Less Work, More Flow

Speaking at Publishing Expo 2012 [NF0]

2012-01-04T15:34:00.001+01:00

For those considering the Publishing Expo Conference Feb 28-29 – I’ll be there with some favourite Congility speakers. We’re still accepting last-minute submissions for remaining speaking slots too.

Presentations should be educational, conceptual or "thought-leading" oriented presentations, i.e., not a commercial sales pitch.

They can sent by email to georgina.johnson@mekon.com.

Here’s a bit of background on the event:

Publishing Expo 2012 – Content Agility Theatre

The Content Agility Theatre is back at Publishing Expo 2012. It will focus on core challenges facing the modern publisher in today’s user-led publishing landscape, and educate and inform visitors on the processes, strategies and technologies required to overcome them.

Content Agility means making information agile, portable and reusable – abilities made ever more critical by eBooks, ePub 3.0, mobile web.

These tools are faster and more powerful than anything we’ve had before, but how do you leverage them without increasing complexity and risk?

The Theatre will feature key presentations from internationally recognised consultants, thought-leaders, and content strategists. They work with organisations the world over, helping them make relevant, excellent content available in the context and format of the consumer’s choosing.

Publishing Expo 2012 – CA Theatre Featured speakers:

Rahel Anne Bailie, Senior Consultant and Content Strategist, Intentional Design, will discuss making e-Pubs relevant to the audience as well as the business.
Noz Urbina, Senior Consultant and Content Strategist, Mekon Ltd., will discuss updating your content strategy for a community-driven world.
Brett Freeman, Content Publishing Specialist, Aptara, will address publishing content to digital platforms.
Anne Caborn, Co-founder and Content Development Specialist, CDA, will take you through governing digital content to achieve agility while avoiding risk.

http://publishing-expo.co.uk/content-agility-theatre

Musings On Choosing a CMS: Feature Overload [NF0]

2011-12-08T12:34:00.003+01:00

Missing the point completely...

I’m working with a major client choosing a CMS.

In this particular choice, it’s a multi-year, multi-million dollar choice.

If all goes well, it will eventually be a system that touches from at least 1000, to many thousands of staff.

Their demanding business context has quickly filtered the market from literally thousands to only a handful of systems. We’re now down to two major vendors. The first of these vendors is demonstrating their extremely powerful system.

Problem: it’s too powerful, and too customisable.

Spoiled for Choice

The system is positively bristling with functions, but as a result, it looks unusable. By the end of this week we’ll have spent 4 straight days digging through this thing. As the product selection team, we’re looking at as many aspects as humanly possible before the selection process itself stops being cost effective.
What’s happening is that with too many ways to do something and too many options, the whole thing seems daunting. If you’ve not used a CMS before, or used only lightweight or simplistic ones (you know who you are, Vendors!) then a big customisable beastie can start to look like something you’d dread putting your users in front of, then having to train on and support.

Metrics vs Feelings [NF1]*

As scientific and unbiased as we try to make software decisions, there’s a very real and human component. And it’s an important one. When I talk about brand I talk a lot about the brand “experience”.

The whole “holistic content strategy” thing is about looking at all aspects of how content affects the experience of the brand. It’s crucial to whether we’ll move from one phase of a relationship to another.
For this project we’ve defined 31 high-level use cases which between them have nearly 350 specific points of evaluation. Each evaluation point is then given a score and weighting multiplier, resulting in lots of juicy math and pretty pie-charts to make everyone feel confident and rest easy.

But do you go with the system that’s better on paper, or the one that feels like you could live with it?

Take Aways

What I’d like to put forward here is two musings from my experience with buying CMSs:

Not Just a Pretty Face

Don’t dismiss UI discussions as a software ‘beauty pageant’. UI discussions are important. Bad UI in your internal systems is damaging to performance in the same way as bad design of the content you’re managing in it. The message gets lost, and you’re slowed, if not prevented, from realising your goals.
The fact that staff can be “told” to do their jobs but users can’t be “told” to engage with your content has some effect, but don’t rely on this factor. This is especially true for those looking at buying XML/DITA-capable CMSs.

It’s Not About You

That said, remember that this is technology we’re talking about. Configuration options can be overwhelming, but especially with big systems, they’re there for a reason.

You want something that can grow with your business. As the stakeholders in the system decision it’s your responsibility to understand how the system could look different to different user roles in your organisation.
The fact you’ve got to sit through ALL those options, doesn’t mean they do. You’ve got to sit through 20 examples of how the interface could look, but they’ll only get one or two. As with all decisions in business, we must step outside of our emotional reactions and think on behalf of others.

Use the Math

The Use Cases and formal points of evaluation are your sanity check. As much as I think that people should weigh subjective user experience into the decision matrix, it is one – albeit important – factor among many.
Develop your use cases well, validate them with your users, then make your vendors go through them, ideally, with your content.

Investing in your use cases is vital. Then you’ve got to brief the vendors to make sure they walk through them properly. It’s easy to squander huge amounts of time, and eventually not be comparing apples to apples in the flow of canned demos.

If you don’t structure your evaluation, you’re only left with “I liked that one better, and I’m pretty sure they ticked all our boxes”. That’s not a reason to invest in any key system, and not a defensible position if anyone asks in 6 months time what you did with all that budget.

Any one else have CMS selection tips they can share?

* This is an NF (Nerd Factor) Rating

Nerd Factor 4, Mr Sulu: Revising My Posting Metadata

2011-12-01T12:19:00.001+01:00

Hello Readerinos,

I love to talk brand, and customer experience and ROI impact until I’m blue in the face. I also get lots of people asking me about some seriously hardcore stuff, and work on some of the world’s largest and meanest content munching machines.

As a result, I’ve gotten myself blog readers at both ends of the content strategy technical interest spectrum.

I need to help readers find the stuff that’s going to add value to them, and pass over (for now) the stuff replete with language and acronyms that to everyone else is gibberish.

Presenting the Nerd Factor Ratings System

Photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NERD.png

So, from now on, I’m going to try rank and tag the technie-ness of my posts from 0 (General) to 4 (Gandalf the White Ninja of Content Coding). So watch for [NF0],[NF2], etc. tags in blog and section titles.

This extra metadata should help you find the content that’s appropriate for your interests.

I hope my readers take the opportunity to push themselves a bit, but I also want you to spare your time for the posts that are going to help you in your work!

Now that I’ve got the levels, I’ll try to make sure I’m blogging at each one with some regularity.

Enjoy!

Here’s some examples of questions I might answer or things I might talk about in each level:

General Audience Stuff [NF0]

Content affects the customer experience!
Brand management and content management are kindred fields!
Here's some tips on selling content value to managers.
It’s about knowledge, communication, collaboration and money.

Somewhat Nerdy Stuff [NF1]

Here's some tips on building a content inventory.
Look what I found out by analysing the SEO of this content.
Change management and process factors to think about before integrating CMSs between departments.
How does terminology management affect content reuse and readability?

Definitively Nerdy Stuff [NF2]

What metrics should I report on in an XML system to prove to management we're performing?
How should I evaluate a DITA CMS before buying one?

Very Nerdy Stuff [NF3]

What’s new in DITA 1.2? What is editor support like?
Here’s a new webinar on DITA 1.2 keys!
What’s the best way the set up my DITA metadata and folder taxonomy for organising my @conref targets?

About as Nerdy as I Ever Get [NF4]

When should I use @conkeyref and when should I use @ttr conditions?
Is it ANT scripts or XSLTs that you need to customise to get your DOT output ready for processing to XSL:FO/PDF and CHM deliverables?

2 New Webinars: Socially Enabled Help, DITA 1.2

2011-11-28T12:17:00.001+01:00

Some new webinars coming at you! Both delivered in partnership DCL and their DCL Learning Series.

Upcoming next week and beyond, I’ve got some DITA 1.2

DITA 1.2 Interactive Tutorial: Three Part Online Mini-Series

Register/Learn more »

On-demand you’ve got:

Socially Enabling Documentation in the Cloud

“Social” isn’t limited to WIKIs, Forums, Facebook, and Twitter.

More and more organisations are looking at how community content can complement (and in some cases replace) their formal product content. Also, many are noticing how much overlap there is with social content platforms and their own intranets, internal business collaboration and knowledge sharing platforms.

For most, putting documentation fully in the hands of the users – even internal subject matter experts – isn’t an option, 1or is simply not desirable. Also, creating yet another silo of social content isn’t helpful for users trying to find answers.

So, how can community and formally created content play nicely together?

On this session see best practice concepts and case study examples demonstrating:

The pitfalls of poorly implemented social functions
How the DITA platform can form the core of a socially-enabled documentation platform
The key social features that organisations are implementing – and the back-end processes required to prevent chaos
How internal SME and external customer communities can be leveraged for maximum benefit to both
The impact on: editorial process, metrics and measurement, version management, content models, workflow, and metadata strategies

View Online »

Content Strategy Day @ Tekom / TCWorld Oct 19, 2011

2011-10-10T17:25:00.001+02:00

Hello!

In a big rush but just wanted to let everyone know about the Content Strategy Day at TCWorld in Germany next week.

Led by Scott Abel, TheContentWrangler, this should be a great event within a great event!

Here are two links to more complete and tantalising blog posts:

Interview with the Michael Fritz, Executive Director of tekom:

http://bit.ly/tcw11cs

An overview of Content Strategy day by Scott Abel:

http://bit.ly/tcw11cs2

Content Strategy Day Speakers and Topics

Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler – Introduction to Content Strategy: Why do we need a content strategy, anyway?
Joe Gollner, Gnostyx Research – An Introduction to Intelligent Content Strategies
Ann Rockley, The Rockley Group – eBooks 101: Developing a unified digital content strategy for eBooks and apps
Aaron Fulkerson, MindTouch – Thinking differently about customer support content: Designing a Help 2.0 strategy
Rahel Anne Bailie, Intentional Design and Geoffrey Roberts, Nokia – Adventures in Localization: The oft forgotten stepchild of content strategy
B. Noz Urbina, Mekon – Content Strategy is a many-splendored thing: Breaking down technical communication silos

Hope to see you there!

Socially Enabled Documentation in the Cloud: Dangerous, Benefits, Getting There

2011-10-06T18:02:00.001+02:00

Hiddly-ho, Readerinos!

FYI - I'll be doing a webinar on one of my favourite topics Oct 12th: Social enablement of technical communications.

Socially Enabled Content…?

Social Enablement…? Socially Enabled Technical Communication?

What on earth is that? Glad you asked!

“Social” isn’t limited to WIKIs, Forums, Facebook, and Twitter, and "Communities" doesn't just mean external customers, they're you and your colleagues as well.

Social enablement basically means taking traditional content, and complementing (not necessarily replacing) it with community-driven social functionality like:

user contributions and conversations
community activity monitoring
tagging
ranking and metrics

All for the good of the users and the enterprise. And in the Cloud, and using DITA XML, so that it's easy to roll out and access from smartphones, tablets, PCs and (gasp!) print.

I'll be going over some of the content strategy pitfalls, issues, and gotchas as well as walking through an example where we're prototyping social features in what was, 18 months ago, a traditional unstructured manufacturing tech docs environment

Hope we see you there!

Noz

Mobile Content Busts Industry Silos

2011-09-24T12:38:00.002+02:00

For me CS Forum made the penny drop for the “Why now?” question.

We’ve been harping on about the importance of product information and separating content from format for years. Why is everyone listening all of a sudden? Methinks it’s mobile.

When the web and CD-roms hit the documentation community we suddenly had a second format to which all our content just had to go.

Print content was not good enough anymore. Content needed to be single-source, multiple output. Heads and tears rolled aplenty. It was an agonizing and painful lesson that some companies are still grappling with today, some two decades later.

Since then we’ve had a whole generation of professionals who grew up fully on the web, considering the browser and the personal computer to be the way to access information. A new monotheism for content. Progress was over and nothing could ever be cooler than accessing content on your computer, it was just matter of refining how.

Until mobile.

Thank you Apple for the iPhone

As much as I am not a fan of Apple or their products, they have lots of things for which I respect them. High on the list is that they seriously took mobile devices mainstream. There’s a whole ecosystem of Android based devices (currently whipping their asses – burn!) specifically because Apple took smart phones from “nerd toy” territory to “normal phone”. Then they had the brainwave to say: “Tablets aren’t skinny crippled laptops, they’re big (crippled) phones!”

Now we all know how to use tablets, even if we’ve never picked one up.

We Are Not Alone

Mobile internet access is overtaking desktop-based access as our primary way of getting information (http://bit.ly/mobvsdesk).

Mobile and its nasty combination of “little website” and “web app” modalities has given the web community a running kick to the tenders, just like the internet gave us way back when.

Suddenly, single source, multiple output and separation of form and content look really interesting.

Information Beats Persuasion: CS Forum 2011 Afterthoughts

2011-09-24T01:27:00.001+02:00

I spoke at CS Forum earlier this month on Content Strategy.

My presentation title (suck as it did) was "B2B Content Strategy: How to create company- and customer-focused content". Terrible. But still, people seemed to see through that and show up.

Here's my feelings on, and inspired by, the event:

I liked CS Forum a lot. Like, a lot. It was definitely eye opening!

People Are Getting Enable vs. Persuade

My most epic of blog of all time addressed the landmark case of Enable vs. Persuade, aka MarComm vs TechComm. Summarising 3000+ words into much fewer:

Focus first on helping people do what they want, and they’ll do what you want.

Check this post from just today on the CS Google Group by Ian Waugh entitled, “Product 'support' content as marketing/sales”:

“Wonder if you can help me? I've heard and read a couple of things recently about the benefits of providing support content like a PDF manual as part of a product description page in an ecommerce site, and the effect that it can have on sales.

I agree with this intuitively, I know I have bought products after looking at the user manual before purchase.
Guess it fits in with the whole "information beats persuasion" kind of approach.”

"Information beats persuasion" Wow. So, 3000+ words down to 3. Good ratio.

For me reading emails like this is like being handed water after running a marathon that lasted 11 years.

Now, there are many more people than I’d have imagined in the web content strategy community who are thinking about this stuff. They’re considering the overlap and touch-points between web/marketing content strategy and, for lack of a better description the "format agnostic" and “product content-centric” content strategy on which I focus.

If they weren't thinking about it before CS Forum, they were thinking about it after.

Killer Keynotes

Both of the first keynote talks - Gerry McGovern and Karen McGrane - were dead on. They talked about task orientation, technical information and its role in the (modern, online) sales cycle. My favourite quote of the conference was Gerry's:

"The content that use to come after the sale, is now driving the sale".

Karen even specifically did us a shout-out by name:

"The Techcomm folks have been doing this stuff [that we in the rest of the CS world need to do] for years. We need to engage with them."

She talked about a "Content API" which was like a CMS which can content to any format you want, even ones that have not been invented yet, and allow mash-ups of content to any device easily and quickly.
I realised that that was not a normal thing at this event. This was a conference where CMSs publish to one format/channel: the web. The extra fancy super-duper ones will do multi-language and serve up your mobile site.

The stuff our customers bang on us for, was a bridge way too far. Stuf like:

Generating content that goes to offline-capable mobile apps
Delivering dynamically to user-driven, nicely formatted print-ready PDF
Serving up content as a service to multiple internal and external websites

Just today I have a conf call about a customer who wants to move to publishing knowledge base content from one repository (authored by various flavours of support and service engineer) and standard content (written by technical authors and trainers) from another repository inside their product itself.
The products have sometimes PCs attached, and sometimes they have data screens (like the data dashboard console in newer cars). Why not get some real, dynamic content in there? Embedded, integrated, social content.

Content Drives the Customer Experience

People are starting to realise that when you buy a TV for $800, you go online first - a lot - and when you do so, being told that it's "elegantly designed" and "sleek" is not compelling. Being told it's got a USB port that can open those movies oh-so-legally downloaded is.

You may not know what your TV being 100 megahertz or 50 megahertz means, but if you asked anyone (and you probably did) then you at least have a feeling of whether it’s a good thing or not.

When it’s time to shop, it’s facts and product, not concepts or “brand messages” that you are seeking. Brand messages aren’t dead, but everyone has to add “We’re here to enable you, not seduce you” to their core messages.

To quote a wise friend:

“Content drives the customer experience”.

To read more about how the web has had some fundamental flaws in how it evaluated itself, I suggest reading more on Gerry’s blog.

So after my CS Forum experience, I repeat my call for collaboration to web CSs, UX people, and IAs. We’re here to help and learn from each other. You do things we don’t, and vice versa. Let’s chat and build some content applications that drive customer experiences.

Has anyone other in the web community be thrust into a web project that’s pushed you out of your comfort zone? “After sales” material mixing in with your copy? Apps? Print? If so:

How did it go?
How did you handle keeping that all in sync with other deliverables?
How did workflows, process and roles have to change vs. what you’re used to?
How did management envision all this and what drove the new approach?

I’m been hearing experiences from the other side of the fence and I’m looking forward to more stories!

Making Socially Enabled User Assistance Better– “Help” vs. ”HEEELP!”

2011-07-20T11:23:00.011+02:00

Someone posted to the Content Strategy Google Group asking about Help content. I didn’t have a lot of time so I pinged over my fav article going on Help these days: Scott Abel’s The Future of Technical Communication Is Socially Enabled: Understanding the Help 2.0 Revolution.

Then I did a runner…

Since, Dana Chisnell then challenged me:

Why are you providing help? Any time you have a separate system for the help, you're in trouble. Embedding the assistance in the UI and surfacing it when the user needs it will work much, much better.

Which is of course, preaching to the choir. I couldn't be more in agreement.

Socially enabled help almost immediately begets socially enabled embedded help. It's only logical, and it’s not even my idea, it’s already happening.

Smart companies generally (regardless of social enablement) are bringing user assistance (the posh word for Help these days) into the UX and the UI, not making it retrospective.

On demand is good, but you want to assist users before they ‘demand’ it. In other words: Help should help, not wait until the user needs 'HEEELLP!' (Tweet that, I dares ya!)

The Problem With The World Today

Today the user assistance UX story is:

“What's that? I can't figure out this UI! Now my User Experience is broken and I hate this company! HEEELP!

It should be:

'What's that?'

Helpful bit of content appears to the rescue!

'Oh. Ok. Now back to what I was doing'

I’m sure Scott’s probably got this in mind too as our brain children go to the same school of thought. It’s nice. Lovely play areas and recess is 9 times a day. And they serve the kids wine…

What you need to do

Anyway! If it wasn’t explicit enough, I’ll provide some detail (in my own words, so I don’t want anyone to think I’m speaking for Scott without permission). Here’s Noz’s official to-do list for the Help World:

Help needs to be socially enabled (Scott’s already broke it down for you)
Help content needs to be brought into devices and UIs (hardware, software, website - whatever!) so that those with content skills work in harmonious partnership with those that have UI, UX and development skills.
The application assistance architecture should be socially extensible so that the social components of help integrate nicely with the brand-generated components

Here’s some examples of companies that have it part right:

Adobe Photoshop Help Offline

Right-click and view/open in a new window to enlarge.

If you’re offline, hit F1 in PS and you go to a html-based help file (html, running offline from a folder on your computer). Note the PDF link on top right!

Defaultpagesayswhat? Community help! In other words, to REALLY get the full experience, go online and join the party, silly!

Adobe Photoshop Help Online

Turn ye ol’ Net back on and Adobe takes you straight to a website that looks exactly the same, but new features abound!

Feedback
Options to search through help for other applications
Still available as PDF!
Community intro link available (blue, bottom left)
Commenting
Comments RSS feed (subscribe to this piece of content!)
And so on… explore it yourself for fun.

Right-click and view/open in a new window to enlarge.

Good, but could be better.

Let’s compare with one of my favourite apps, Ableton Live:

Ableton Live Context Ultra-sensitive Help

Right-click and view/open in a new window to enlarge.

In Ableton, help is in panes within the UI. Once you’re experienced user, you hide them both away and only bring them back as needed.

Big stuff like tutorials, walkthroughs, set-up instructions, is on the right in the main help pane (F1).
Bottom left we have a little hide-able pane that constantly pops helpful information and short-cuts for ANYTHING I hover my mouse over (the 'Live Device Browser' in this case). That is to say, new users just leave that baby open, and you instantly know what every UI item works, and the short-cut for triggering it:

Compare this to user's alternative workflow:

'What's this? How do I use it?'

Learns how to use it is somehow. By looking it up? Probably not...
Starts getting into productive work...

'Showing and hiding this thing is annoying....
Hmmm...maybe there's a short-cut...?
Do I want to stop what I'm doing and look it up?
No.
Actually, yes... this is annoying...I'll go look it up!'

...and how mad are they going to be if it turns out there is no short-cut after all?

The Promised Land

Of course, we should bring the two together, so that the web snazzies of Adobe’s help appear in the UI like Ableton. In time dear friends, but fear not, that is where we’re heading!

Agree? Disagree? Let me have it in the socially-enabled comments!

UPDATE!

Dana pointed out I forgot to mention mobile devices and hit me with this great soundbite:

"...we should all be thinking about what will work on the tiny screen that will scale up, not the other way around."

I also forgot to mention:

Great help doesn't mean UI/UX designers can all start leaving work at 3pm! The idea is to avoid needing to get help in the first place, no matter how nicely it's delivered.
Those implementing DITA or any other Component CMS platform should be thinking about how this social content gets round-tripped back into source so that the brand-sourced content, service desk knowledge-bases, intranets, and the product itself are all improved by leveraging the crowd's contributions.

Time Go Bye Bye, DITA Training, Largest DITA Project Ever

2011-07-19T09:18:00.002+02:00

Wow...

Time has just... gone!

It seems like last week I was delivering my opening address, somewhat exhausted, at Congility 2011.

The event wasn't even over and we were letting people know about the DITA Training courses on offer at Congility South. Not to mention my having to prepare the course itself.

A heartbeat after I was whisked away to begin work on what is one of the largest DITA Content Management projects of my career, and the biggest Content Technology Audit (CTA, similar to a Content Strategy Audit but systems-focussed) I've ever done. They have 1000 (one THOUSAND) dedicated technical authors worldwide with 10,000 (you heard me) engineers looking to contribute natively into DITA topics. They said full roll-out numbers might be 30,000 users globally. If we opt to go for direct Engineer contributions, they will have more DITA authors than most companies have staff!

Oh, and they're working off the file system - no CMS support.

DITA Gone Wild

It's been a fascinating example of DITA pushed to the limits. They products are set up in a 'platform>product' way where specific products are built off the platforms, so there is extensive reuse. But:

They various builds of the software run in parallel, meaning there's reuse from platforms but also any number of parallel builds of the software
The need to keep maintaining all the various versions - current, plus 2 versions back
They have to reuse extensively into training materials
There's hardware too...
Oh... and just for fun, it's full of client-specific stuff

They're handling this all with extensive branching and merging, and more conditions than I've ever seen. They're conditionalising content by:

Version - because of all the branching and parallel development, different versions are considered different products
Audience - Including the employees, the public, and customers
Outputclass: e.g., chm and pdf
Platform - what base platform is the product derived from

Single lines like 'The XYZ product can boil a chicken in 5 minutes if you press the "boil" button' might be conditionalised to the point where it can say:

The XYZ23 product can boil, or broil a chicken in 5-10 minutes if you press the "cook" button
The XYZ27 product can cook a chicken in 15 minutes automatically
The ABC123 product can boil a turkey in 20 minutes if you press the "boil" button
The 321CBA product can nuke a turkey, squab or chicken if you press the "Angry birds" button

And so on, and so on and so on aaand so on...

Imagine working on the sentences while looking at a document module (DITA Topic) where all that is being expressed simultaneously. and then sharing modules like that that were created by other people for use in your documents. Without a database...

What is amazing is how well they're managing. I have amazing respect for what they've already accomplished. Now they've asked for help to go from managing to optimising and really tuning for the customer's interests.

I'll let you know how we get on.

Overall I'm really enthused by seeing such a huge DITA project be a success, and now, having the opportunity to help take it to the next level. Lame, but that gives me the warm and squishies inside.

Geek corner

For the nerds out there, I'm seeing now just how interesting DITA Keys and Conkeyref are to the scalability of reuse, especially combined with Conditions. I'm upping the focus on them significantly at Congility South.

Also, I've finally got a little workshop together on Context-sensitive help in DITA. I had a real developer build me an actual application that I can use to demonstrate the concepts and make new context sensitive help on the fly for various formats from DITA source

Now I just need to work out how to use it to teach conditions as well... and make it call a website instead of a local help file...

When Content Strategies Collide Pt 6: Conclusion, Unification

2011-05-14T11:56:00.004+02:00

(Reposting this after it was deleted by Blogger’s maintenance update)

I’ve harped about Marketing vs. Technical Communication Content Strategy in this wacky World of Content for a while now. The thesis in short is that we can and must integrate content strategy across these divisions for the sake of competitiveness and customer experience in the modern global market.

Now here’s the wrap-up and what I think we should really be doing about it. Your comments have indicated that there are some glowing exceptions to the trend of separation, but that others feel the challenge is hopeless.

My final thoughts below, but here’s some links to the other posts:

Conclusion

Content Strategy is at the centre of debate right now, not only because it’s a buzzy term, but because it brings together content together with the bigger picture issues of planning and accountability. It links in with the overarching business goals that will take content to its rightful place as a strategic asset in any organisation.

Content Strategy unification, integration and sharing of standards. Is it hopeless? No. Difficult? Yes.
Companies don’t get far in a globalising marketplace when we don’t even make strategic efforts to do things because they’re "hard". We should be reassured more by our similarities than bothered by our differences.

Our customers will benefit most when we federate into a United Nations of Content, with common governance, standards, and practices which are tailored, as needed, for the business context.

We have much common ground to build on. In discussing this post with Scott Abel he articulated quite nicely that content professionals share a baseline of skill-sets like:

analytical and structural thinking
empathy for the user and usability sensibilities
the ability to express oneself in words.

Everyone in this world of communications and content rallies behind (or should?) certain battles cries:

Content is king
Content is a strategic (critical) business asset
Consistency helps us and helps customers understand and engage with us
Business needs first, technology second

Joe Gollner wrote on this blog recently and defined content quite nicely: that which goes in a container. This is most apt. If you’ve been following this series you know I am organising Congility 2011. The "unwritten theme" is recognising that all content professionals are, in the end, concerned with how to best move those containers around amongst different formats, audiences and channels to best serve our customers and business goals. When it can, you can say your content has agility.

Once you are integrated and agile, we can break down silos in delivery as well as silos in the business, and that is really when the customer and therefore the revenue stream will see some effect.

Giving the Customer What They Want

The wisdom that content is king is second (in my mind) to the older wisdom: the customer’s always right.

We’re designing customer experiences; not web pages, not manuals, not help files.
It’s about the customers and what they want to do, how they want to do it; not your content nor what you want them to do. They (may) want to buy your product, if you show them properly why they should. Especially true in the B2B space – putting meat behind the sizzle of communication is vital to engaging the modern mind.

Users want answers to their product and technical questions fast and easily in the format that’s most convenient for them. Not just support post-sales questions, but presales curiosities and decision-making questions. Persuasion loses its effect if it is not backed up with enablement.

I’ll dust off this same “The Oatmeal” cartoon from a previous post:

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/sell_generation

It talks about how to sell to the new generation (but I don’t think that is generation just in age, this applies to the new generation of consumers). He pulls out three keywords; we must be:

Sincere
Helpful
Knowledgeable

How are you really going to be helpful and knowledgeable without closing the communications loop?

Final thoughts for Web Content folk:

You are less persuasive when you spend too much time focussed on persuading.
When you’re selling technology products, the stuff that might bore you – like tables, specs, details, trouble-shooting, how-tos, and so forth – is often make or break to your customers.
There are all sorts of skills and technologies already developed for technical content that do the things you want to do like control language, metadata style, presentation, and structure across multiple formats. Some may already be in your company. Go learn about them!
There is a lot of process management experience and integration experience in the more forward thinking TechComms world. Each organisation moves at its own speed. Think of every organisation as being somewhere on a "Content Maturity Model" and check out the DITA Maturity Model, or JoAnn Hackos’ Information Process Maturity Model as examples looking at how a large business can develop its content smarts.

Final thoughts for TCs:

No matter how good your information is, if it’s still “the documentation”, then you will struggle to get it considered as a first port of call for users in trouble. Diversify your delivery methods to engage people across different media and models.
You have so much more to offer the business than you may realise. Your skills are applicable to many business critical operations on both sides of the sales / pre-sales cycle. You know how to deal with ugly, complex content. Teach your colleagues and they will thank you.
Social media a) has already impacted your career and your customer’s preferred way of ingesting information b) is your pipeline to the user feedback you’ve been denied all these years c) is more trusted than you are by an order of magnitude – you can’t beat ‘em. Join ‘em.
Search has changed everything.

Your turn

I’m really interested in hearing the from “the exceptions” – people in the collaborative, integrated, standardised teams out there. There’s been a few comments from those in shining star organisations, and some saying it’s hopeless and that the populations of these worlds could never produce ‘viable offspring’.

Can we do it? What are the half-measures in your opinion that get us at least on the road from point A to B? Where does technology fit into all this?

See also:

When Content Strategies Collide Pt 5: Is Communication Mired in the Past?

2011-04-27T19:13:00.001+02:00

My biggest, and possibly most controversial, post to-date continues with responding to and extending the question – is TechComms mired in the past?

Yes. But we’re not alone. Those of us in MarComms are at the beginning of a new dawn too. If we’re in the the past, what does the future hold? I take a little look at some cutting edge thinking…
Typewriter image used under Creative Commons License

See also:

Is TechComms mired in the past? Hell Yeah.

In Pt 2 of this series, we talked about Julie Norris’ mildly infamous comment about TechComms being mired in the past, and the voracious sh**storm that hit her after, causing her to erase the whole debacle from her blog (sadly).

The only quote I managed to save from Julie’s blog was:

“In any case, by “mired in the past” I mean a mindset that’s opposed to change, or trying new things. It’s not something new. I’ve seen it with every advance that’s come along in this industry, with every new method I’ve tried to help move along. I’m burned out with trying to explain to people the benefits of whatever is new, up-and-coming, or important to watch at the time.””

Hear, hear, Julie. There are loads of us behind you. Thought-leaders, consultants, leading bloggers and TechComms practitioners have felt the frustration of trying to move their peers in the TC community forward.

I was on a call with Ann Rockley moments after reading the firestorm about Julie’s original post, so I raised the issues with her. We’re both agreed that it’s always been this way since we started in Technical Communications – back when it was called ‘Technical Documentation’.

Ann noted that herself, Scott Abel, Rahel Bailie, and myself are all people who have, in her words, “Let but not left” – bridging the gap between the “world of TC” and the wider content community. TechComms is not to be left behind if you’re really promoting an integrated approach to content and customer experience.

---------------------------

UPDATE (18:19 18/05/2011):

Julie has commented on this post and part 2 to point out an error. Because I was not able to access her blog directly, I was left with the misinterpretation that she had in fact ‘left’ TechComms for pastures new. The truth was that was refocusing her blog away from TechComms, but she is today and will continue to be a Technical Communications practitioner. I have left the rest of the blog as was, because the key point is the reaction that the mere idea caused. At Julie’s request I have included this point of fact that she has not ‘left’ at all. Any words not quoted directly from her blog were my interpretation based on Tom Johnson’s post and the contents are not to be attributed to Julie herself.

---------------------------

Scott pointed out a word of wisdom to me: “TechComms professionals should consider how having real-time analytics and unique IDs on every piece of content they create affects their process and measurements.” Seeing how content is used, shared, and consumed can help optimise and prioritise content and tasks. Why was this procedure shared or “favourited” fifty times, and this one twice?

What does that say about the content, or even the product and its design?

^{For more, see: http://lessworkmoreflow.blogspot.com/2011/01/social-media-and-super-role-of.html}

If you don’t have public facing documentation, what about socially enabling the intranet or secure customer extranet so that key clients, or your hundreds of support, services and engineering colleagues can give you feedback after the content goes live? Imagine. Well, we have the technology! These are the same SMEs who are always ignoring your requests for feedback and reviews before content release. Post-launch is not too late to fix things in the socially enabled web world.

But, TechComms aren’t the only group of Communications and Content folks mired in the past. We all are. If we’re only on the edge of major change with a clearly visible future, then we are all, ipso facto, living the past.

Is MarComms Mired in the Past? Hell Yeah.

But I’d say less so.

The web is fast and fickle.

Web-oriented, and Marketing-oriented folks are ok with that. They’re ready to adopt whatever’s hot, leave behind what is not, and are generally vision-oriented, not detail oriented. In the Archipelago of Internet Marketing*, they quite enjoy the fluid flux and flow of web work and the instant gratification of metrics and analytics. It’s all a bit more easy-going on Ze Islands! Basically, they are committed to brand and see it as their responsibility to root out all threats to its global domination. If that includes support and technical content, so be it.

^{*See the first post in the series.}

That said, there’s definitively lots of ‘mired in the past’ thinking. Often an Internet Marketing consultant comes in, maybe with their freshly minted Content Strategist passport, and is asked to look at a business problem. This involves the audiences, the workflows and of course the content. What are we giving these people? Too often we’ll consider these issues with a marketing or brand bias, because of our backgrounds.

Content can get neglected, or it’s assumed that needed content can come from the ‘usual’ content sources. Content that comes from deeper in the organisation (for example, technical content) is the harder content to get, and therefore the easiest content to neglect.

If the content the people want is coming from technical communicators, then we have to find a way to deliver that isn’t shoving up a forum and a bunch of hard-to-index, hard-to-share PDFs on the site and calling it a ‘Knowledge and Support Centre’.

I am still hearing a lot of agencies and consultants on the web-focussed side saying “My customer just wants to launch a website. They don’t want me complicating their lives”. Why should they change when the market is not asking for change? How can you know how much more effective you can be if you don’t have other companies to benchmark yourself against?

Each consultant or software vendor is being engaged by one contact, with his or her own agenda, for his or her own department within the enterprise. Those individuals or teams are not pushing for integration the way they should be.

The true work of Content Strategy – as a field – is not done until that market mentality changes, and organisations are asking for unified, integrated content experiences for their customers.

A Glimpse at the Future

So, what does it look like when marketing and technical mentalities collaborate? Here’s just one example (I’d like to see more in the comments from all of you).

Firefox has overtaken Internet Explorer as the world’s leading Internet Browser. Look at the help content on their Sumo (Support Mozilla) site. It’s something any communicator could love. It’s engaging, aesthetic, re-enforces brand values and is tuned for the audience.

Note the stark contrast with a traditional manual or online help layout and feel.
Take this example of their help text (from the first link “How to set the home page”):

“Setting your home page in Firefox is easy. Can't decide on just one page? No problem. Firefox lets you set a group of websites as your home page.”

Friendly, chatty, and although it’s direct and to the point, has some “unnecessary” words like “Can’t decide on just one page?” that are there to connect to the user. This combination of community forum, support, and technical documentation into a single platform has enabled technical content to be tracked and measured en masse, but also by the individual author on their specific contributions. This is truly the best of all worlds.

All this content is volunteer generated. Content professionals spend so long talking about how we should speak to users, this is an example of the users showing us exactly how they want to be spoken to.

Part of what motivated this revolution in approach was: “Firefox quickly went from an early-adopters’ browser for the tech savvy (not because Firefox was hard to use, but because early adopters tend to have an affinity with technology) to a mainstream browser used by everyone.” They weren’t appealing to geeks anymore, and had to take on some slick marketing-esque techniques to make things work for the mainstream.

This line from their “Scope” topic discussing Sumo sums up the connection between content of this type, and revenue nicely:

“Firefox is one of the rare and probably the only open source project of this magnitude that has a business model. More Firefox users = More money for Firefox.”

They’ve embraced social technical content, with an aim to improve experience and revenues, and they have the metrics to prove it was a success.

To some extent, this is like gamification - i.e. rewarding positive acts with "points", levels and social recognition among peers.

Firefox are of course piping their support out through Twitter and Facebook as well.

^{For more see: http://blog.mozilla.com/sumo/2009/03/30/the-road-to-sumo-in-retrospect/}

People today (ask everyone you know who doesn’t know you’re a tech author) want to type a few words into a web page and be gratified ASAP. But, can every product be supported by online social platforms, or Twitter and Facebook specifically? No. Heck, some products still need printed manuals, because that’s the nature of their business context. Every communicator needs to explore how some new interaction models apply to their users and context, and assess if they’re still delivering the best possible communication service.

Do all products even need “technical content”? No. I’ve never read a manual for a piece of clothing, or a hotel package, but some of the websites that sold them to me might need some good guidance information to make the usable. Technical Communications aren’t just the failure of good design. Don’t think of them as a recourse, but as an asset.

In the next and final chapter, we wrap up and I solicit those exceptions that prove the rule*.

*Don’t you just love that expression? So delightfully nonsensical…

See also:

When Content Strategies Collide Pt 4: Enabling vs. Persuasive Content

2011-04-21T09:18:00.000+02:00

Part 4 of my post comparing Marketing Content Strategy vs. Technical Communication Content Strategy. A love letter to the community and a petition that yes, we can all just get along… even if we have several valid and deeply rooted differences.

We’ve started with the World of Content: the virtual geographic landscape where content flows like water through various channels and lines, digital and otherwise. Then the customer – the one who suffers our divide, and then looked at the nature of what separates us.

Now going into the cultural differences and ‘geographic’ differences between marketing and technical content strategy.

Cultural Divide

Supporting vs. Leading, Proven and Familiar vs. New and Sexy…

As far as I’m concerned, the most powerful thing that divides the content world is simple: “persuasive” vs. “enabling” content. Everything from the most technical – technical data specifications – to the most persuasive – ad copy, is all content that touches the customer. So you have:

Persuasive – Content that leads the customer to your goals – the usual goal is that they buy stuff, or, promote your brand so that their peers buy stuff. When planning and creating this content there’s lots of talk of brand messages, engaging with the brand, calls to action, conversion rates, and so on. It’s front-line web pages, mailer content, ad copy, brochure copy, and the like.
Enabling – Content that supports the customer in their goals. Here we’ve got manuals, tech specs, help, forums, self-serve support materials.

^{I also discuss this on a podcast on Idwratherbewriting.com}

Again, when these two content areas aren’t in synch, you get negatively impacted customer experience. No one in the World of Content wants the content consumers to have a bad experience.

Rahel put it very well on her blog:

I would argue that, despite the perception that websites consist of marketing content, for many sites, the marketing content is only the top layer – the icing on the cake, and what supports that top layer is a substantial amount of technical content – the cake itself.

^{Image: Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Note: Nerd that I am, I took 45 minutes to choose this cake. I like it because the icing layer also shares content with the cake layers below, just more pretty and glossy-like. : D}

That technical content is often far more valuable to the corporate or product brand than the persuasive content. In doing user research for one client in particular, a manufacturer of power generators and inverters, I saw how guys used their site. Consistently, they would bypass all of the marketing material and go right for the specs. (Of course, before the site revamp, a lot of the specs were missing or buried in a PDF in some obscure area of the site…)”

Andrew Bredenkamp, CEO of acrolinx – a product that has been very successful in major TechComms organisations helping people control their language, keep to a corporate terminology base and monitor style and writing, was recently blogging about how all these things apply to web marketing’s baby: SEO.

…what was most interesting talking to people in the Marketing space, and especially SEO, was how familiar the issues were to me. I kept hearing words like “shared vocabulary”, “establishing brand voice and style”, and *everyone* was talking about keywords and keyword research.

So, same tools, same drivers, different application and different content professionals benefiting. Web marketing folks: think about it. You might have already bought something in your organisation that helps you automatically police style and word usage on your website, or many other things you’re looking to do but don’t know how.

Generally, there’s divisive attitudes about new technologies and content channels. For example, XML and DITA are often considered scary, “techie” and complex by the web marketing world, whereas Social Media is often, unfortunately, considered frivolous and irrelevant by the TechComms world.

^{Related article on social media and TechComms available here.}

Geography

MarComms and TechComms generally exist on different branches of the org chart and generally, in the product life cycle. Marketing kicks into gear mostly late, when there’s something they can start to make noise about. TechComms wants to be integrated as early as possible into the product development cycle. To have the content ready for launch, they need lots of warning and lead time.

I’m going to stretch my analogy a bit here and include some real geography and another continental crash: the one of east meets west. The western world is hotly debating what will happen when Asia “hits”, and global competition ratchets up several notches.

For MarComms, we all keep getting reminded that the west will need to compete on service and brand, as price and even product quality can be duplicated more easily. TechComms is an asset here. By integrating processes with the other organisations, you have:

Keyword rich information (it’s all about the product and related ideas)
Content that many customers really, really want
Content that helps do things like seed forums and that can sit side-by-side with user generated content
A differentiator that supports your after sales experience, and therefore customer experience and brand

If TechComms provides you content that solves users’ problems, and other users can see that, share it, and help their friends solve their problems, then you’re cultivating happier customers.

For TechComms, globalisation REALLY matters

I live in Spain. I buy far more products than I used to that are made in countries where English isn’t the native language. As globalisation increases, I’m going to get even more clunky and/or badly translated manuals under my nose than before (the current crop are often hilarious). As a result, my inclination to bother even opening them to check if that particular company delivers good content is going to get smaller and smaller.

We’ve been begrudgingly discussing the comment “No one wants to read the manual” for years. Add the content of a new, non-native English, non-EU economy’s to the landscape. Now they REALLY don’t want to! At least not in its traditional manual/help format.

Is it safe to assume all content created abroad will be poor? Absolutely not, but with the number of companies scrambling to get involved, the chances of content being left behind are high.

Do any of you have any experience with trying to bridge the timezones and language barriers with content? I’d be interested in hearing anecdotes and approaches. Happy to compare notes.

Next post we’ll go into the question: Is TechComms mired in the past? Is MarComms? And we’ll look at what the future could look like.

When Content Strategies Collide Pt 3: War. Huh! What is it Good For?

2011-04-16T18:12:00.001+02:00

This is Part 3 “When Content Strategies Collide – MarComms vs. TechComms”.
Today we’ll look at how the gap between communications departments (specifically Technical and Marketing) persists despite the damage to customer experience.

See also:

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Like many neighbouring nations, we get very excited about our little differences instead of focussing on our big picture commonalities. In my mind, the usual suspects that separate people are:

Language
Culture
Geography

Let’s take a look at these areas and the impact they have on the people we’re all in the end working for: the customer aka, the content consumer.

Language: We’re All “Content Professionals”

Whatever it says on your business card – your passport in the world of content – we have many words we share. We all talk about:

Consistency of…
- Language
- Style
- Structure
- user-orientation
- taxonomy / metadata
Localisation
Customer-specific content and understanding what the customer wants or needs
Content management
Content audits
and now of course, Content Strategy.

Where we differ is in some of the details. MarComs and Tech Comm are the way that the organisation communicates with the outside world. The only other “Communications” group is “Business Communications” Take this list of words and see how many terms hit home with you:

Brand Values / Brand Management	XML	Information Architecture
Social Media	DITA	CX
Socially Enabled	CCMS	Personas
SEO	CMS	UX
Single Sourcing	Context Sensitive	Monetised
Syndicated	Reusable	Modular
Messaging	Style guide	Structural Templates
Analytics / Metrics	ROI	Content Modelling

I read Kristina Halvorson’s “Content Strategy for the Web” and in the margins of each page put little markers about whether the statements and language were applicable and understandable off the web and outside the marketing team. My markers indicated three things: “Yes (this idea is applicable off the web)”, “No”, “Maybe”, and “Not usually, but it should be!”

There were lots of each category, but the “No” items were in the vast minority, i.e., most content best practices don’t differ between channels. Let’s take an example which any content professional can immediately understand (or should):

“If your CMS metadata is inconsistent or poorly managed, your content’s going to pile up, and information will be buried. You’ll also end up creating redundant content, waste money on inefficient workflow, and generally rack up unnecessary content-related expenses and headaches.”

And then a bit that would leave other content professionals making a sort of slanty grimace:

“During the analysis phases, you collected all of your messages – the pieces of information you want the user to learn or the user wants to see. In the content strategy phases, you make recommendations about how the messages all work together to form useful, usable, enjoyable web content.”

So, we share some words, but not all, and those we do, we don’t always mean the same things by them. “Messages”, “Messaging”, “Messaging hierarchy” are all pretty marketing-specific for those in other departments. When defined as “the pieces of information you want the user to learn or the user wants to see”, then it’s more relatable. It’s not that different.

People outside the web team get shocked and offended by quotes like:

“The content strategist may collaborate closely with a web editor or web writer to oversee the creation, revision, and approval of all required content. In the absence of a web editor or writer, the content strategist may also be called upon to create all necessary content.”

... “All”?

Come again?

Naturally anyone in the Land of Tech Comm would be hurt and dismayed to hear that “all” content on the website, which probably includes tens of thousands of their words in HTML Help, How-To, FAQ, Release Note, and downloadable PDF form, and more, was being so totally left out of Content Strategy thinking.

I think it’s obvious, however, that Kristina, or any leading web content strategist saying something like this is talking about the new and website-specific words, probably in the context of only the web project in question. There are loads of words which only exist on the web and serve to gel together, relate, enhance, and support all the other content created by other sources that needs to go public via online channels.

So… chill.

In Part 4 we’ll go on to discuss the Cultural divide – the different way that MarComms and TechComms tick.

See also:

When Content Strategies Collide Pt 2: Customer Impact

2011-04-11T15:15:00.001+02:00

In my last post, I left off with my description of the two major continents in the World of Content:

“The Archipelago of Internet Marketing”
“The Land of TechComms (and a bit of Training)”

Here’s some links to all the posts if you haven't read them:

Today there’s a gap between them, but the two continents are starting to collide and create some topographical ruffles in the process. Here we look a bit more at some names and faces from the populations and why this is an issue for the enterprise.
This was all born of my thinking when coming up with the theme for the Congility 2011 Conference in the UK this May.

The Lay of the Land And The Cloud

Wherever you picture yourself on this Communications landscape, the word wide web flows around and between us all like water. As they say, “location, location, location”. Everyone – inside and outside any organisation – can see the web and (theoretically) find the information on it.
On the web you can even package up bits of content and ship them stuck to other bits (related items, banner ads, pop-ups), to make them even more “findable”. Now in the age of social media, every single man, woman, and especially child is throwing their work into the growth of web’s wealth of information and the findability of that information.
This creates a friction along the coast as the Archipelago of Internet Marketing and Land of TechComms start to merge, pushed on, inexorably, by the underlying market forces.
Take for example some other posts from both sides of Web Content / Technical Content fence:
Kristina Havlorson’s posted “Why I Wrote Content Strategy FOR THE WEB” recently regarding her book and why the title and examples therein focussed on the web. On that post she’s provided further contextual links, and calls it a source of “serious frustration”. In the end, I’d say she’s not as webby as you might think, and she and her book are not to be dismissed by any content professional.
Kristina links her post to one by Rahel Bailie. Several conversations with Rahel and Rahel’s blogs regarding Content Strategy were further dominos leading up to this article.
There was also some feather ruffling in the blogosphere (see 18:19 18/05/2011 Update below for new information and correction on this) caused by notable blogger and Content Professional Julie Norris announcing she was leaving technical communications and transitioning into something more in the UX and social-media related fields (Here’s a post where TechComms blogger Tom Johnson then reacted to that). Almost as an aside in her announcement she was leaving TechComms, she dropped, grenade-like, the comment that TechComms was ‘mired in the past’.
Bam!
I, unfortunately, can’t quote directly or even link to it because the original post, its update notes, and even a follow-up post, have all been (tragically) removed from Julie’s blog. The evidence can be now most easily found via Tom Johnson’s blog “Technical Communication Stuck in the Past?”

So – we can see the wrinkles forming the landscape already. Let’s hope that like when real tectonic plates crash, it forces the horizon skyward, and everyone’s game will be raised. But why is this happening, and possibly more importantly, what is impact?

---------------------------

UPDATE (18:19 18/05/2011):

Julie has commented on this post and part 5 to point out an error. Because I was not able to access her blog directly, I was left with the misinterpretation that she had in fact ‘left’ TechComms for pastures new. The truth was that was refocusing her blog away from TechComms, but she is today and will continue to be a Technical Communications practitioner. I have left the rest of the blog as was, because the key point is the reaction that the mere idea caused. At Julie’s request I have included this point of fact that she has NOT ‘left’ at all. Any words not quoted directly from her blog were my interpretation based on Tom Johnson’s post and the contents are not to be attributed to Julie herself.

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The Point of Impact – The Customer’s Doorstep

I’m very interested in the rift* between those in the content industry who are generally taking a holistic approach, integrating across the borders, and those who keep to their ‘nationalities’.
^{* For more on TechComms rift see Sarah O’Keefe’s blog on 2011 predictions: http://www.scriptorium.com/2011/01/2011-predictions-for-technical-communication/}
This second rift is more important because of the victims: the customers. Oh please, won’t someone think of the customers! My most popular blog post to date was all about how fragmentation and division inside the organisation create fragmentation in our content and our communications. The result: customer experience suffers.

^{Every business is busy, busy, busy, especially successful ones. BUT, when you’re too busy working harder to work smarter, the customer is the one who waits in frustration while you try to get your act together.}
^{http://www.flickr.com/photos/failpost/3758092256/}
I recently had calls with three companies (in one week!) who had:

unified their writing style, structural and metadata guidelines
implemented a content management system
set up standards and collaboration across business units
moved to a modular XML-based standard (DITA, for their technical content)

And by doing so had realised all sorts of great benefits. What were we talking about on the call? The fact that in the end, what they had done was set up a very efficient, collaborative silo of technical content that was isolated from the rest of the content in training, engineering, presales and marketing. Terminology, Language, Labelling/Taxonomy, Metadata, even things as important as product names, were not supported with the solutions implemented.
Many of the software vendors and even many consultants and experts only make this worse. Each of these organisations had Web CMS systems in place, but they weren’t integrated neither in process nor in software. Software vendors know that trying to bridge a departmental gap is only going to complicate and therefore lengthen their sales cycle. That ain’t gonna happen. So they “give the people what they want”.
However, it’s the customers who have navigate through all our output, regardless of source department, so the more rifts there are in our thinking and processes the more rifts they’ll have to traverse to get what they want. That’s annoying!
Today, the customer wants us to integrate. They want us to work together to deliver the value-added, clear, CONCISE*, factual information about products and services. Most marketers already know that today the more you appear to be trying to sell, the less affective, but haven’t got a plan yet as to how they’re realistically going to keep product information fresh, available and digestible.
Check out The (ever-brilliant) Oatmeal:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/sell_generation
There you have it.
In Part 3 we deep-dive into why we can’t get along. Why does the rift persist?
_{*Unlike my blog posts…}

See also:

Ann Rockley and Rahel Bailie Congility 2011 Podcasts

2011-04-08T15:57:00.001+02:00

As promised – here are the two Featured Speaker podcasts for Congility 2011 where I interview two major players in the content industry.

Both are delivering workshops and featured presentations at Congility 2011.

Ann Rockley

Ann Rockley, President of The Rockley Group, Inc. is interviewed by Noz Urbina, Mekon Consultant and Congility Conference Chairperson.

Sometimes known as the "mother" of content strategy, Ann introduced the concept in 2003 with her best-selling book "Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy".

We talk about:

Unifying content strategies across silos like technical communications, marketing, support and more
The role of Darwin Information Typing Architecture and content consistency
How content affects the customer experience
Speaking with a single voice to multiple audiences.

Watch Ann Rockley’s video podcast (8 min)

Rahel Anne Bailie

Rahel Bailie, Principal of Intentional Design, has many years of experience in the areas of content development and user experience environments, including environments producing localized and/or internationalized content.

Rahel has been making waves in the Content Strategy community as of late and in European circles was recently the Keynote speaker of the Content Strategy themed STC France chapter event.

We talk about:

Knowledge vs. Data and Information
Combining and recombining content to create context (e.g. in a mash-up)
How all content today - technical, marketing, commercial and user generated - is becoming a unified body of 'presales' content
How standards help content converge for better experiences for customers
"Big picture" content strategy

Watch Rahel Anne Bailie’s video podcast (6.5 min)

When Content Strategies Collide: Marketing versus Technical Communication

2011-04-08T15:15:00.003+02:00

We’re in an intensely exciting time now in “the World of Content”. Content Strategy and Social Media are the buzzwords on everyone’s lips. Like any new and game-changing hot-button, there’s as much debate about what we’re even talking about as there is about why it’s important, or what we should do about it.

_{See a discussion on
what Content Strategy is on the CS Group on LinkedIn}

This multi-part blog is going to take a look at how Content Strategy is affecting the ‘Word of Content’ and the world of the content professional.

By the time I’m done I'll have concluded that both Marketing and Technical Communication are both mired in the past – and probably annoyed and offended some people in the process for which I apologize in advance. I won’t be saying that that I’ve got the magic 100% effective snake-oil/silver-bullet-salve to fix it all but hopefully I’ll have gotten some discussion started about what potential solutions could and should be.

Whatever type of content-related work you do, be it Content Strategist, Tech Writer, Brand Manager, UX, IA, Web Writer, Content Manager, etc., this blog’s for you.

Here in part one we look at the fact that we’re seeing the early impact-zone wrinkles of a bigger collision to come: I think what we’re going to see is a unifying and blurring of the content functions around an organisation. There will be increased collaboration, re-titling of staff, new services offerings from traditional teams/consultancies/agencies aimed towards closing the loops in and outside the organisation itself.

We’ve been talking about content standards unification and integration for decades now, but now, with the recognition of Content Strategy, we have the catalyst for change.

Why? What difference does CS make?

Because once you really start to think of content itself as a strategic asset, and put a well conceived strategy together, our artificial traditional separations need to come down to support the business’s true goals.

To put it another way, you can’t serve customers best interests while maintaining high walls between the communications and content-centric parts of your operation. Ergo, they’re going to start to integrate. This will delight some and horrify and confuse others.

Content Strategy as a discipline is generally focussed around content that is for communicating. There are two main Communications areas in the average enterprise. On one side, you’ve got MarComms, where Content Strategy concerned mainly with the public web, and websites and closing the loop with brand management and the sales cycle. On the other side, TechComms is working to close the loop with product development, training, the support lifecycle, and training. Traditionally, they’ve scuffled over the word “content”, approaching it with different personalities, tools, budgets, departments and sometimes perceived goals.

This blog addresses major topographic changes coming in the World of Content, integration of silos, and the customer experience. The theme of the Congility 2011 Conference, May 24-26th, is “Content Integration” and its effect on customers. It, and this post, will focus on how the work of all of us as content professionals is similar in important ways and would benefit from increased collaboration. Our efforts should seek to close the loops in the customer lifecycle, user experience, user interaction design, and often benefit from similar processes, skill-sets and even underlying tools and technology.

The World of Content, Communication and Content Strategy

As fast moving as the details are, ask anyone who’s been specialising here in the World of Content for 10 or more years, and they’ll likely tell you that in fact, in many ways, it moves at a tectonic pace.
The chasm of time between a methodology or technology’s introduction and its going truly mainstream can be huge. There are still jaded old SGML folks hollering, “I told you so! In 1970! Without us there’d be no web!” from their dusky digital retirement homes. And they’re right too. Content Strategy is by no means new. What is new is the recognition it’s receiving, and the effect it’s starting to have.

_{Some content professionals really like to think before they cross
the chasm.}

I see it as two Continents of Content colliding right now, in “the World of Content”. I’ve dubbed the continents:

“The Archipelago of Internet Marketing”: Not really a unified landmass, but more of a well connected set of large islands peopled by Web Copy Writers, Web Editors, User Experience Designers, Brand Strategists, Marketing Managers, and the rest. It’s enjoyed a rich past of big budgets, booms and bubbles (there was a .com burst, but it hardly killed the internet, now did it?), its wealth is fed by of the most valuable of natural resources in the content world: visibility.
“The Land of TechComms (and a bit of Training)”: Peopled by robust and hearty breed, they’ve put up with neglect, starvation, apathy, segregation, misunderstanding, and sometimes commoditization to a point that resembles slavery. I picture the land without a lot of trees, considering all the printed paper that gets used up...

Along the borders of both nations, there are those that make their living crossing back and forth across the gaps – consultants like to live here. Generally the disciplines of Information Architecture, Content Modelling, Minimalist Writing, Taxonomy, etc. are all on the borders, but generally only familiar to the more forward thinking of Tech Communicators.

Inland on each, you have those who are more known for their work in their own nations, like JoAnn Hackos in very forward thinking TechComms, Training and Support material, and Kristina Halvorson for the Web.

But… so what? It’s always been this way…

Related posts:

In Part 2, we’ll look at the differences between these worlds and why the separation between them is creating problems for even the most forward thinking of organisations.

Update – since the time of authoring, the recent tragic situation in Japan has developed. Of course no insensitivity or relationship to that situation is intended or implied. I debated rewriting the entire piece to remove the metaphor, but that also seemed inappropriate.

See also:

Congility S1000D – May 24th

2011-04-07T17:45:00.003+02:00

S1000D is a sufficiently focussed and sufficiently important area of structured content and dynamic publishing that we gave it its own day at Congility 2011.

It’s the first dedicated S1000D event to hit the UK since 2003!

If you’re in Aerospace and Defense documentation, Military documentation or various other heavy manufacturing and safety-intensive areas of technical communications, S1000D is the event for you.

It’s in parallel to the Congility 2011 workshops, so you have to choose, but you can get great deals on attending both conferences for one price.

A Quick Overview

Congility S1000D, London May 24, 2011 is the UK event for anyone that is currently needing to produce, evaluate or implement S1000D.

The one day event will cover a broad range of topics appropriate to your objectives and current level of understanding. Topics include S1000D and the ASD suite of specs, Business Rules, the Software Selection process, addressing legacy data, and more.

Fees have been subsidised by our sponsors to encourage easy access and attendance by Aerospace and Defence organisations. Register early to save your spot!

http://www.congility.com/s1000d

Speaker Highlights

Speakers from A&D house-hold names will be there, like:

Horst Luetzelberger from EADS Cassidian
Ian Proctor from CDG, a Boeing Company
Mike Day from Rolls-Royce Defence Aerospace
and many more!

Pre- Congility Conference Podcast on I’d Rather Be Writing

2011-04-07T17:15:00.002+02:00

3 podcasts recorded this week: Ann Rockley, Rahel Bailie, and me. Running an event like Congility is really fascinating. Most interesting in the industry buzz has been seeing how we seem to have struck a chord with the ‘Content Agility’ concept, and have seen a sudden spike in people referring to content that is ‘agile’ on other events, blogs and websites.

Check out my podcast here (audio only) and watch this space for quick (<10 min) video podcasts from both Ann and Rahel.

“Podcast: Content Strategy and Agility, with Noz Urbina”

Download mp3

Congility Speaker Insights – Discuss!

To make this year's conference more interactive and try to blunt the ‘cutting edge’ a little, we asked speakers:

Many of the answers give food for thought and nail this year’s message right on the head.

Disagree? Have at them with the feedback features.

Andrew Bredenkamp signing up for Congility Talk

2011-03-02T11:46:00.007+01:00

I've just been chatting with Andrew Bredenkamp (CEO, acrolinx) about Congility 2011 and his talk submission.

Of course all the speaker interviews are interesting, but the session with Andrew was particularly so because of how deeply he 'gets' where Congility is trying to go.

If you're going to:

reuse
sell
be found
make content consumable and understandable on the first read
localise/translate
leverage the crowd and (UGC) user generated content

online or offline, then content consistency and the ability to mine large data sets for key patterns is vital. So is attacking the issue across the customer life cycle, and therefore, across the content life cycle.

The content industry is moving so fast that those who can understand where it is are hard to come by. Those that can articulate a clear and well supported vision of where it's going are even rarer. As such, I'm incredibly pleased to have Andrew and so many other top-quality speakers submit, and look forward to having him engage and interact with the Congility audience.

Social Media and The Super-Role of the Technical Communicator

2011-01-13T15:52:00.003+01:00

NOTE: This is a re-publishing of a Social Media and Technical Communcations piece that Adobe requested I put together for a special supplement to the UK's Communicator Magazine (http://www.istc.org.uk/). It was originally released in print only in mid-2010. I was pleased to be selected to introduce the issues in the supplement.

The contributors were David Farbey, Gordon McLean from Sword Ciboodle, RJ Jaquez of Adobe, and myself.

Enjoy!

On a recent discussion in the ISTC Yahoo! Group, a Technical Communicator compared Social Media’s significance to his profession as being as useful as a pogo stick or skateboard. In other words, he stated Social Media has no significance to Technical Communications at all.

There is a delicious irony here, in that this particular Technical Communicator posted this theory in an online web forum (a prime example of Social Media) which was created by and for his profession’s community. As evidenced here, it is clear that Social Media can play an extremely important role for technical communicators, enabling them to collaborate on how they guide and direct the strategy of their organisation’s content.

It is a widely-held belief that Social Media is the biggest thing to hit communication since the advent of the internet. Globally, communications are still experiencing the tectonic shifts, but these are only the warnings of the earthquake that is to come. The impact, now and in future, means that users are integrating social media and the ‘old-fashioned’ internet so fast and so deeply that they are starting to blur. Social Media is not just the hot new thing being utilised by the Marketing department to reach audiences; it is bringing back to the fore the forgotten art of conducting business with a two-way conversation between shop and customer. If an organisation isn’t engaging with and guiding this conversation, it will be overwhelmed by it, and most likely, in a negative way.

Let’s tie that into what I’m going to call the ‘super-role’ of the Technical Communicator: to assist the user in getting the best use out of the product or service their company provides. This extends throughout the product lifecycle from pre-sales evaluation content, to repeat business when the client (hopefully) re-invests in a relationship with your organisation because of the great experience they had last time.

Datasheets, manuals, help, knowledge bases and learning/training materials all affect this experience, and to achieve the ‘super-role’, the Technical Communicator attempts to:

understand how, where and why different users need content
become an expert in creating and managing content to meet these needs
deliver content in the correct context, structure, format and language across all the channels in which the user expects it

Like all megatrends, the Social Media explosion is the sum of various trends that have been building for a while, some since the first pre-internet Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs). In 2009, digital marketing intelligence agency Comscore stated that “social networking attracts three quarters of European internet users [15 and over]” – this means that 75% of all people in Europe using the web engage in Social Media. Although teenagers comprise only a small slice of the sample group, as they are tomorrow’s consumers, their impact is still weighted heavily. These results show there has already been a monumental impact on how and why people collectively access online information.

^{Comscore report: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/2/Social_Networking_Spain/(language)/eng-US}

Social Media Facts

Social Media is not just for socialising. A quick internet search shows that most any organisation you can think of has content (video, blog, articles, etc.) posted on the internet from its employees. It is therefore fair to say that the business perspective and presence is now a key part of what we call “Social Media”.
Marketing departments no longer own web communications. As more documentation and training material is posted online (both in textual and media/video formats), or gets embedded directly into application interfaces, there is a greater need to include technical information within an overall corporate web strategy. I’m sure you’ll have noticed that more often than not, pressing the F1 key takes us to a live, hosted website instead of to an HTML file or CHM file, so even our definition of ‘electronic’ is changing. A corporate web strategy will invariably create a technological requirement for a global web server, which will force the integration of goals and cooperation between Marketing and IT and various content-generating departments. This is no longer the remit for Fortune 5000 organisations only – small to medium-sized businesses are addressing this issue as well.
Social Media isn’t necessarily “public”. Many Technical Communicators suffer from inconsistent, out-of-date or poor access to product knowledge within their organisation. Social Media can improve this because by its very nature, the organisation is itself a ‘community’. Therefore, the collaborative aspects of Social Media can all apply across teams, geographies or departments. For example, Technical Communicators can engage in the WIKIs and blogs utilised by their Software and R&D Departments. These can be fantastic content lifecycle tools which can be used as a product knowledge source*. Large organisations may even have Subject Matter Expert blogs (public web or internal) to view. From the public space, Technical Communicators can monitor user blogs and Twitter streams to learn the issues which users are having with their product directly.

^{Of course, they can also be badly implemented, poorly organised and a waste of time}
Many large organisations are integrating Social Media functions directly into their product help. Microsoft has been at it for nearly a decade with their more technical products, bringing programmer blogs and communities into its help and knowledge base applications. Adobe Creative Suite 3 brought link management and user communications into their online help, and in CS4 and the Technical Communications Suite, they’ve implemented an AIR application which enables Social Media posts to be hosted on an information platform, enabling a community of Adobe users to generate their own media which links directly with the help, and thus forms an extended part of it.
^{http://www.adobe.com/community/publishing/}
People have integrated the concept of Search into their core brain functionality, using Google before thinking. Consider: users who type URLs into Google instead of into their browser’s address bar; users who employ Google as a spell checker; and users who haven’t consulted a paper map in the past 5 years.
The all-time classic: people don’t want to read manuals. Thanks to Social Media, users can and are viewing video tutorials contributed by other users as another way to avoid picking up the manual.
Organisations of all kinds are investing heavily in Social Media as a continuing conversation channel with their prospects and customers via different types of this technology (blogging, WIKIs, microblogging, forums, video, etc). The Society for New Communications Research just published a report discussing the incredible success of the by-product of this phenomenon: revenue-rich online advertising. This reinforces just how seriously the market considers these information platforms.
^{http://sncr.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/new-influencers-study.pdf}
2 of the top 3^[1] (Facebook and YouTube, after Google) and 4 out of the top 10 most used sites on the internet are social media/networking sites. Created as recently as July, 2006, Twitter has shot to 14^th on the list and continues to rise. Continuously innovative, Google has recently created the ultimate Social Media extension to search, the “SideWiki^[2]”, where even after you’ve searched and found a page – any page, anywhere^[3] – Google users can comment on and extend the site being viewed.
_{[1] UPDATE: As of writing these numbers have changed. Twitter is now in the top 10, as predicted! Ha! The other two social media sites I was talking about were WIKIpedia and Blogger.com: http://www.alexa.com/topsites}

^{[2] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/help-and-learn-from-others-as-you.html}

^{[3] Google has opted to “turn off” SideWiki functions for pornography or otherwise sexually explicit sites, and unfortunately I think, have made it (or have only been able to make it) available only to users of their Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer.}

If taken individually, these items can seem more or less trivial or arguable, but what we’re seeing is a cumulative phenomenon and it must be interpreted that way. Social Media technologies are a primary connection between the customer and the business.

The Importance of (and to) Content Strategy

So, Social Media is big and it’s here to stay. To a market already struggling to deliver to multiple channels, it presents a whole collection of new channels, and worse yet, they’re moving and changing faster than we’ve ever seen publishing channels move. To tackle multiple channels, you have to work smarter, not harder. This means creating content which is flexible in structure so that it can be utilised in multiple contexts; using a format-neutral content storage method to allow for different viewing formats; and leveraging reuse so that your content can be quickly updated when necessary across all channels. All of these factors underline the importance of taking a very strategic approach to content, not a deliverable- or document-based approach. A successful content strategy is something you develop and maintain holistically, above and apart from specific projects and deadlines, and overarches all content processes being delivered to all channels. It should take the following into account:

Your content sources: the product, internal and external Subject Matter Experts, end users, yourself and your fellow professional communicators
Your content consumers: internal and external people who need content to do their jobs
Your content constraints: localisation/translation, accessibility, usability, industry standards, corporate standards, branding guidelines, etc.
The product and content lifecycles: all the different touch points between the players listed above across time

Embrace Your Super-Role

It’s a contradiction to think you can fulfil the role of the Technical Communicator, which includes understanding the user information needs and trends, and yet dismiss Social Media as the latest technological pogo stick going. User expectations have changed, the conversations are raging, and you need to participate to know what’s being said and how you’re going to need to speak in the future if you want to be heard.

Drowning Your Audience in Content

2010-12-09T15:30:00.016+01:00

^{Image - treehugger.com}
The National Health Service just got caught red-handed doing what way too many companies do every day:

“The NHS spends up to £86m a year on thousands of websites that are difficult to find, badly designed and irrelevant to patient needs, according to a leaked government report.”

This article made me dust off my biggest jaded, bitter sigh. It’s like a macrocosm example of what happens both in private enterprises and not-for-profit organisations all the time.

With Content Strategy featuring high on the Congility track-list this year, and this year’s theme of “Content Integration”, I thought that the NHS article was a great example to illustrate what “Content Integration” actually means.

^{Full NHS article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/aug/04/nhs-websites-failing-patients}

Delivery Overload – Content Flowing All Around but Nary a Drop to Drink

^{Image - waterfall-wallpapers.com}

Time and time again I consult with organisations who seem to create new streams of content like water cascading across rocks. Every time the flow of information encounters an obstacle, it splits and creates a new smaller, weaker stream.

Companies struggle as it is getting different media like print and electronic formats, or even content for different product-lines, to jive together. Not only is the web a stream of content, it’s a relatively inexpensive one to set up new tributaries and sub-streams (if you only look at the short term costs), it’s easy to be seduced into creating websites all over the place.

There are legitimate reasons to maintain multiple websites, for example, an organisation with two clearly delineated brands with low audience overlap. For example, Aston Martin (http://www.astonmartin.com/) and Aston Martin Racing (http://www.astonmartinracing.com/).

They’re both Aston Martin, but the business models, content, products and customers are vastly different. For those interested in the main brand, right off the homepage you can get to the Racing sub-brand. It’s also easy to get back (although in my opinion the link back should be more obvious).
^{Mekon case-study on Aston-Martin}

Water-Logged Reasoning

A layer of NHS bureaucracy, represented by websites built by primary care trusts, foundation trusts and strategic health authorities, received "almost no recognition" from the public. "The question is raised why these sites were developed in the first instance," the report says.

However, there are thousands more professional websites than there are valid reasons for sites to exist. Here’s some of my favourite reasons I’ve actually had explained to me, with or without a straight face, some of them various times in different projects:

“That site exists because IT couldn’t figure out how to control access to the content if it was on the main site.”
“Our main site is marketing stuff and the other site is for our customers and technical content.”
“That site exists because it was a big project so we thought it deserved its own website.”
“No one around here really knows why it’s a separate site, but it’s been that way a while so we just leave it like that.”
“IT (or Marketing) didn’t have time to help us with our need so we just hired an agency and set this site up.”
“We could have done a common site but we didn’t realise that another department had one so similar already running.”

And my all-time fav:

“Our departmental management set up our own site because he/she doesn’t want any other departments telling us what to do”

Integrate Content - Let Them Quench Their Thirst

^{Image - thewaterdeliverycompany.com}

I said it in some recent posts, but I’ll say it again:

YOUR CUSTOMER DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOUR ORG CHART

The research also warned that poor websites mean "the confidence of the public in the NHS brand may be diminished". Patients wanted to see "one NHS" online rather than a proliferation of websites.

Most of these delivery channels just add to the issue of duplication and confusion that happens across other forms and formats of content. Content integration is about unifying process and standards in an organisation so that customers are presented information in a way that makes sense for them, not in the way that is patterned after the teams and departments that created it.

Inconsistencies in areas like these annoy customers (and staff who need the information) all to tiny little pieces, and dilute your brand:

How to do a task or process with your product or your company
How to communicate with your company
How to refer to or find things across your different sites, products, hardware, software, marketing, sales, user, or maintenance materials (in short: content modelling, structural and terminology issues)
What features are offered on some sites vs. others

Yes – even features can be annoying. For example, at the Online Information show last week, we were talking to one of the world’s largest publishers. They recently implemented ‘word wheels’ (like those drop-down lists of auto-complete text for your search-terms as you type in Google) on some of their online products. The keyword: some. They actually get calls to customer support from people saying, ‘You sold us access to this content, and some of it doesn’t have word wheels like our other content’. They would actually have had a better customer experience with no nifty function because they wouldn’t think some sites were ‘broken’. It’s a major organisation – they think – surely their back-end content platform was integrated such that navigation functions were consistent? Sure.

I don’t want to trash-talk anyone by name, so for an actual example I’ll pick on a company who I’ve said good things about in past, and has already sorted out the problem: SDL. SDL has gone on the acquisitions trail (warpath?) in recent years, snapping up four organisations that Mekon worked and implemented with prior to the acquisition (Idiom, Trisoft, XOpus and XyEnterprise). If you take Trisoft + XyEnteprise, you get SDL "XySoft". As a result, lots of little websites were born of these mergers, so for a while they had (all these neatly redirect to sdl.com today):

SDL totally get the problem and in fact asked me (informally) to contribute a telephone interview / usability review to their re-architecture efforts a while ago. Even at that point at least the sites basically looked the same, you just jumped around between them and couldn’t figure out how you got there or how to get back. Also, you have to sympathise. They have one of the valid reasons to be having this issue, albeit a temporary one: acquisitions and mergers. Integrating new companies is hard, and if you keep buying them up all the time, then there’s going to be a more or less constant job of integrating their existing presence.

A Wash-Up

Some points of consideration before you get dragged down by the content undertow and start drowning your people in content streams:

Separate customer or audience profiles / personas don’t necessarily mean separate sites.
Separate sites don’t mean different back-end architecture.
A sub-domain (adding a part before the main domain, e.g.: mail.google.com or maps.google.com) is better than a whole new domain.
Although you might think it’s ‘special treatment’ to give customers vs. other people (prospective customers) a new discrete domain with separate content, it can be annoying if you’ve not properly integrated the content and features. Existing customers are your best prospects, so don't annoy them making them jump back and forth between sites to interact with things they’ve not yet bought, or worse, linking back and forth because you’ve got some content in one site and not the other.
Separate sites are a breeding ground for (needlessly) inconsistent information architectures, terminology and navigation tools.
If you are going to have separate sites, have clear guidelines around when a new one should be created.
See if you can make internal staff use the same content sources as external users. If they stop using ‘back doors’ to find information, you’ll get loads (tidal waves!) of usability feedback (read: screaming and yelling) when things aren’t optimised for findability.

I’d love to hear your stories of navigation and content inconstancies. No need to name names, so feel free to air the details of the salmon-like upstream swimming lengths users have had to go through to get the content they want.

PS – Speaking of ‘findability’ – I’m becoming much more active on Twitter these days:

Cookin’ Up Some (XML) Content

2010-11-25T21:15:00.011+01:00

This post is a response to something on Tom Johnson’s blog – idratherbewriting.com (upon which I is be groovin’ regularly and I highly recommend).

On a recent post we got into a discussion regarding the use of XML. Naturally I was all over that. I felt really bad I talked so much but never addressed a direct question of Tom’s:

“Here’s what I am interested in with XML. How can I extract pages on a Mediawiki wiki and package them up into selective guides and then publish them in a book-like PDF format?”

I felt like I was ‘flooding’ the comments so I moved this over here.

I’m afraid I don’t know the specifics of getting content out of Mediawiki. I’ve never implemented nor have I reviewed it in depth. I can say that I doubt it’s simple. XML is not a format like others. It’s a meta-format. Saying something is XML is like saying a food is ‘French’ rather than saying it’s a ‘croissant’. You may know how to make French food generally, but that doesn’t mean you know how to bake, much less bake croissants. I’m sure there’s a better analogy than that, but that’s what I’ve got for now. So, you can’t just go to ‘XML’ anymore than you can make a ‘French meal’ without at some point nailing down exactly what recipe you’re going to be cooking up. Even DITA is somewhat flexible. You can go to DITA, but not all DITA files are equal. Like FrameMaker or Word with our without the judicious use of styles; same format, very different beast.

A fond memory of Paris, but god knows how they pulled it off!

The reason there’s no tool to do it is because there’s not much of a point. Like a machine that cooks for you, unless you’re specific in setting it up, the chances it’ll cook what you want are slim. What happens in practice is that people make a mapping from the Mediawiki (source) mark-up to the XML (target) mark-up that *they* want; as simple or as complex as their business case dictates. Once you’ve got the extraction routine in place, you’ll get an XML file to your specifications from whichever WIKI entries you like. You need a publishing tool chain set up to handle that file. If you don’t already have a system to publish your XML through, there’s not a lot of point in going generic XML. DITA is better in this regard.

DITA gets around this to a great degree by allowing you to use whatever DITA-compliant applications you want (there are far more generic DITA tools than XML tools). You could apply DITA filtering attributes turning certain content ‘on or off’ depending on your intended audience.

This might sound a bit opaque or vague – I’m not sure you’re existing level of XML knowledge. Unfortunately, you need a critical mass of XML understanding to intuit the details. Again, back to my cooking analogy, if you’ve mastered meat dishes and someone asks you how to cook a cheese soufflé, you might not be able to answer. If they asked you how to make salami, you might not be able to make them understand the response if they don’t already have a certain background.

Maybe I should have gone with music instead of cooking as my analogy? Anyway, unless you really had a recurring reason to do it, you’d (probably) not go through the trouble to do XML.

Industrialising content processes is highly beneficial, but you need a defined reason (a business case) that makes sense.

DITA/XML is an ‘industrialisation’ of content processes. You don’t set up a whole content strategy and governance process for something you’re only going to do once (unless that thing is a truly big undertaking). You don’t buy a 100-gallon mixing machine if you’re only going to use it once, you just get out 10 10-gallon spots and pull a few all-nighters. You don’t set an assembly line up if you want to make sculpture. Same for XML – it makes sense for things that are going to be used on a certain volume of content, or by people (or small teams) expert enough to handle every aspect themselves.

PS – Call for Speakers for Congility 2011 is still open!

Developing a Content Strategy

2010-10-13T10:39:00.003+02:00

This post is a redistribution of my recent article in Communicator Magazine on Developing a Content Strategy. It discusses how Content Strategy works best when approached with an open mind, following the wider scope of the content lifecycle, not trying to hammer into the shape of your departmental org-chart. It should address all incarnations of content, not any one output, channel or team.

This is somewhat slanted towards the Technical Communications audience that reads Communicator Magazine, but I'd only make minor adjustments or additions for a more marketing or 'web-based' audience when discussing Content Strategy.

I was very happy and honoured they chose it for the top spot on the cover articles list.
I'm eager for comments and thoughts here for via twitter.

The article:

Richard Truscott, one of Mekon's Content Strategy Audit clients, recently produced an article regarding his content journey discusses a methodical approach to revising and updating his organisation’s content strategy. Along the way he encountered many familiar pitfalls and hurdles, like the cultural impact of content process change, the departmental boundaries that may need to be crossed and a large number of tools and technologies to review in a reasonable amount of time.

He also found, as many other organisations do, that there are assets and useful best practices available in the content industry that he could learn and apply in his work. Richard looked at and used several available options:

DITA content - paired with a component content management system (CCMS)
A metadata classification system (also known as taxonomy)
The Mekon Content Strategy Audit™ (CSA)
A cross-departmental, knowledge-oriented workflow utilising subject matter experts (SMEs).

This article aims to address what a Content Strategy is, and how you can start building one. I will be using some practical examples to illustrate, as well as referring specifically to Richard’s experience.

What is content strategy?

Content strategy is a term that touches upon every aspect of content. Organisations often have more content than they actually know what to do with. Nevertheless, they can still struggle to deliver the content that they would like or need. This is where strategy comes in.

At its simplest, a strategy is an idea that, if executed, will deliver you a specific gain. It will get you from point A to point B, assuming point B is the better one. Content strategy is therefore a collection of ideas – a content-related methodology – that will deliver gain. Like any strategy in an organisation, it should uphold overall corporate strategy and brand. Wikipedia still makes a strong link between content strategy and web development, but although web-based delivery circles are where the term gained initial popularity, the need for content strategy is not determined by the publishing channel, but the business model and business context. ‘Holistic Content Strategy’ is an approach that takes into account the entire content lifecycle and the various audiences and stakeholders that are touched by content along the way.

Content and knowledge

In practical terms, for an organisation that makes a product or delivers a service, content encapsulates knowledge, making it transferable and accessible. As in Richard Truscott’s case, content strategy and management initiatives often develop into knowledge management initiatives involving not just specialised technical communication resources, but also SMEs. SMEs are the source of raw content for repurposing/rewriting. These days, technology is enabling workflows where annotations, additions or corrections can be added easily after content goes live, extending the SME influence.

Typically, when you buy a product you will receive a manual on how to use that product, and possibly some training that implies its own associated materials. Someone else will receive a repair/service manual to support the product, some more training, and maybe a parts manual to identify spares. Marketing will describe the product online, and support may share descriptions and how-to information with technical communications and training. Development content flows through all of these points, and has impact throughout the content lifecycle. For example, the product feature list planned in development may go on to appear in various publications as seen in Figure 1.

Ideally, these departments are keeping shared information up-to-date and sharing content, metadata and organisational/navigational models where possible. If these are not shared, users are given disparate resources they need to make sense of themselves. Sometime this data is even contradictory when groups have not kept their updates synchronised . In Figure 2, we see an example of sharing a single resource.
If you are the developer of the product or service, the users may be internal staff like services and support. Poor information can affect profitability directly through inefficient staff costs and impact customers as various points of contact are hindered by a lack of good resources.

Each contact with the customer builds the brand and encourages long, fruitful relationships. Therefore, if an organisation wants to consistently deliver quality customer experience, then a holistic content strategy needs to be established. Content storage and delivery underpins the vendor’s ability to provide the knowledge and service that facilitates customers using the product or service.

Figure 1 (Click to Enlarge): Product feature list displaying four related departmental outputs. Each number represents a slight adjustment for the new context: (1) the original specification version, (2) the user guide and quick start guide are modified, but content is identical, (3) Marketing adapts the content using the same version on the website product page and brochure, but a modified website FAQ.

Figure 2 (Click to Enlarge): An optimised workflow where all departments update a shared resource. One resource can contain variant content for different tone or style, but all managed and updated in one place. At publish time, the variant content is processed and delivered to the appropriate audiences.

This is one of the reasons that knowledge management without content management rarely delivers the full functional and business benefits available. Without a methodology for delivering and refining captured knowledge into targeted content deliverables, you cannot spread the knowledge very far. A targeted deliverable is one that is fit for a specific audience, context and purpose.

Therefore, streamlining and inter-relating the content of the various knowledge sources within the organisation is a key strategic activity for the staff responsible for managing content to support overall corporate strategy.

Content/Knowledge sources that need to be taken into account in a content inventory include:

Product Managers
Engineers
Trainers
Technical Services / Support

Staff that are generally responsible for managing and delivering content include:

Technical Communications
Marketing
IT

The distinction between content managers and sources is that content managers are responsible for managing more information than they originally generated. Technical Communications and Marketing take content from the SME departments and extend, add value to, re-write, and re-structure it to optimise it for use by content consumers.

Key components for implementing a content strategy

In order to have a strategy you must first have:

A clear understanding of your current situation
A mission or goal defined for your future situation.

Reviewing the current situation

As we will see in the case studies later, it is only with a holistic understanding of the current situation that an organisation or team can build strategy appropriately and plan for its feasible execution.
It makes business sense to make an up-front investment of some of the time and budget allocated to a project to make sure the other, much larger, percentage are spent properly. By aligning with other departments’ goals, a Technical Communications-based initiative increases the overall mass of its business case, giving economies of scale.

We have found when customers do not take into account cross-departmental perspectives, vital details get missed that have a detrimental affect on the project. Many organisations’ content strategy fails because they think that they can keep to their departmental boundaries when thinking about content, yet still provide the best customer experience.

A customer is not interested in the source department of their answer. Numerous studies and our own project experience has shown that customers want the information that comes with their product to work and make sense together, and be presented such that they can actually find what they are looking for when executing a task. In an organisation, all departments are discussing the product(s) or service(s) the organisation sells. This means opportunities for reuse are frequent, but it is often only through analysis and departmental communication that these opportunities reveal themselves (see Figure 3).

Analysis of your current situation and strategy for change must take into account:

User profiles, workflows and requirements – both internal and external
Process – creation, management, translation, delivery and maintenance of information
People and skills – who do you have? Who do you need? How will you apply them?
Content and its models – both current and planned
Technology – the tools and/or products to make all the above feasible
Change itself – how will you manage the migration of all of the above?
Business case – your justification for change

Richard covered some of these in his ‘Information sources survey’. As in Richard’s case, a SWOT analysis is often a useful tool for understanding your current situation.

Analysing the content

The subject of content analysis is complex, but to help you get started, here are some quick, widely applicable questions you can ask yourselves and your documents. The answers will help feed your implementation task list:

Do a content audit or 'inventory', depending on what your preferred term is. What do you have to manage? Now proceed with the rest of the questions below.
Utilise user research and personas to decide what content is needed. Answer the question, ‘who cares’? If you cannot think of a user scenario where someone really needs to know this information, leave it out and see what happens. Leave in a link to a web page and see if anyone goes there. If you are documenting labelled items in the UI, leave them out. Is documenting a field always necessary? For example: ‘Database ID Form Field: Enter the Database ID in this field.’ Add value, not volume!
How mature is your current content process? Organisations can only move so far, so fast. Be aware of the cultural context of your organisation.
Do you have an inventory of information sources? Are the managers of all these sources participating in a shared content strategy? Are they in a single repository, or if not are the various repositories sharing metadata and search capabilities?
Have you reviewed the table of contents lists, structures, and terminology across all the information sources and performed a consistency analysis?
Does your content have to be delivered to multiple audiences with different needs? Are you just delivering one big deliverable because you do not have time to separate into tailored ones?
Do you frequently have to resort to cross-references because reuse is unfeasible? Would it be better for the users if they did not have to switch between documents or go to another website?
Do you have an easy feedback loop to facilitate updates of field knowledge into your documents from internal and external experts and users?
Does your content get published through modern web-based channels and formats? Does it need to be?
- Wiki, Communities, Twitter and so on, can be either a great opportunity or time wasted.

Figure 3 (Click to Enlarge): A departmental content overlap model. Ideally, content will be reused by a systematic business or technology process. In many cases, however, overlap is either not noticed and new content is written to say the same thing, or is instead handled by duplication (copy, paste, tweak). At best duplication impedes usability, and at worse, contradictory information and user confusion and frustration arise.

Case studies

It was difficult to narrow down a list of case studies, but here are a few of my favourites.

Example - Richard Truscott

Richard Truscott quickly noted that he was in an organisation that had a long cultural history with notable lack of focussed professional attention on technical communications. This contributed to SMEs using their own sources and notes as primary sources as there was no central shared knowledge or content repository or administrator.

He used the CSA to validate and extend an initial analysis to ensure that vital points were covered. Leading onto knowledge management from content management was a natural progression for him and his revised content strategy using SMEs as content sources to feed into a formalisation workflow made good use of limited Technical Communications assets.

Example - Medical devices manufacturer unites the clans

This organisation had a long list of content issues impacting external customers directly and indirectly via hundreds of service, training and support staff. Similar to Richard’s experience, the organisation was suffering from too much content, without a corporate policy or system for governing or sharing it. Maintenance, training and support staff using documentation but were not given a unified, up-to-date source of data, and so collected their own local or departmental 'cheat sheets'.

The content was on personal machines in a ‘laptop library’ or network folders, meaning that content went out of date quickly and any personal knowledge and notes stored were not easily transferred to other users.
Support and service staff were repurposing or re-writing content from manuals or official sources to avoid having to find it again for their own future use, or to send to a customer to answer recurring requests. This indicated a desire to be able to quickly retrieve smaller pieces of information that can be directly recalled when required (essentially the ability to store favourites and annotate content), as well as the option of taking sections of official content and repurposing it in a new context. It also implied that navigation of current content offerings was not optimised and searching should be consolidated.

The executive body unanimously approved our project proposal to set global content strategy standards and implement a central DITA-based content management system. A progressive implementation across international business groups is now in progress.

Example – Large defence manufacturer gets it right

This is an interesting example that illustrates the importance of meaningful information and the changing market. Rather than simply supplying a product, in this case an aircraft, the client chose to buy a full service level agreement. This committed the supplier to ensure a minimum number of aircraft would be operational 24/7/365. The quality, usability and accessibility of the maintenance documentation suddenly had a direct impact on the supplier’s bottom line costs.

The result of analysing their repairs and spare overhaul statistics and engineer usability feedback suggested a small enrichment to the procedure for Power Shaft inspection would help engineers make decisions. Using photographs to graphically present acceptable and unacceptable damage limits resulted in a reduced number of units being sent for repair.

Overhaul orders reduced by four per month resulted in annual savings of over £280,000.

Example – Consumer electronics manufacturer gets it wrong

One the most striking CSA stories I have was meeting with a Technical Documentation manager and talking to the maintenance department about content. It turned out that the maintenance teams repairing products sent back from the field were generating their own quarterly DVD of technical tips, reference charts and other technical documentation. Every three months someone in they would collate the updates and re-issue the DVD. The Technical Communications team was unaware of the DVD or the useful content it contained.
This same organisation suffered from costly NFF or ‘no fault found’ returns. NFFs are when the product was in perfect working order, but the customer returned it because they could not understand how to make it work.

Conclusion - the impact

Inconsistent information between departments is visible when content is published. If your information processes do not unite knowledge sources and how they flow into deliverables (web pages, help packages, training materials, manuals, and so on). When customers go to websites or read documentation there is inconsistency. Many Technical Communications teams tell us that they want more user and task orientation in their documents. Meanwhile, the user- and task-oriented content they wish they had the time to develop is being developed, sometimes even delivered publicly, but there is no internal collaboration to facilitate this or take advantage of the reuse and sharing opportunities. Remember:

Establish metrics: Using surveys and ROI case studies allows you to establish the problem and potential in numerical terms. Measure before change, compare later.
Think long term, scope for the short term: ‘Delivery’ is not a singular or static process, no matter what the medium – organisations deliver, gather new information from multiple sources, then update and re-deliver, endlessly. Content strategy improvements are also ongoing.
Content strategy is business strategy: Content strategy should be aligning user experience with both the goals of the organisation, and the expectations of users. When both buyer and seller are happy, you have a mutually beneficial recipe for repeat business and growth.

The Computer Pirates of Penzance

2010-10-07T18:26:00.000+02:00

The first line sort of just came to me spontaneously in a bit of office banter, so I felt I had to do some more!

Let me know if you like it. Maybe I could be persuaded to actually record it! : D

(to be sung to the tune of 'I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major General', from Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Pirates of Penzance").

Here's the original with music and lyrics so you can (try to) sing along. (Note - not my video, so I can't fix that typo in the introduction where it says 'Major Genreal's song'):

"I am the content model of a modern Major Enterprise I feed my architecture with all of the docs I analyse Strategical, and managed and my audit trail's historical From R&D to user gen'd I've tagging categorical I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters taxonomical I understand equations, both MathML and graphical Re: Darwin Information I am teeming with a lot o' news (Newsfeeds? Maybe a little RSS?) With many cheerful facts about best practices that you should use

With many cheerful facts about best practices that you should use With many cheerful facts about best practices that you should use With many cheerful facts about best practices that you should you should use!

I'm very good at translation and all my terms are consistent And I know their costs are worthy of some very careful management In short, in matters budgetary, I aim to reduce their size I am the content model of a modern Major Enterprise

In short, in matters budgetary, he aims to reduce their size He is the content model of a modern Major Enterprise!

I know our mythic history, Info Mapped SGML I answer fiscal problems with processes that are rational I cite case studies showing its a crime to be too product-led It's people and their processes that move all good projects ahead I assert there's a place for structure in just about all documents Structure can mean XML or just workflows that make some sense! The hard part's knowing how much, when and what it is all destined for To have a CM system(1) that can do you had hoped before!

To have a CM system that can do you had hoped before! To have a CM system that can do you had hoped before! To have a CM system that can do you had hoped before before!

Oh, I can write a tidy topic up in minimalist uniform And tell you ev'ry detail that's conditional or off the norm In short, in matters budgetary, I aim to reduce their size I am the content model of a modern Major Enterprise!

In short, in matters budgetary, he aims to reduce their size He is the content model of a modern Major Enterprise!

In fact, when I know what is meant by "formattin'" v "stylin'" When I can tell at sight a user manual from some scribblin' and spearhead project issues and surprising user feedback that tells you your user guides are best made outside a HAT(2) Because I've learnt methods for better content lifecycle I balance needs more daunting than a hippo on a bicycle In short, with my tactics laid out all in a Content Strategy, (oh, hmmm... that's a hard one... Strategy...) You'll say that other Major-Enterprises' look like agony!

You'll say that other Major-Enterprises' look like agony! You'll say that other Major-Enterprises' look like agony! You'll say that other Major-Enterprises' look like agon-agony!

With all my ROI calcs(3), you will find that you are lucky I've led the cutting edge since the beginning of this century And still, in matters budgetary, I aim to reduce their size I am the content model of a modern Major Enterprise.

In short, in matters budgetary, he aims to reduce their size He is the content model of a modern Major Enterprise!

(1) CM system = Content Management System

(2) HAT = Help Authoring Tool. See also http://hat-matrix.com/

(3) ROI calcs = Return on Investment calculations