Content ops forecast: mostly sunny with a chance of chaos (webinar)
In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series, Scriptorium principals Sarah O’Keefe (CEO), Alan Pringle (COO), and Bill Swallow (Director of Operations) provide practical insights on the future of content operations. They’ll deliver sunny predictions, warn of upcoming storms, and equip you to weather unprecedented fronts in the content industry.
After watching, viewers will learn:
- The current forecast for AI and the clouds on the horizon
- Challenges facing your customer content strategy
- Recommendations for future-proofing your content operations, come rain or shine
Related links
- The challenges of content operations across the enterprise (podcast)
- Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series on YouTube
- Free book, Content Operations from Start to Scale. Dr. Carlos Evia coordinated and edited this incredible collection of insights from a myriad of content industry experts.
- Our book, Content Transformation, 2nd Edition. Building an effective content strategy is no small task. This is your guidebook for getting started.
Transcript:
Christine Cuellar: Hey there, and welcome to the ContentOps Forecast, which is Mostly Sunny With A Chance Of Chaos. Today’s webinar is part of our Let’s Talk ContentOps webinar series hosted by Sarah O’Keefe, the founder and CEO of Scriptorium. And today we have a rare chance for you to see all three Scriptorium principles and action. We don’t often let them get together on calls because it can be mayhem, but helpful mayhem. Today it’s going to be a lot of fun. […] So without further ado, I’m going to pass this over to our resident ContentOps meteorologist, Sarah O’Keefe. Sarah, over to you.
Sarah O’Keefe: Well, thanks. Well, and it is in fact sunny, although it’s actually hazy, hot, and humid, which is sort of the default for the summer here. Hey everybody, welcome aboard. It’s going to be an interesting ride. We wanted to talk today about where ContentOps is going and what we think our best guess is at the forecast as to what’s happening and what are the things that are happening, and best guess I think is really the main thing here. And actually, I wanted to kick it off by talking about one term that we’re hearing a lot this year, which is sustainability. So Alan, I wanted to throw it to you and ask you about sustainability, which I think has become overloaded because it means actually several different things, right?
Alan Pringle: It does, and let’s start with more of the planet centric view of what sustainability is. From that point of view, it’s how your business, how it creates its products, its services. How is the company having an impact on the planet, on the environment? How is it having an effect on the resources that we have on the planet? So it’s kind of like an ecological green perspective. And if you take the example of artificial intelligence, we’re what, four minutes in and here comes the first mention of AI, yay. If you take a look at AI right now, it is probably not something that is super sustainable as it is. It takes a tremendous amount of computing power for AI to do what it does, so it is eating up resources that we have on this planet. And you can kind of dial back from that environmental picture and then start looking at sustainability more from the point of view of do you have processes in place that are repeatable? Are they scalable? And we’re content people, so I want to kind of focus on content. If you are creating content and you are using multiple tools to create different types of output, for example, and I will say I have seen this particularly in the learning and training space. There are very specific, tailored tools that get you one kind of delivery target. If you’re using a bunch of different tools to both create and then deliver your content, you’re not creating a sustainable process. You’ve got basically multiple irons in the fire and it’s much harder to manage and to come up with kind of a streamlined process. And even think of it from an IT point of view, you’re having to basically manage how many tools? How many tools are in your tech stack? At some point that becomes unmanageable and again, it points back to sustainability. Having all those layers of tools in your tech stack, that probably is actually using more resources from an ecological point of view. So it’s not just a matter of looking at things from just an efficiency point of view, on the business side, it’s also kind of going backward and looking, how is this inefficiency going to affect or have an impact on the world we live in? And again, AI is a perfect example of where I think we’re not getting a lot of bang for our buck these days.
SO: And so that broader view of sustainability, when we’re thinking about sustainability essentially of our content operations, which includes the environmental kind of considerations but also others, Bill, what does that look like in your world? When you’re sitting on the side of these big implementation projects and doing big development projects, what does it look like to manage those projects into something sustainable?
Bill Swallow: It’s a very interesting problem to have, and I tend to look at the lack of sustainability as more of a churn and burn approach where you are working fast and furious to get things out the door, to get things written, and there’s not a lot of either forethought or consideration of what will this need to look like a year from now or two years from now, or oh dear, we suddenly have to go and publish this in a different language? So a lot of that is really unwinding a lot of ad hoc processes and ad hoc code and streamline that. We talk about the lack of sustainability, we talk about ad hoc processing, and all of that really comes down to building a pretty significant mountain of technical debt. So it’s a lot of short-term decisions and it might’ve been a great idea at the time. It might’ve been a proof of concept that got you to a specific endpoint, but a lot of times if you don’t take a look at what you developed there or what you did there and refine it, you’re just going to pile on problems as you keep building on top of it. And a lot of times it’s really easy to just say, “Oh, we’ll fix that tomorrow,” but a lot of times tomorrow becomes tomorrow, becomes tomorrow, and it never gets fixed.
AP: Quick and dirty becomes very expensive, basically.
BS: Oh, yes. And the longer you let that sit, the more expensive it is to fix it later.
AP: And dirtier.
BS: And dirtier.
SO: Now we’re going to segue right into a micro Dirty Jobs kind of presentation. In the poll about sustainability of ContentOps, a pretty mixed bag. Some people are saying they have it, but we gave you four answers and the winner right now is no. It’s not a majority, but it looks like about a quarter said yes, 40% said no, about a quarter said other. Oh, now it’s changing again. Anyway, so not a lot of people saying that their ContentOps are sustainable. That much I can tell you. A lot of people are saying other, which tells me you probably have some other questions about this. Speaking of questions, if you have them, drop them in the Q&A and we will do our best to get to those as we go. We already had one kind of interesting one come in, which had to do with ops. So somebody said, “What’s the difference basically between DocOps and ContentOps?” And the answer I’ve given, Alan and Bill, is that DocOps tends to be focused on developer docs as opposed to broadly content and ContentOps is ContentOps, which could potentially include DocOps. Is that a reasonable definition? Bill, what do you think?
BS: I think it’s reasonable to say. We also talk about having global ContentOps, which then extends it further into the entire localization process. So generally ops, at the end of the day, it’s ops wrapped around a thing.
SO: Okay, that’s fair. So Alan, well, both of you were talking about quick and dirty, and I think really that leads us into a term that many of you on this call are probably familiar with, which is technical debt. So the idea of technical debt is that when you make a decision, when you go into a project, if you do the quick and dirty thing, then it’s cheap in the short run, but you introduce technical debt. You’re going to have to fix it later. You didn’t pay the full price and you have debt and that debt accumulates and has interest, and then eventually, you’re going to have to pay the piper on this. So Bill, do you have some examples of what technical debt looks like in a real project? And please do not name any names.
BS: Sure. Well, Alan had a good one where especially within the learning industry, you have a lot of these tools that are designed to do a very specific thing. And what we see more often with the work that we do is that you have a group of people who are trying to author in a consolidated fashion, so they’re trying to create a single source of truth. They’re trying to do the right thing, but they’ve now created all of these custom publishing pipelines that go out to all of these other places that have a single purpose publishing mechanism. So you’re publishing out to an LMS so that you can do e-learning, and then likewise, you’re publishing out to a website that supports web content. You’re publishing out to PDF, and sometimes the tool that you’re using to author the content may not have all of those connectors. And what we’ve seen, especially with a lot of early adopters for those who decided to centralize their content, is that they had to use some let’s call it creative coding to get from point A to point B and point C. And that creative coding solved the problem, but fast forward 5, 10, 15 years of doing this process, the code becomes brittle and things start falling apart, especially as some code, some things that were developed are slowly getting deprecated because other systems refuse to talk in that language anymore, and you start having to do workarounds to your workaround to get it to work continually. So unwinding a lot of that stuff can get rather dicey and rather expensive because somewhere along the way, someone may have decided that, “Hey, mid-process, we’re going to start injecting other content in here.” Now you have to accommodate for two content pipelines going out, and it gets even more confusing from there. Another, I guess on the flip side is more I guess brute force publishing. So you either spend the time creating a proof of concept publishing pipeline, and the thought is that you will harden it and refine it and nurture it but at the end of the day, the proof of concept gets streamlined into basically your production environment and it becomes the golden way of publishing and it becomes very inflexible. It’s very fragile because it was built as an example, not as a solution. So again, reworking that becomes difficult.
SO: And Alan, I did want to turn to you. The canonical example though of that prototype brute force publishing is you build a proof of concept that is basically English only and a whole bunch of stuff gets hard coded in, and then along comes the production version, which is, oh wait, 37 languages, and nobody thought about the fact that the, “Not, caution,” warning text would have and try and get out of this really bad situation. Structure, automation. I’ll also say that you really want to think about long-term flexibility because if you solve things, again, you solve it, but then you didn’t solve it because in a year, a new requirement comes along and you can’t meet that requirement. So you have this issue that you sort of have to work through, I have to survive and then I can get some bandwidth to do this. And so that leads us straight into where we live, which is ContentOps. How do you make this sustainable in the long term so that it all works? And I think the big, big problem that we’re seeing right now, and this is again the forecasting issue, is that these projects, these initiatives, these efforts take time and money and resources, whether internal or external, and right now we have an awful lot of large organizations that are not interested in talking about long-term. They’re interested in what can you do for me next week or next month or maybe next quarter, but it’s going to take six months to dig ourselves out of this hole that we’ve built over the past 10 years is not a popular position. And so it’s just very, very difficult to get people to go along with that, to help us with that and to start moving into these initiatives so that we can fix what we’re doing. And so shifting a little bit into that forecasting and that solutioning mode, what does it look like to invest in structured content or better content? It doesn’t have to be structured, but what does it look like to make that case in this short-term environment? I don’t know which one of you wants to touch on that, maybe Bill.
BS: Sure. And I think to tie right into that, it’s about having a results focus in your pitch to begin with. So if you know that you need to change, you know that you need to build in some sustainability, you need to focus on the results. What that looks like is going to be very different from you versus those who are going to approve any funding that you’re going to get because the results that those who are in the approval stage are looking at, that might be a website, a PDF, a mobile app. So if you are still able to produce a PDF, a website, and a mobile app, then why do you need to change the way you’re working now? And so you need to start being able to articulate other gains so it’s not just, “Yes, I’m able to produce these things, but I am able to produce these things in a third of the time. I am able to produce these things in seven languages instead of two in the same amount of time,” or, “I am able to produce these things in 30 languages that we haven’t been able to do before within the same budget.” Those are things that start getting attention and we need to start building that into the business plan for your pitch.
SO: I agree with that. Sorry, go ahead, Alan.
AP: I was going to say, here I go again with the AI BS. Excuse me all, but AI is hot right now. It is, maybe overly hot. Even so, you can look at it from a content point of view as another delivery target. And if your content that you have right now is pure crap, guess what? What AI generates from it is going to be even worse crap, probably. So if you have an edict that you need to start focusing on how AI can basically be a distribution channel or can somehow consume your content, that can possibly be a way to get your foot into the ContentOps door and say, “Listen, we got to clean this stuff up, make this existing content better, and that way it will make the AI less likely to hallucinate, less likely to give information that might potentially cause legal problems.” So there can be some things you can do there to basically focus on how good content is the bedrock of a lot of things, and that includes the direction AI is heading.
SO: Yeah. I think that’s a really good point. I’ll add to that, and I’ve come around on this over the years because I used to say, “You’ve got to do your planning and then you’ve got to do your thing and then you’ve got to do, and eventually we’ll deal with formatting way down the line, like a year from now we’ll fix your PDFs.” I’ve come around to the idea that that’s not going to work and your proof of concept, your prototype, your first initiative, whatever it is, is going to have to include something visual. And what I mean by that is we’re going to redesign the PDF. We’re going to redesign the website. We’re going to deliver this HTML differently, something like that, because people more or less are visual. People want to see something. Your CFO wants to see numbers, great. All the rest of them that you’re trying to get approval from, if you don’t give them a visual, “Hey, we’re going to go from it looks like this to it looks like this,” it just doesn’t connect. And so even though from a pure technology point of view it makes way more sense to do the planning and the content architecture and the build and the implementation, the configuration and then the publishing pipelines, I think you’re going to have to include a publishing pipeline of some sort upfront at the beginning so that you can visually show a difference even though from a technical point of view, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But my sense is you will not get your project approved if you don’t have a visual to show. And that kind of makes me twitch because if you look at how that project should be laid out, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but just file that away under things that you’re probably going to have to do. I’ve got a really interesting question here in the chat about integrated systems. “How do you even get to an integrated system,” this viewer asks, “In an agile production process where content is atomic, fragmented, and hard to trace?” Well, other than that. I’m going to throw this to you, Bill, as the technical person, but I’ll say a few things first. We have the ability to make content atomic and track it in things like component content management systems. If fragmented means scattered across the universe, then yes, that is definitely a problem and needs to be fixed. And we have techniques for traceability, for saying this content was created because of this bug. This JIRA ticket resulted in this content update, which results in this, or this product requirement resulted in this content feature which then results in this content, that type of thing. So I don’t think there’s anything inherent to agile that would make things fragmented, hard to trace. Atomic, probably yes, but we have tools that can address that. So I think this is a case where I would lean on software because all three of these things that you’re asking about sound to me like something that I can solve with software. Bill, does that sound about right to you?
BS: Yeah. That’s exactly where I was going to be going because I was looking at that last item of hard to trace, and that right there smells like technical debt because you have developed things and now you can’t track where they are, where they’re being used, when they were last updated. At least I assume by that term, that’s what you mean. We can certainly manage atomic and we can certainly manage fragmented. Hard to trace, once you lose something, it’s very hard to wrap your arms around where it went and where it now is all being used. So that’s something that you unfortunately are going to have to backtrack and rebuild once you get things centralized, and I do say centralized. Even though you’re talking about atomic and fragmented, if you centralize it, you can push to those places. You don’t necessarily need to author or store content in a million different spots. You can manage it all centrally and push it out to where it needs to be at the time it’s needed and not have to worry about that. Then that’ll reduce that hard to trace a bit of debt that you have.
SO: Sorry. Go ahead, Alan.
AP: When I saw that question, the atomic angle, I’m like, “That’s good. That can work to your advantage.” It’s a matter of finding a system to help you manage those atomic bits and pieces and give you some governance so you don’t lose things and they become hard to trace.
SO: I will say when we talk fragmentation and it’s fragmentation across something like multiple git repositories, that is in fact super tricky and that’s one of the reasons that that’s where you run into issues with DocOps and this idea of docs as code and all the rest of it. If the docs are associated with the code, but the docs need to share across multiple code repositories, things get really annoying really fast. I wanted to turn to the forecasting, and Alan, you touched on AI a little bit. To me, we are seeing a slightly, slightly more nuanced view of AI as hey, this could help us. It’s an interesting tool, we can do stuff with it, but it’s not going to just take over our world. It’s more I think a more accurate and more nuanced version of what it can potentially do for us. Does that sound right to you?
AP: It does. I’m still seeing on LinkedIn in particular all of these ads in my feed, “This AI thing will do all this for you.” There’s still a little bit of snake oil salesmanship going on, unfortunately. But I do think overall, at least when you talk to people especially in the content trenches, I think there is some cooling off and maybe people are realizing it is not going to fix the world because it aint. It just is not.
SO: Yeah. But it’s a great tool and it can help us. There’s some cool stuff we can do with it. Bill, what are you seeing in terms of forecast, what people are saying, what the trends are?
BS: I’m going to bring in a bit of a gray cloud here. If you haven’t been paying attention lately, there’ve been quite a lot of layoffs in tech and that’s causing a lot of people to get scared, overwhelmed, especially not so much those who are being laid off, although that’s specifically they have their own problems and concerns that they need to manage, but those who are left behind at a company. I will put it that way, because that’s literally what we’re seeing. Those who are left behind suddenly have to manage systems and processes that they never really had expertise in. And so we’re seeing a lot of small improvements that people are making because they just don’t know everything about the way something was hooked up before. And because of that, there’s a reluctance to really ask for a lot of help, whether it’s to ask for funding because a company just had a layoff, “There’s no way they’re going to give me money so that I can ramp up on this thing.” They’re not going to ask for help from other departments because those departments are now understaffed potentially. So there’s a lot of flailing, I guess, because of people not being willing to stick their neck out and say, “Hey, I need help. Hey, we need to change the way we’re working. Hey, we have to spend money, even though we just let go of a lot of people because we didn’t have money.” I’m not sure where to turn that around, but that is definitely what we’ve been seeing at least over the past six to nine months specifically.
AP: What you’re describing to me is another not so tasty flavor of technical debt because when the people who knew how to run those systems are no longer there, it’s like pulling out the rug from under the people who do still have to keep things running. What if you don’t know how these things work, how they are connected? That’s a kind of technical debt and it is frightening to be in that position, especially when getting more resources is probably not on the table.
BS: Or you are in charge of a completely new initiative that relies on another group or another system, and now you don’t have I guess a reliable pool of people to draw upon for that old system because they’ve all been let go.
SO: Yeah. So first of all, for those of you that are on this call that have been laid off recently, I literally started this company because I was mad about being laid off, and there’s a whole backstory there, which is pretty entertaining now. At the time, it wasn’t very entertaining at all. So I really feel for what you’re dealing with. It’s life-changing and sometimes, ultimately it’s life changing in a good way, sometimes it’s not. It’s always extremely, extremely stressful. What you should know is that nearly always, it has nothing to do with your capabilities and your competencies, no matter what certain companies might be saying, and it’s just they changed direction, they didn’t have the money, they made a bad bet on a bad strategy, and you got to pay the price for that instead of the executive. On the survivor side, the people that stay on the inside that are still there, nobody wants to stick their neck out and risk anything because, “Oh, well, they’ll just fire me next.” So there’s this very unhealthy response that happens to layoffs and fear and concerns about people’s jobs. People don’t want to take a risk or be visible, they just want to put their heads down and do the work because that seems to be how you get the job done, probably. And for those of you that think, “Oh, she’s talking about me,” I’m not talking about you. I have had several calls over the last couple of months that boil down to, “Hey, the people or the person that ran our system is gone. We don’t know how to manage it. What do we do? Can you help us?” That’s a sign of somebody that didn’t think through a layoff, right? Because they let go somebody that had a unique skillset and they had no backup. So that is really, really troubling and really, really not healthy at all. Alan, what are some of the other trends that we’re seeing?
AP: I think tied into what you’re talking about with these people kind of scared to ask for money for new initiatives, for those who are trying to move forward with a new initiative, things are taking longer to get approved. The window and the procurement process, they’re dragging a little more now. And it could be because people are a little shell-shocked by some of the layoffs and there’s this fear of, “I don’t want to step across the line and cause myself problems,” and I think that is all kind of tied together in a not so fun package right now.
SO: The approval for $50,000 that used to go to a director is now going to a VP. The approval for two or $300,000 is going a level higher than it used to go, that type of thing. Everything’s taking forever, even when there are legitimate projects there. Bill, what else is out there?
BS: I was going to say that those approvals are definitely stalling, but I think more importantly, the ones that are gaining more traction tend to be the bigger initiatives these days. So it’s not so much looking for that $50,000 fix to one particular aspect of let’s say content production, but it’s basically a full overhaul saying, “Okay, we did it this way for six, 10 years, it’s worked great. Do we invest in making these iterative improvements on this system or do we flat out go for a completely new way of doing things?” And these bigger initiatives tend to squeak by on the approvals a lot faster, or at least a lot more consistently than a lot of the smaller ones. The smaller ones may come and go, might be a good idea at the time, but for whatever reason, at the last possible minute, the approval gets yanked for getting that done. The bigger ones, they tend to have a lot more business case driving them. They have a lot more potential behind them, and I think they have a lot more momentum in getting through all the approval stages to actually getting funding.
SO: I think Alan’s right that AI right now is an easy approval mechanism. “I need to do X so that we can AI,” is pretty much the message, and it’s true and it’s helpful. I will say that sustainability, we feel like, is also a place where you can get some traction. So partly sustainability in terms of environmental stuff, but also in terms of business sustainability, sustainability of operations, scalability, velocity, that type of thing. We see that working actually pretty well as a pitch, but I think the key is that you have to be results-oriented. You have to focus on we need to do this because of a business outcome. What doesn’t seem to be working at all is focusing on content quality. Our content isn’t good, we need to make it better. And they’re like, “Eh, don’t care.” Okay. Why are you making it better? If we improve the quality of our content, we will get fewer product returns, which quantifies to these kinds of numbers or better tech support, which means fewer calls, call deflection, that kind of thing. But it is absolutely critical to connect whatever the content initiative thing is that you’re trying to do to a business outcome. Connecting it to the content is going to be better and shinier, and I know I told you to make a pretty PDF or a pretty HTML page. You also have to do that, but you have to simultaneously connect it to a specific business outcome or it will not go. It just will not. Go ahead, Bill.
BS: Yeah, exactly. And it needs to be quantifiable, so things like being able to reduce the number of product returns is a good one. Reduce the number of support calls is a good one. Another one would be being able to publish within the same timeframe to six more language markets. Being able to pull that publishing in by a quarter, a month, two months, so that you can get the content out to those markets sooner, so that you can get your product out to those markets sooner. Those things have very, very, very tangible things that you can measure. And we talk about metrics, everyone talks about metrics. Everyone loves metrics and everyone hates metrics, but those are things that you can tie numbers to very easily.
SO: Yeah. Alan, any final things you want to tie into here?
AP: Really the cold, hard business result angle, it’s some variation of show me the money because it is. Better words, it’s more grammatically correct and flows better. That ain’t going to cut it. It’s just not.
SO: But it’ll work better in machine translation because it’s more grammatically correct and the sentences are shorter and simpler.
AP: There you go.
SO: That, you might be able to do. Ultimately, I think that what we’re seeing though is a core tension between the timescale required to do big ContentOps projects and the timescale that business write large is operating on right now. So if you’re operating on a “what does my next quarter, what does my next week, what does my next six weeks look like” kind of timescale and a ContentOps project is three months, six months, a year, there’s a real disconnect there between the timescale for the content stuff and the timescale for business. So ultimately, you have to find a way to break down your project into bite-size in the cadence of the business pieces so that you can get those approved. That I think is going to be a big, big challenge, and I would encourage those of you that are wrestling with this to look over at digital transformation because they have more or less solved this. You see these monster millions of dollars of digital transformation projects and they get approved, and they’re not going to happen in six weeks, so how are they doing that? What does the messaging look like? Lean on that, learn from what’s happening in that digital transformational world because ultimately that’s what you’re trying to do, right? You’re trying to do ContentOps, which amounts to digital transformation, but specifically for content as opposed to for business operations. I think with that, I’m going to wrap it up unless either of you want to jump in with anything else that we’ve got here.
AP: I think we’ve covered the gamut here today.
BS: Agreed.
SO: All right. Well, Christine… oh, Bill, sorry.
BS: No, I totally agree with Alan. I think we’ve hit everything. I could throw out an example of one thing that might make digital transformation more appealing, I guess, and that’s that it signifies actual change. It’s not that you’re just operationalizing. It’s not that you’re just doing a tech project, but you are transforming the way that your company is doing business.
SO: All right, Christine. Back to you, I think.
CC: Yeah. Well, thank you all so much for being here. Please head to the rating the webinar tab. That would be really helpful. We just really want to hear what you liked, what you didn’t like. If you have any other questions too, feel free to ask them on the ask a question tab and we can send you a follow-up email with more information. And keep an eye out for our next webinar, which is going to be September 18th. A great way to stay updated with our future webinars and other content is via our Illuminations newsletter, which is in the attachments tab. And thank you so much for being here. Enjoy the rest of your day!
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