Calculate your DITA ROI
Will DITA bring enough value to your content operations to justify the investment costs? Calculate your DITA ROI to decide.
Taxonomy: Simplify search, create consistency, and more (podcast, part 1)
Can your learners find critical content when they need it? How do you deliver personalized learning experiences at scale? A learning content taxonomy might be your solution! In part one of this two-part series, Gretyl Kinsey and Allison Beatty share what a taxonomy is, the nuances of taxonomies for learning content, and how a taxonomy supports improved learner experiences in self-paced e-learning environments, instructor-led training, and more.
Allison Beatty: I know we’ve made taxonomies through all sorts of different frames, whether it’s structuring learning content, or we’ve made product taxonomies. It’s really a very flexible and useful thing to be able to implement in your organization.
Gretyl Kinsey: And it not only helps with that user experience for things like learning objectives, but it can also help your learners find the right courses to take. If you have some information in your taxonomy that’s designed to narrow it down to a learner saying, “I need to learn about this specific subject.” And that could have several layers of hierarchy to it. It could also help your learners understand what to go back and review based on the learning objectives. It can help them make some decisions around how they need to take a course.
Powering Conversational AI With Structured Content (webinar)
In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series, special guest Rahel Bailie, Content Solutions Director of Technically Write IT, and host Sarah O’Keefe, Founder & CEO of Scriptorium, discuss how organizations can leverage the unlikely connection between structured content and conversational AI.
In this webinar, attendees learn:
- What is structured content, and how it fuels reliable conversational AI responses
- How technical writers and conversation designers can collaborate for optimal output
- Where to get started with structured content and conversational AI
Transform L&D experiences at scale with structured learning content
Ready to deliver consistent and personalized learning content at scale for your learners? In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow share how structured content can transform your L&D content processes. They also address challenges and opportunities for creating structured learning content.
There are other people in the content creation world who have had problems with content duplication, having to copy from one platform or tool to another. But I will tell you, from what I have seen, the people in the learning development space have it the worst in that regard—the worst.
— Alan Pringle
Creating content ops RFPs: Strategies for success
In episode 179 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle share the inside scoop on how to write an effective request for a proposal (RFP) for content operations. They’ll discuss how RFPs are constructed and evaluated, strategies for aligning your proposal with organizational goals, how to get buy-in from procurement and legal teams, and more.
When it comes time to write the RFP, rely on your procurement team, your legal team, and so on. They have that expertise. They know that process. It’s a matter of pairing what you know about your requirements and what you need with their processes to get the better result.
— Alan Pringle
MEGAComm 2025
February 12th-13th
Jerusalem, Isreal and online
We’re excited to kick off 2025 with MEGAComm!
During this conference, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow will both return as speakers for the online version of the event.
Futureproofing Your Content
Every now and then, it’s helpful to look up from the content grind and think about the future. Are you producing content that will stand the test of time, or are you making choices under pressure that incur content debt for the future? In this presentation, Sarah O’Keefe looks at the content lifecycle and discusses what you can do today to make things better for Future You.
Modernizing your content management system: The challenges of replatforming
Many technical communication organizations have established processes inside a content management system (CMS), and a single source of truth for their content. But over time, the business needs change, and the CMS chosen a decade ago may no longer be a good fit for the organization. At some point, it becomes necessary to change systems and replatform the content onto a new CMS.
Changing systems is a costly proposition, and one that needs to be assessed well. The more customization work that was done to meet your original requirements and the more content you have in the current system, the more complicated and expensive a replatforming transition will be.
In this session, Bill Swallow shares the business justification, the risks, and the benefits of a replatforming project.
Bridging technical and marketing content (webinar)
In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series, Scriptorium CEO Sarah O’Keefe interviewed special guest Alyssa Fox, Senior VP of Marketing at The CapStreet Group. Discover critical enterprise content strategy insights that Alyssa has gathered throughout her journey from technical writer to marketing executive.
In this webinar, viewers learn:
- The broader picture of enterprise content operations
- Strategies for integrating technical and marketing content
- Best practices for using technical content as a marketing asset
Do enterprise content operations exist?
Is it really possible to configure enterprise content—technical, support, learning & training, marketing, and more—to create a seamless experience for your end users? In episode 177 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow discuss the reality of enterprise content operations: do they truly exist in the current content landscape? What obstacles hold the industry back? How can organizations move forward?
Sarah: You’ve got to get your terminology and your taxonomy in alignment. Most of the industry I am confident in saying have gone with option D, which is give up. “We have silos. Our silos are great. We’re going to be in our silos, and I don’t like those people over in learning content anyway. I don’t like those people in techcomm anyway. They’re weird. They’re focused on the wrong things,” says everybody, and so they’re just not doing it. I think that does a great disservice to the end users, but that’s the reality of where most people are right now.
Bill: Right, because the end user is left holding the bag trying to find information using terminology from one set of content and not finding it in another and just having a completely different experience.
Survive the descent: planning your content ops exit strategy
Whether you’re surviving a content operations project or a journey through treacherous caverns, it’s crucial to plan your way out before you begin. In episode 176 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Christine Cuellar unpack the parallels between navigating horror-filled caves and building a content ops exit strategy.
Alan Pringle: When you’re choosing tools, if you end up something that is super proprietary, has its own file formats, and so on, that means it’s probably gonna be harder to extract your content from that system. A good example of this is those of you with Samsung Android phones. You have got this proprietary layer where it may even insert things into your source code that is very particular to that product line. So look at how proprietary your tool or toolchain is and how hard it’s going to be to export. That should be an early question you ask during even the RFP process. How do people get out of your system? I realize that sounds absolutely bat-you-know-what to be telling people to be thinking about something like that when you’re just getting rolling–
Christine Cuellar: Appropriate for a cave analogy, right?
Alan Pringle: Yes, true. But you should be, you absolutely should be.
