It’s hard to believe that the DITA standard needs additional tags. I tried counting them, but gave up at 150, when I had only reached the letter G. (Be my guest: https://www.oxygenxml.com/dita/1.3/specs/langRef/quick-reference/all-elements-a-to-z.html)
When organizations replatform from one content management system to another, unchecked technical debt can weigh down the new system. In contrast, strategic replatforming can be a tool for reducing technical debt. In episode 172 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow share how to set your replatforming project up for success.
Here’s the real question I think you have to ask before replatforming—is the platform actually the problem? Is it legitimately broken? As Bill said, has it evolved away from the business requirements to a point where it no longer meet your needs? Or there are some other questions to ask, such as, what are your processes around that platform? Do you have weird, annoying, and inefficient processes?
— Sarah O’Keefe
Just like discovering faulty wiring during a home renovation, technical debt in content operations leads to unexpected complications and costs. In episode 171 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle explore the concept of technical debt, strategies for navigating it, and more.
In many cases, you can get away with the easy button, the quick-and-dirty approach when you have a relatively smaller volume of content. Then as you expand, bad, bad things happen, right? It just balloons to a point where you can’t keep up.
— Sarah O’Keefe
Does any of this sound familiar?
It’s time for a new way of managing content. Here’s how a content strategist can help you create successful content operations.
Technical debt is “the implied cost of future reworking required when choosing an easy but limited solution instead of a better approach that could take more time,” Wikipedia, “Technical debt.”. Like financial debt, technical debt isn’t always a bad thing. You can use a loan to buy a house right away (at least in the U.S.) and then pay off the debt over time while living in the house. Technical debt allows you to create something quickly instead of doing it exactly right and taking much longer.
Too much technical debt, though, will hamstring your work. The trick is to find the Goldilocks solution.
In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series, Scriptorium principals Sarah O’Keefe (CEO), Alan Pringle (COO), and Bill Swallow (Director of Operations) provide practical insights on the future of content operations. They’ll deliver sunny predictions, warn of upcoming storms, and equip you to weather unprecedented fronts in the content industry.
In episode 170 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar dive into the world of content localization strategy. Learn about the obstacles organizations face from initial planning to implementation, when and how organizations should consider localization, localization trends, and more.
Localization is generally a key business driver. Are you positioning your products, services, what have you for one market, one language, and that’s all? Are you looking at diversifying that? Are you looking to expand into foreign markets? Are you looking to hit multilingual people in the same market? All of those factors. Ideally as a company, you’re looking at this from the beginning as part of your business strategy.
— Bill Swallow
Marketing professionals have opinions on what defines effective content strategy. But what if these definitions barely scratch the surface? The world of content strategy is much larger than marketing, and organizations can see amazing results when they incorporate an enterprise content strategy.
Is your team skilled in navigating your current CCMS, but unfamiliar with the system you plan to adopt? During a recent replatforming project, we worked with a team of in-house experts to build out a new CCMS. The combination of their domain expertise and our replatforming experience was a big success. The client is now self-sufficient and thriving in their new CCMS environment.
In episode 169 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Sebastian Göttel of Quanos engage in a captivating conversation on generative AI and its impact on technical documentation. To bring these concepts to life, this English version of the podcast was created with the support of AI transcription and translation tools!
Sarah O’Keefe: So what does AI have to do with poems?
Sebastian Göttel: You often have the impression that AI creates knowledge; that is, creates information out of nothing. And the question is, is that really the case? I think it is quite normal for German scholars to not only look at the text at hand, but also to read between the lines and allow the cultural subtext to flow. From the perspective of scholars of German literature, generative AI actually only interprets or reconstructs information that already exists. Maybe it’s hidden, only implicitly hinted at. But this then becomes visible through the AI.
