Toy Dracula on a black table with other monster toys around it. Blue frame is around the photo.

November 4, 2024

From stakeholders to stake-holders: Getting business buy-in for content operations

LavaCon 2024 delivered actionable insights, emphasizing that your business case for content operations requires strong alignment with business goals. Successful content modernization hinges on executive support, effective change management, and a wary eye on AI.

The business case for content operations

In her keynote session, Sarah O’Keefe showed attendees how to communicate the value of content to executives and others in an organization. But why is a business case needed?

Other than the people in this room, nobody cares about content. They don’t care. They care about the business drivers and how content will achieve things for the business, organization, or mission.

– Sarah O’Keefe

With this context, Sarah described how to effectively communicate the value of content by translating technical terms into business language.

Don’t say transclusion. Say reuse.
Don’t say conrefs. Say no more copy and paste.
Don’t say ditaval. Say variant.
Don’t say XSLT. Say automation.
Don’t say specialization. Say adaptation.
Don’t say plugin. Say publishing pipeline.

As you advocate for improved content operations within your organization, you take on a lot of personal risk. But not advocating for better systems and processes can also incur risks when high-stakes content projects are delayed or derailed.

I talk a lot about risk mitigation. Risk mitigation is really powerful when you’re talking to your C-level executives. But risk mitigation for yourself is also important. You don’t want to get laid off because nothing’s working. In terms of risk mitigation for yourself, if you’re trying to sell a big project, you can lean on accuracy, compliance, and single sourcing.”

– Sarah O’Keefe

Sarah also shared how to secure funding by using AI to get attention for the project.

Figure out what you want to do and then sell it because it will enable AI. Sell it to the people with the money saying, “With X, we can do all this stuff with AI and it’ll be great.” We have a content agenda; they have a different agenda. Sell to their agenda.

– Sarah O’Keefe

The horror of modernizing content

In this session, copresenters Alan Pringle and Janet Zarecor shared the key considerations teams must think about to improve content operations before selecting content management tools.

Because of the festive spooky theme, Janet created many of the background images by staging these toy figures in her amazing green screen set up.

Unfortunately, the horror of inescapable technical problems prevented the slides from being shown for the majority of the presentation. We’ve provided the slides below so you can enjoy them now!

The horror of modernizing content presentation slides (PDF, size 333 KB)

If you’re considering a content modernization project, it’s critical to start by getting executive support, visibility, and communication.

Whether that’s you, your boss, or your boss’s boss, when you’re going on a journey like this to completely modernize your content and deliver it in a different way, if your executive sponsor hasn’t built a coalition of people around them that isn’t visible, openly supportive, and talking about it to all of the staff, you’re not going to get very far.

In Prosci research, they found that organizational messages would always come from the CEO or president. That’s where they have the most impact. But if you’re talking to an employee, they really want to hear it from their supervisor. So you have to be very thoughtful and intentional about who’s sending out the message of why we’re doing this and what we’re trying to accomplish.

– Janet Zarecor

It can be difficult for people to shift to new systems and processes. Alan and Janet gave tips for navigating change management issues.

You have to talk to staff about long-term impacts. How is this going to save them time down the road? What improvements are we going to continue to make? For example, you can say, “Well, now folks are more likely to open your documents because before it took them 35 seconds to open them. And now it takes them six.”

– Janet Zarecor

All of that good communication, all of that proactive change management that Janet just talked about, those are going to be absolutely critical when you get to your discovery and requirements gathering. You want your content stakeholders to be communicative. You want them to be helpful. You do not want them ticked off, coming at you with weaponry, like this group of angry villagers you see here on the slides.

– Alan Pringle

But can’t AI just do all of this for you?

Let’s just put this out here. I’m sure there’s some executive out there thinking, “I don’t need a consultant. I don’t need a human to do this discovery. Can’t we just have AI do it?” No, you cannot. You, as a human being, need to talk to other living, breathing human beings to understand their pain points and requirements. AI is not going to help you with that.

There are plenty of good uses for AI in the content world, and you may have heard of them in the many sessions on AI at this event. It’s getting a lot of attention. But when I see what it’s actually delivering, when I realize the amount of resources we’re using to deliver that, and then I’m seeing these public-facing chatbots being, let’s say, less than respectful of intellectual property rights, I’m a little salty about AI. Two weeks ago on social media, I saw someone refer to the public-facing chatbots as Grand Theft Autocorrect, and I’m like, “I’m down with that.”

– Alan Pringle

The day after the presentation, Alan’s festive cape was featured on the front page of the LavaCon newsletter!

Panel discussions & community resources

During the conference, Sarah O’Keefe also participated in two expert panels.

Introducing the Component Content Alliance

Marianne Calihanna moderated this panel discussing this new resource for content professionals. If you’re interested in learning more about the CCA, join the CCA LinkedIn group.

Writing a Book on ContentOps: It Takes a Village of Experts

Five panelists sit at a long table, smiling for the camera. A book titled "Content Operations: From Strategy to Scale" is displayed in front of the panel. The group includes three men and two women, all casually dressed, seated with microphones ready for discussion.

Pictured from left to right: Dr. Carlos Evia, Rahel Bailie, Scott Abel, Sarah O’Keefe, and Patrick Bosek.

Scott Abel moderated this panel that unpacked the book, Content Operations from Start to Scale, coordinated and edited by Dr. Carlos Evia. To hear more about the story behind the book from Sarah and Dr. Evia, check out this podcast episode.

Kinetic Council

The conference celebrated the launch of the Kinetic Council, a collaborative group for content professionals created by Rahel Bailie and Larry Swanson. If you want to learn more, join the Kinetic Council LinkedIn group.