Your digital transformation is underway! You have a plan for new content, new delivery, and new content experiences. But what do you do with all of that existing content? You may have a plan for actively maintained content, but you also have much older legacy content. What does your conversion strategy look like when you have very old documents and must continue to provide them, even if they are not changing?
You’ve deployed a successful content strategy for one department at your organization. How do you know you’re ready to take that strategy to the next level and expand it across the organization? Here are some common indicators that it’s time to develop an enterprise content strategy.
“Whether you like it or not, your prospects already use technical content.”
In the paper age, it cost money to distribute information. That gave big organizations some control over information flow. A prospect interested in purchasing a product would get “pre-sales” information–marketing materials, sales pitches, and perhaps a data sheet. Only after buying the product could the prospect access “post-sales” information, such as technical content. (Buyers could and did request technical information from their sales representative, but the decision whether or not to provide the information rested with the organization.)
But in the digital age, information distribution is free, and that makes it difficult or impossible to control what information people receive. As a result, the distinction between pre-sales and post-sales content is blurring. If you are in the market for a new desk, and you’re considering “some assembly required” options, you might take a look at the assembly guide. If the build process looks daunting, a not-so-handy person may look elsewhere. If you’re considering a piece of software, you might glance at the user documentation to see whether tasks are explained clearly at a level that makes sense to you.
Migrating to DITA means more than just adding element tags. There are a few common holes in migration strategies that can prevent you from reaping all of the benefits of the converted DITA content. To avoid that mistake, make sure you have a plan in place for:
These should be important factors when migrating your content to DITA, and they will require new workflows and changes in the way you handle the relationships in your content.
When it comes to mobile strategy, the question has shifted from, “Do I need a mobile strategy?” to “Should my strategy be mobile-first?” A mobile-first strategy prioritizes the delivery of mobile content over other options.
Employees are (and should be) hired for their knowledge and skill, not necessarily their multilingual skills. In a global organization with many offices worldwide, the result is a diverse team with content developers and contributors that speak many different languages. Collaborating on content development—especially on the same document—can be difficult if employees do not speak the same language fluently (or at all).
“When you share content across the company in ways you haven’t before, everyone has to shift to a culture of collaboration.”
Undertaking a project to improve your organization’s content creation process is overwhelming. It is not easy to move into structured content, create a new taxonomy, or develop a new content delivery platform, for example. Here is a list of things to do before you start any content project.
Looking for ways to save your company time and money? Content reuse allows you to write content once and use it again in multiple places. Do these use cases for reuse apply to your content?
Do your customers know the right words to search for? Does marketing refer to your product one way while the tech team refers to it another? Inconsistent word use causes confusion within your company and negatively affects customers’ perception of your brand. So what causes the inconsistencies, and how do you fix them?
If done properly, a new content strategy will bring added value to your organization. The transition itself is not always easy, and the success of the projects depends on your stakeholders. Much like trick or treating, you never know what to expect when someone “opens the door” to change:
When you want to put new content development processes in place, proving the return on investment (ROI) of your strategy is one of the most effective ways to get buy-in from managers or executives.
You can calculate ROI by showing how much money you’re currently spending creating content, and comparing it to how much money you will save over time with a more efficient workflow. But what if there are roadblocks preventing you from gathering the metrics you need to get those numbers?
Because of a merger or a change in company direction, you’ve got snazzy new branding to roll out across your marketing content: updated logos, corporate colors, fonts, and more.
And then you realize you’ll have to adjust hundreds (if not thousands!) of InDesign, Microsoft Word, and other files to reflect the new branding. Ouch!
So you’ve decided to move your content to DITA. You want all the benefits of reuse and less expensive translation, and you’ve completed your content model. But now the question is, “What do we do with our existing content?”
In an agile environment, a company develops its products in continuous iterations with incremental deliveries called sprints. This approach allows the company to test the success of each small change to the product and adapt the development process accordingly. So what does that mean for content?
When you ask management to fund your content strategy initiative, you need to show them the money.
Nested content is one of the biggest differences between structured and unstructured content.
I’ve been working at Scriptorium for almost four years, but last week was my first opportunity to attend a conference. I spent a good amount of time on the exhibit hall floor, but I was also able to attend presentation sessions.
A proof-of-concept phase is often the key to unlocking the budget for an entire content strategy project. When defining the scope and goals for a proof of concept, don’t forget your team will still need training.
In 2015, we talked about a vision to tackle, lead and map out an enterprise content strategy. Today I wanted to provide an update on making that vision a reality, and how to expand it beyond a singular team and into other parts of an organization.
The rollout of an enterprise content strategy can be done in phases to define content goals, clean up existing content and then expand to additional departments.
A misfire by a German grocery chain entering the US market reminds me of a very important content strategy commandment: Know thy audience.
When winter weather makes commuting to Scriptorium’s NC office difficult, we work from home. We have set up a cloud-based infrastructure to support remote employees (hello, Bill Swallow!), and it works well for the rest of us during weather events and business travel.
Scriptorium wraps up 2017 with a look back at posts on content strategy, localization, DITA, and other content conundrums.
We often talk about building content strategies from the ground up: first, coming up with a strategy to address your content problems, and then implementing a solution. But not all implementations happen that way. If you’ve already started implementing a new system, it’s not too late to think about content strategy—in fact, it’s crucial to make sure your new processes will be sustainable.
