implementation, we help them with support, and we are hearing from people in multiple places.

AP:                   So again, it’s this idea of what happens in one place can have a broader effect with people who may be working from you a thousand miles away. And I think also with the pandemic, we’ve really seen this shift to remote teams. So what you do “locally” is really maybe not so local anymore.

GK:                   Yeah, absolutely. And if you just think of things locally instead of globally, you’re going to be limiting yourself. And I think this also plays into localization, because the more that you can share content, the fewer times you would have to translate something. Because it’s not just the companies that are more globally connected, it’s also your audience. And so I think there is more and more need for localized content to be produced and delivered, and especially when you do have a multinational company. I know there are a few examples that I can think of among our clients who have gone through mergers that ended up with not only the company having different collaborators across the world, but then the same is true with their customers. And so they have to think about the localization angle all the time.

AP:                   Exactly. And the merger point is a really, really good one. We should probably talk about that for just a moment. That’s one place that really has a huge impact on content creators. Because a lot of times when you’ve got a merger, you have got basically then two or more sets of tools that are pretty much doing the same thing. You’ve got some processes that are the end game may be the same, but the way that they get there is different. So you have got to combine tool sets, workflows, and cultures, company cultures, to create this, again, this unified message to send out to the world. And it is hard to understate how difficult that can be, because basically people have a tendency to want to protect their own. And I totally get that, but sometimes you’ve got to lower that defensive posturing a bit and come together to create, again, that unified message that you really need to be sending out to be successful.

GK:                   Yeah, it’s a big challenge for sure, and I see it as falling under the umbrella of change management, which is something that we see with any type of content process change. And a merger is a perfect example of that. You have to bring all of these different content creators and the people who manage them, the people who have other types of a stake in the content, you have to bring all of them together under one unified vision. And a lot of times you have to do that very quickly so that you don’t have a major disruption in the production of your products and your content. So it really is a big deal and a big challenge for content creators to face.

AP:                   It is. And what’s interesting is when you start looking at the kinds of problems content creators have, for example, inefficient workflows and processes. You’ve got a workflow that has a lot of manual work, and you’re doing a lot of copying and pasting. Or to do a revision, you basically make a duplicate of your document and then slap some changes on top of it. That very manual process. Think about that manual process being multiplied many times if you’ve got two companies coming together who really don’t have super efficient content operations, and it happens.

GK:                   Yeah. If you’ve not only got two or more companies coming together, but then translating into two or more, sometimes 20 languages as a result of that merger, it really just multiplies some of those inefficiencies that might have been present in each one coming in. And even if you’ve only got one company dealing with that, that’s still a huge issue. We see this all the time that there is some part of the workflow that’s just not doing what it should for the content life cycle. And then we have to come in, take a look and see what exactly is going wrong. But I think a lot of it does lie on what we just said. Some of these manual things, like copying and pasting, things that have to be done and then redone and redone again and checked again every time there’s an update to the information, those are the types of things that are really going to slow down production and therefore slow down localization and everything else.

AP:                   Yep. And again, this is stuff that so many content creators face, and a lot of times it feels like you’re trying to dig yourself out of this bottomless black pit, because you’re stuck doing these constant manual changes and revisions. But it is possible, slowly but surely, to put in better content operations to make that a whole lot less painful.

GK:                   I think that’s a good place to wrap up, but we will be continuing this discussion in the next podcast episode. So Alan, thank you.

AP:                   Thank you.

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

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