Content strategy is planning to use information to advance an organization’s goals. Your organization should have an enterprise content strategy that covers all customer-facing information, both persuasive content and informational content. Marketing content is generally persuasive, and technical content is generally informational.
You have DITA. Now what?
More companies are asking this question as DITA adoption increases. For many of our customers, the first wave of DITA means deciding whether it’s a good fit for their content. The companies that choose to implement DITA find that it increases the overall efficiency of content production with better reuse, automated formatting, and so on.
How do you know it’s time to move to XML? Consult our handy list of indicators.
One common roadblock to content strategy is a lack of funding. This post describes how to get budget, even in lean years (and recently, they have all been lean years!).
You can justify intelligent content with efficiency–more reuse, cheaper translation, better content management. The true value of intelligent content, however, is unlocked when you connect content across the organization.
This year’s tekom/tcworld conference reinforced the ongoing doctrinal chasm between North American technical communication and German technical communication.
I am speaking, of course, of the proper role of DITA in technical communication. If any.
In a recent post on lean content strategy, I wrote about a focus on waste reduction:
After creating a nice automated XML-based process, waste in formatting is eliminated, and we declare victory and go home. Unfortunately, the organization is now producing irrelevant content faster, and the content organization is now positioned as only a cost center.
Is your content perceived as a commodity?
Lean manufacturing begat lean software development which in turn begat lean content strategy.
What does lean content strategy look like?
The roles and responsibilities in an XML (and/or DITA) environment are a little different than in a traditional page layout environment. Figuring out where to move people is a key part of your implementation strategy.
