The last mile: getting approval for your content strategy
You’ve thought about your content strategy. You have a business case. You have a plan. What you don’t have is a budget and approval to proceed. What can you do?
Author: Sarah O'Keefe
Brand credibility
Business case/ROI
Case studies
Content pitfalls
Content silos
Structured content
White papers
Creating a unified customer experience with a content fabric
Coauthored by Anna Schlegel (Senior Director, Globalization and Information Engineering, NetApp) and Sarah O’Keefe (President, Scriptorium Publishing)
The interest in customer experience presents an opportunity for enterprise content strategists. You can use the customer experience angle to finally get content proposals and issues into the discussion. Ultimately, the challenge is in execution—once you raise awareness of the importance of content synchronization, you are expected to deliver on your promises. You must figure out how to deliver information that fits smoothly into the entire customer experience. At a minimum, that requires combining information from multiple departmental silos.
Content strategy for technical communication
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.
The second wave of DITA
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.
Top eight signs it’s time to move to XML
How do you know it’s time to move to XML? Consult our handy list of indicators.
How to get budget for content strategy
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!).
The advent of intelligent content
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.
Sturm und DITA-Drang at tekom
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.
The commodity trap
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?
