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Author: Sarah O'Keefe

Content strategy

Content scalability: Removing friction from your content lifecycle

First published in Intercom (October 2020) by the Society for Technical Communication.

Scalable content requires you to assess your content lifecycle, identify points of friction, and remove them.

Company growth magnifies the challenges of information enablement. When you grow, you add products, product variants, markets, and languages—and each of those factors adds complexity. Process inefficiencies in your content lifecycle are multiplied for every new language or customer segment.

As a result, content scalability—increasing content throughput without increasing resources—becomes critical. Consider a simple localization example: when you translate, you have a few manual workarounds that require 1 hour of work per 100 pages of translated content. So if you translate 100 pages of content into 8 languages, you have 8 hours of workarounds. But as your content load grows, you are shipping 1,000 pages of content per month and translating into 20 languages. Suddenly, you are facing 200 hours of manual workarounds per month—the equivalent of one full-time person per year.

Sarah O'Keefe
May 10, 2021
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Content operations

Content operations (content ops)

Content operations (content ops or ContentOps ) refers to the system your organization uses to develop, deploy, and deliver customer-facing information. Rahel Bailie refers to it as the way that your organization operationalizes your content strategy.

Over at easyDITA, there’s a more aspirational definition, which includes the purpose of good content ops:

Content Operations — ContentOps — is the infrastructure that maximizes your content creators’ efforts and guards against procedural errors by automating as much of the content development process as possible. 

Sarah O'Keefe
March 29, 2021
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Podcast Podcast transcript

The personalization paradox (podcast)

In episode 84 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe talks with Val Swisher of Content Rules about why companies fail and how to succeed at delivering personalized experiences at scale.

“It all has to be completely standardized in order to be successful. There have to be small, individual, standardized chunks of content that are devoid of format that can be mixed and matched. Then the output can be personalized to the person who asked for it and sent to them at that moment in time.”

—Val Swisher

Sarah O'Keefe
November 16, 2020
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Content strategy

Enterprise content strategy maturity model

“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. 

Sarah O'Keefe
July 27, 2020
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Webcast

Surviving and thriving with AEM and DITA (webcast)

Sarah O’Keefe discusses general best practices for CCMS implementations, along with a specific focus on the AEM DITA CCMS.

“You then configure AEM XML to support your content model with specialization, constraints, and authoring experience. You can build authoring templates that give people a framework to work in and you can also customize the actual user experience.”

—Sarah O’Keefe

Sarah O'Keefe
June 29, 2020
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DITA

Improving DITA workflow

An organization’s first foray in DITA and structured content is most often driven by one of the following:

  • Merger or acquisition: After a merger, the organization needs to refactor content workflows and so they decide to move into structured content and DITA.
  • Localization: The organization is growing and needs to ramp up content production in many languages.
  • Smart content: The organization recognizes content as a key business asset and wants to wring maximum value out of the content lifecycle.

Sarah O'Keefe
June 8, 2020
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Analysis

The challenge of digital transformation

Digital transformation touches on every aspect of business operations. At Scriptorium, our focus is on high-value content, so our definition of digital transformation is also content-centric:

“Digital transformation is the use of technology to enrich information delivery.”

“Enriched” information is usually divided into two major categories:

  • Content delivery
  • Context

Sarah O'Keefe
April 27, 2020
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