It’s hard to believe that the DITA standard needs additional tags. I tried counting them, but gave up at 150, when I had only reached the letter G. (Be my guest: https://www.oxygenxml.com/dita/1.3/specs/langRef/quick-reference/all-elements-a-to-z.html)
When organizations replatform from one content management system to another, unchecked technical debt can weigh down the new system. In contrast, strategic replatforming can be a tool for reducing technical debt. In episode 172 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow share how to set your replatforming project up for success.
Here’s the real question I think you have to ask before replatforming—is the platform actually the problem? Is it legitimately broken? As Bill said, has it evolved away from the business requirements to a point where it no longer meet your needs? Or there are some other questions to ask, such as, what are your processes around that platform? Do you have weird, annoying, and inefficient processes?
— Sarah O’Keefe
Does any of this sound familiar?
It’s time for a new way of managing content. Here’s how a content strategist can help you create successful content operations.
Technical debt, hereafter called “content debt,” is “the implied cost of future reworking required when choosing an easy but limited solution instead of a better approach that could take more time,” Wikipedia, “Technical debt.”. Like financial debt, content debt isn’t always a bad thing. You can use a loan to buy a house right away (at least in the U.S.) and then pay off the debt over time while living in the house. Content debt allows you to create something quickly instead of doing it exactly right and taking much longer.
Too much content debt, though, will hamstring your work. The trick is to find the Goldilocks solution.
In episode 170 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar dive into the world of content localization strategy. Learn about the obstacles organizations face from initial planning to implementation, when and how organizations should consider localization, localization trends, and more.
Localization is generally a key business driver. Are you positioning your products, services, what have you for one market, one language, and that’s all? Are you looking at diversifying that? Are you looking to expand into foreign markets? Are you looking to hit multilingual people in the same market? All of those factors. Ideally as a company, you’re looking at this from the beginning as part of your business strategy.
— Bill Swallow
Marketing professionals have opinions on what defines effective content strategy. But what if these definitions barely scratch the surface? The world of content strategy is much larger than marketing, and organizations can see amazing results when they incorporate an enterprise content strategy.
Is your team skilled in navigating your current CCMS, but unfamiliar with the system you plan to adopt? During a recent replatforming project, we worked with a team of in-house experts to build out a new CCMS. The combination of their domain expertise and our replatforming experience was a big success. The client is now self-sufficient and thriving in their new CCMS environment.
In the wide world of content, we’ve got a lot of terms. Some may be new to you, and others have contested definitions, which makes clear communication—typically our bread and butter—a challenge. If you’re exploring efficiency in your organization’s content processes, this post clarifies the foundational concepts of an enterprise content strategy.
In episode 167 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe, Alan Pringle, and Bill Swallow discuss the difficulties organizations encounter when they try to create a unified content experience for their end users.
AP: Technical content, your tech content or product content, wants to convey knowledge so the user or reader can do whatever thing that they need to do. Learning content is about improving performance. And with your knowledge base content, it’s when, “I need to solve this very specific problem.” So those are the distinctions that I see among those three types.
SO: Okay, and from a customer point of view, what does this mean?
AP: Well, in reality, I don’t think the customers care. They want the information available, and they want it in the formats they want it in. And also, they want the right information so they can either get that thing done, improve their performance, or solve a specific problem.
For your customers to effectively use your products and services, it’s critical that your enabling content is fully integrated across content types.
Bill Swallow, Director of Operations at Scriptorium, and Emilie Herman, Director of Publishing at the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF), shared lessons learned from a DITA implementation project.
What did we want to accomplish with our project? One was to develop a single source of truth for our content, a single system to host all of it. Secondly, we wanted to modernize our information architecture and our content models and document all of it clearly. Lastly, we wanted to futureproof our content operations and go to a digital-first workflow.
— Emilie Herman
In episode 165 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and guest Patrick Bosek of Heretto discuss how the role of customer self service is evolving in the age of AI.
I think that this comes back to the same thing that it came back to at every technological shift, which is more about being ready with your content than it is about having your content in the perfect format, system, set of technologies, or whatever it may be. The first thing that I think either of us will say, and a lot of people in the industry will tell you, is that you need to structure your content.
— Patrick Bosek
When a DITA-based workflow is the best choice to support business requirements for your content, you may face the daunting task of convincing leadership to move forward with this enterprise-wide change. Sarah O’Keefe shared practical tips for overcoming common objections to DITA during her session at the AEM Guides user conference.
In this episode of our Let’s talk ContentOps! webinar series, Scriptorium CEO Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Megan Gilhooly, Sr. Director Self-Help and Content Strategy at Reltio, explore how to successfully integrate AI into your content operations. They discuss how to use AI as a tool, how to create content that an AI can successfully consume, and how the role of the writer will shift in a GenAI world.
In this webinar, you’ll learn
Companies want to hear that AI will automate all the things and therefore, it’s going to be So Easy. But unfortunately, we have the Iron Law of Life:
YOLO = GIGO
Communicating the value of content operations can be complicated. We created an ROI calculator to help.
In episode 162 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar discuss the benefits of single sourcing as part of your content strategy through the example of two things they love: coffee and beer.
“We know companies that have moved away from a do-it-yourself approach because they had maybe two or three different people putting in half to almost full-time work on the publishing system and not on other facets of the company’s core business or the writing. They were simply there to keep everything working. It just blows my mind that on a scale where you have hundreds of writers contributing content, you are saying, Okay, you three people are going to be solely responsible for keeping this thing up and running so that they can produce their content, rather than having a system that’s designed to keep itself up and running.”
— Bill Swallow
Organizations are recognizing the need for a strategic approach to content creation, management, and distribution, but content operations require upfront and continued investment. In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Mark Kelley discuss how to build the business case for content operations.
In this webinar, you’ll learn
What if your training content could be seamlessly tailored to a learner’s environment no matter where or how they interact with it?
This content was first published in Content Operations from Start to Scale: Perspectives from Industry Experts, Dr. Carlos Evia, editor; Virginia Tech Publishing.
We have an ingrained mental model of writers as introverted hermits, toiling away in solitude. Eventually, they produce manuscripts, which are fed into a publishing pipeline for editing and production. This model might hold for some fiction writers, but content production looks very different for marketing and technical efforts.
In episode 159 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and special guest Dipo Ajose-Coker share tips for moving from unstructured to structured content.
“I mentioned it before: invest in training. It’s very important that your team knows first of all not just the tool, but also the concepts behind the tool. The concept of structured content creation, leaving ownership behind, and all of those things that we’ve referred to earlier on. You’ve got to invest in that kind of training. It’s not just a one-off, you want to keep it going. Let them attend conferences or webinars, and things like that, because those are all instructive, and those are all things that will give good practice.”
— Dipo Ajose-Coker
In episode 158 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and special guest Dipo Ajose-Coker discuss the challenges of moving from unstructured to structured content.
“I think we could make broad categories of challenges as tools, technology, people, and methodologies, and I think we’ll just dive into these because they’re not necessarily independent—some of them flow one into the other. One of the most complex and challenging parts is implementation. Changing over to a new tool also involves changing processes and training the staff. Basically, some documentation teams struggle with that initial learning curve.”
— Dipo Ajose-Coker
Scriptorium principals Sarah O’Keefe, Alan Pringle, and Bill Swallow have decades of experience in the content industry. In this webinar, they share their analysis of key content operations trends.
After watching, you’ll learn
In episode 157 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Dee Lanier discuss design thinking: what it is, what it isn’t, and obstacles and ideas for equity in design.
“Design thinking is not a model first. It is a mindset that incorporates a strong inquisitiveness. What’s happening here? Who are the people that are being affected by whatever problems that are happening here? And what don’t I know that I need to learn before proposing any solutions? That’s design thinking in a larger understanding.”
— Dee Lanier
