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Content operations Content strategy Podcast Podcast transcript

What’s next after LearningDITA? (podcast)

If you’ve taken the courses at LearningDITA.com and you’re interested in starting a DITA project, check out episode 163 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast where Bill Swallow and Sarah O’Keefe talk about the steps you can take to get funding.

“Showing up with cookies never hurts, but what is your executive’s motivation from a business point of view? What are they trying to accomplish in their goals for this next quarter or month or year, and so on? You need to show them, assuming that you can, that moving to structured content, moving to DITA, and changing tools is going to help achieve those business goals.

— Sarah O’Keefe

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Content strategy Podcast Podcast transcript

Brewing a better content strategy through single sourcing (podcast)

In episode 162 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar discuss the benefits of single sourcing as part of your content strategy through the example of two things they love: coffee and beer.

“We know companies that have moved away from a do-it-yourself approach because they had maybe two or three different people putting in half to almost full-time work on the publishing system and not on other facets of the company’s core business or the writing. They were simply there to keep everything working. It just blows my mind that on a scale where you have hundreds of writers contributing content, you are saying, Okay, you three people are going to be solely responsible for keeping this thing up and running so that they can produce their content, rather than having a system that’s designed to keep itself up and running.

— Bill Swallow

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Content operations Webinar

Building the business case for content operations (webinar)

Organizations are recognizing the need for a strategic approach to content creation, management, and distribution, but content operations require upfront and continued investment. In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Mark Kelley discuss how to build the business case for content operations.

In this webinar, you’ll learn

  • Why you must understand the connection between the proximity of content ops to revenue
  • How to position your business case for maximum success
  • When to consider the role of generative AI when seeking funding for content ops

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Content operations Podcast Podcast transcript

Our demands for enterprise content operations software (podcast)

In episode 161 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle share their ideal world for enterprise content operations software, including specific requests for how content management software needs to evolve.

SO: “When I envision this in the ideal universe, it seems that the most efficient way to solve this from a technical point of view would be to take the DITA standard, extend it out so that it is underlying these various systems, and then build up on top of that. I don’t really care. What I do care about is that I need, and our clients need, the ability to move technical content into learning content in an efficient way. And right now that is harder than it should be.”

AP: “Oh, entirely. And I would even argue it should go the other way, because there is stuff possibly on the training side that the people in the product content side need. So both sides need that ability.”

SO: Right, so give us seamless content sharing, please. Pretty please.

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Content operations Learning content Podcast Podcast transcript

Rise of the learning content ecosystem with Phylise Banner (podcast)

In episode 160 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and special guest Phylise Banner talk about the limitations of the learning management system, the rise of the learning content ecosystem, and more.

I think about enterprise-wide applications. Consider the tools that are used to generate help solutions. Let’s just use Jira as an example. You have a knowledge base, enterprise-wide, and everyone at the organization has access to ask a question or search the knowledge base, or something like that. That’s where I want to go, that’s what I want to see. I want my learning experience platform to be like that. I want a knowledge base that I can tap into any place, anytime, anywhere. And then, have my mastery checked in the ways that I want to have it checked.

— Phylise Banner

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Content operations Content strategy White papers

The business case for content operations

This content was first published in Content Operations from Start to Scale: Perspectives from Industry Experts. O’Keefe, S. 2024. The Business Case for Content Operations. In: Evia, C. (ed.) pp. 25–32. Blacksburg: Virginia Tech Publishing.

We have an ingrained mental model of writers as introverted hermits, toiling away in solitude. Eventually, they produce manuscripts, which are fed into a publishing pipeline for editing and production. This model might hold for some fiction writers, but content production looks very different for marketing and technical efforts.

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