DocTrain West News & Announcements

Dragon-Slaying Is Not A Sideline: Earley As Protector Of Content

2009-03-11T18:03:26Z

When a large insurance company looked at organizing tens of millions of documents, stored in multiple repositories, they knew they had one monster project on their hands. With 260 million documents in one repository alone - everything from customer relationship data, to policies, to underwriting processes, to claims handling documents - entering this project would be akin to going deep into a dragon’s den and getting driven back by the intense heat.

Enter Seth Earley, dragon slayer. He didn’t set out to battle any dragons, actually. As Seth put it, they wrote “one of those RFPs from hell,” thinking they had no chance of actually winning the bid. They donned their armor, heralded the benefits of a sound taxonomy, and waited. And win the bid they did. Seth recalls that when they were notified, they had the typical reaction of a small band of dragon-slayers finding themselves face-to-face with a fire-breathing dragon: a moment of abject panic at realizing the massive task ahead. Once they began to dig into the content, however, they realized that knowing the system and processes made the project seem just like any other project … just bigger, more complex, and a lot scarier.

Seth confesses that this particular dragon has been easier to slay because of the excellent example set by management. It’s not often that an executive team comes forward with the term “taxonomy governance,” much less understands the importance of it. He admits that the project would have been very difficult to succeed at, had they not had full executive support and a level of project management that covered critical details and resources.

Seth Early presents Building a Search Strategy and Developing a Content Management Strategy at DocTrain West 2009.

Language Is Never Simple: Braster Drives Consistency Message Home

2009-03-11T17:51:24Z

Berry Braster is a little lonely these days, and it’s no wonder. He gets on the road for weeks at a time, bouncing between the various coasts of the US and every point between, Canada, Europe, and Australia. And it’s hard for a lover of language, when he wakes up asking himself, “Where am I?” and there’s no one to answer. But for Berry, it’s worth it to bring the message about simplified technical language to the world. He’s passionate about his work and his business. He recognizes that the increase in cultural slang, combined with an increase in global business, is putting us on a linguistic collision course. Did he tell you about the police officer who warned a middle aged woman about “blowing a light?” She envisioned replacing a burnt-out tail light; the officer envisioned issuing a ticket for going through a red light.

Between cultural differences, regional differences, generational differences, and other population segmentation, getting some sort of standardization is becoming critical. Berry sees the need to communicate as justification enough, but when he extends that justification to include the substantial savings in costs and cultural misunderstandings, the implications are enormous. And if the savings in translations costs drives the savings in communication clarity, that’s alright with Berry. In fact, Tedopres has published booklets on that very topic, which they distribute free of charge.

The aerospace and defense industries have worked in Simplified English for a while now, but when Berry makes presentations outside of those industries, he still sees “the big aha” amongst members of his audiences. And that, he says, is why he’ll have to wait a long while before he can stay home long enough to justify having a pet to talk to.

Berry Braster presents Controlled Authoring Workshop: Learn How Standardizing Content Will Improve Quality and Reduce Content Creation and Translation Cost at DocTrain West 2009.

Winning Techniques Mean No Exinction For This Rare Bird

2009-03-11T12:20:00Z

The Rare Bird Award, established in 2004 by the Center for Information-Development Management, is awarded for distinguished contributions to best practices in the management of information development. It is awarded annually to managers or teams to recognize the achievement of managers and their teams in developing best practices in areas related to innovation, efficiency, productivity, customer benefit, and leadership, and in the process transforms the organization from ordinary to extraordinary.

When ILOG prepared to adopt and implement their content management strategy, they garnered the coveted award for their organized way of preparing and migrating content from a desktop publishing platform to and XML DITA solution. They joined the ranks of award winners such as IBM, Raymond Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft.

ILOG’s Lucinda Croft presents the case study behind the award, in her presentation, The Journey From FrameMaker to XML: A Story About Migration and a Rare Bird, at DocTrain West 2009.

Projecting Content Needs Leads To DITA For An Electronics Firm

2009-03-11T12:17:36Z

When you read refer to the user guide that goes with consumer electronics, such as a phone, printer, or camera, you’re likely focused on solving a problem. What’s probably not foremost in your mind is how many user guides get created by the vendor, or how many variations of the same needed to be created to accommodate the differences in a product line?

A company such as IKEA may be able to create a universal set of directions by eliminating words, by showing amorphous people assembling furniture. That wouldn’t be so practical for a product like a camera with complex functions spread of a multitude of buttons and action patterns. Even trying to have a universal manual would be confusing - by the time users are shunted between instructions for various models, they would be frustrated - and cost-prohibitive - the language variations alone would cause the cost of a manual to skyrocket.

So when Epson wanted to streamline the content production for their printers, projectors, and LCD monitors, they looked for a single-sourcing solution that allowed for content re-use in a way that allowed for real-time updates. Burt Courtier, Manager of Documentation/Software Integration at Epson America, Inc, shares his experience at DocTrain West 2009 with his presentation, Moving from Silos to a Collective Farm: Developing Epson America’s Hosted CMS with DocZone DITA.

Performance Reviews and Their Effect on Motivation

2009-03-09T19:19:57Z

The performance review is part of those ubiquitous employee evaluation systems that virtually every company of any size uses to rank employees. Deeply flawed and as a result, often unfair, the obsession to categorize, quantify, and rank staff against their peers perpetuates the notion that there is a way to make empirical decisions about what is “better” or “worse” on the employee scale.

Complicating this situation is the not-quite-as-ubiquitous incentive program that rewards employees for contributions deemed of significant value to the company. Outwardly, this seems like a simple, straightforward idea, but turns out to create larger quandries about managing the intrinsic and extrinsic human motivations that get manipulated along the way.

Richard Hamilton, author of Managing Writers: A Real World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation, discusses finding the right balance to rewards and performance evaluations, and much more, on his Managing Writers blog. At DocTrain West 2009, Richard will share a different type of knowledge, that of Managing the Move to Structured Content.

An Alternative To The Conundrum of The Good-Fast-Cheap Triangle?

2009-03-09T19:15:43Z

In the quality triangle, where the three sides read “Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Two,” the idea that there is a way to do all three seems incongruous. The art of Information Quality Management lies in a discipline that tries to balance factors such as efficiency, effectiveness, confidentiality, integrity, availability, compliance, and reliability. These factors are to manage the competing needs of the business in terms of internal resources, business processes, accuracy, risk management, and - not to be forgotten - the need to delivery quality information in usable form to end users. While recognizing that it may be impractical, even impossible, to achieve 100% on all three sides of the triangle, the goal is to adjust the controls to the optimal delivery balance for a particular organization.

Marc Asturias, an author, editor, and technologist with Cisco Systems, understands that adopting and pursuing a quality management program for content can yield a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. He shares his knowledge on his Marc Asturias blog, and shares a case study, Information Quality Management at Cisco Provides Benefits Beyond Improved Quality at DocTrain West 2009.

Better Content Through Better Understanding of Audience

2009-03-09T07:23:50Z

When creating information with a purpose, it’s important to gain an understanding of your users. To do this you need to know what information they need and how they will use it. Once this is understood you must build user profiles that will speak to different audience groups.

By following some simple steps, you can build the right user profiles to make the exercise successful:

Develop personas for all audience groups by looking beyond geographic boundaries and across functional areas.
Upon completion of the personas, conduct a task analysis.
Map each task to the various users groups.
Merge the persona and the task analysis to create user scenarios for each audience group.

Learn more about the user-centered design process, particularly user personas and ethnographies, in this podcast with Joan Lasselle. Joan presents Using a Balanced Scorecard to Measure the Value of Content at DocTrain West 2009.

Getting Content To Perform At Its Peak

2009-03-08T19:21:18Z

Whether it’s flamenco dancing, fine food, or content management, when Pamela Kostur gets passionate about something, it’s readily apparent. In addition to being an accomplished cook, Pamela is also an avid flamenco dancer, studying and performing with the Arte Flamenco school in Toronto. Pamela’s passion is clear in her work, as well. After all, she muses, how did the “content” in content management get left out of the loop? If the purpose is to manage content, why do so many projects focus on the technology around the content, and not on the content itself? Anyone who has heard Pamela speak over the past few years is very clear on where she stands on that issue.

She absolutely loves working with content, particularly when content is being restructured as part of a content management implementation. She loves cleaning it up, rewriting it, re-structuring it, and creating guidelines so that others can continue to write the content consistently. Pamela always begins with analysis and finds that in most cases, similar types of documents and information products are written inconsistently. The first task is to bring structure to the general chaos, defining structures for similar types of documents and information products, and defining writing guidelines to support those structures. Kostur explains that structure still doesn’t tell authors how to write the content that goes into the structure. That’s where the writing guidelines come in. Whether starting from scratch or working with existing content, defining the structure - and how to write to the structure - are critical. It’s a lot like choreography, she says. She’s getting the content ready to dance on the stage of the World Wide Web, or wherever else it may be asked to perform.

Pamela has presented on topics in this realm, which she shares on the Parallax Communications site.

Pamela presents Writing Modular Content: Making Content Behave and Building Content Models: Constructing with Content at DocTrain West 2009.

Practical DITA Author Offers Practical Advice

2009-03-08T09:46:47Z

The difference between unstructured and structured content is way more than a few tags. It can mean a huge difference in process power when it comes to leveraging the power of multi-channel publishing. It’s not the content itself, but the structure that allows applications to take advantage of the possibilities. One of the most exciting technologies on the scene is DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture), which allows you to distinguish between information types and analyze the content within.

Julio Vazquez, author of Practical DITA, is a fierce proponent of using structured content, particularly DITA, to improve the content architecture. His article on single-sourcing is a fine example of how content needs to be analyzed during its creation cycle to ensure that its full potential can be realized. Julio presents Structured Authoring and DITA at DocTrain West 2009.

A SaaSy Twist On Getting Shoes For The Shoemaker’s Children

2009-03-08T09:42:15Z

You may lust after a CCMS (component content management system) with the same intensity that you really want that new pair of Fleuvog shoes, but if the budget and infrastructure isn’t there to support the implementation and maintenance, are you destined to stand outside the shoe store, barefoot, waiting for better times? Groups needing to implement a CCMS to manage their technical documentation often find themselves in that very position.

Technical communication groups find they desperately need a tool that will help them meet the demands being made on their content, yet they are prevented from moving to content management because of steep adoption costs. These costs range from the obvious one, of the application itself, to customization costs, and ongoing infrastructure and maintenance costs.

One way that these groups manage to get to “go shopping” is to move to the Software-as-a-Service model. Small businesses are finding that this way of “leasing” software applications levels allows them to think big and move faster toward their goals. Someone who has been through the SaaS experience is Nancy Thompson, who shares her story in her session, Moving from Silos to a Collective Farm: Developing Epson America’s Hosted CMS with DocZone DITA, at DocTrain West 2009.

A New Twist on Measure Twice, Cut Once

2009-03-08T09:36:08Z

There’s a saying in the marketing profession: if you can’t measure the results, it’s not worth doing. In other words, if you can’t tell whether painting your URL on the side of a truck nets you the desired results, why bother? The effort spent painting, and maintaining the paint job, on the truck could be spent on other activities that could be proven to be effective.

Often, in the world of content production, proving the effectiveness of moving to structured content is a little tougher. The anecdotal stories are plentiful, but actual metrics are harder to come by. If you find yourself in a position where you want to gather metrics, you may want to study an article by Mark Lewis on developing cost metrics for DITA. By using standard ROI calculations, he provides a concrete set of tools that you can use to compare your traditional content development methods to those in a DITA world. Mark also shares his knowledge in his session, DITA Cost and Reuse Metrics, at DocTrain West 2009.

Technology Is What You Didn’t Grow Up With: Going Native In A Digital World

2009-03-08T09:32:54Z

The largest generational gap today may very well be between digital natives and digital immigrants. When faced with a technology malfunction, digital immigrants blame themselves; digital natives blame the technology. The differences in expectations for learning is also quite different between these two groups. Digital natives expect learning to be fun. They grew up with the edutainment of television shows such as Sesame Street, and continued with video games that teach everything from reading to math and beyond. In fact, a recent study demonstrated that when teachers flipped the classroom paradigm, providing take-home lectures while using the classroom to do homework, students’ performance improved.

So with a move to structured content, how can we reconcile the need to provide digital media such as audio and video content? Sean Healy presents some answers with his DocTrain West 2009 session, DITA, Coming to its Senses: Better Communication through Video.

Got Content? Got Content Strategy?

2009-03-08T09:28:22Z

In the discussion of structured content, there is much discussion about paying attention to the tags, and what’s between the tags. There is even some discussion about maintaining the quality of the content. What doesn’t often get discussed is whether the content being migrated to the new system - and there always is a system - is really needed at all. The temptation to do a wholesale move of content on the assumption that if it was needed before, it will still be needed. Or, on a website, that keeping all the old content is necessary, because of the idea that it helps with SEO, ignoring the loss in trust that outdated and no-longer-correct content has on potential and existing customers.

With the ever-increasing amount of content to be handled by organizations of all sizes, having a good content strategy is no longer a luxury. As we enter an age where content needs to be able to integrate with other content, be syndicated in appropriate ways, and converge with other content types, having a strategy is now a critical aspect of planning useful and usable content. Rahel Anne Bailie has been discussing some of the ways that content can converge and integrate.

Rahel demonstrates the impact of content strategies and its contribution to good user experience at DocTrain West 2009, with her presentation, The Sound of Music 2.0: The Making of a Rich M(use)ical Experience, along with the workshop, Before You Touch the Tool: Techniques for Development of Structured Content.

Engineering Content For Re-use Needs Content Engineers

2009-03-05T08:49:08Z

The beauty of topic-based content, particularly structured content, is the ability to re-use it. The idea of being able to combine and recombine content for multiple contexts has become a reality, when the content has been created to support that purpose.

Content is a little like a super-hero. It is a resource whose usefulness is being able to spring into action and come to the rescue of the user who needs information. But, as any comic-book afficienado knows, for the hero to spring into action, a super-power is needed. For content, these super-powers come in the forms of metadata and attributes, which allow the content to be transformed from a little piece of data into a contextualized message that is delivered up in the knick of time to save the day.

It’s not easy orchestrating content to perform in the super-hero leagues. That’s where content engineers come in. The engineering of content is much like the engineering of software. The patterns used in developing object-oriented software are good conceptual tools to understand the combining of content to create a powerful story. Lisa Woods, a consultant specializing in collaborative technologies, speaks to this topic in an article for Innovativ Sessions. At DocTrain West 2009, Lisa presents Collaborate to Elaborate: Using Collaboration Tools to Elicit and Manage Project Requirements and Teams.

Making Content Smarter and Finding Smarter Uses

2009-02-25T07:35:45Z

Ann Rockley is an evangelist for the idea of structured authoring. She has a deep understanding of the business benefits of having content that is portable, interchangeable between systems, and highly adaptive to new business requirements. Rockley makes it her business to listens closely to both business executives and end users, and to bring together the two sets of needs into a single, elegant solution. In some circles, she would be called a matchmaker; in the content management world, she’s called an industry leader.

With a highly successful book under her belt, as well as the first-ever event on Intelligent Content and how it can deliver on the promise of the semantic Web, Rockley doesn’t wait for the industry to catch up. Instead, she works to make the next step happen, as with DITA for Enterprise Business Documents, a standards proposal by Ann Rockley and co-author Michael Boses.

Ann presents Moving to Structured Content, The Structured Content Technology Landscape, and Making Content Intelligent at DocTrain West 2009.