Content operations (content ops or ContentOps) is the engine that drives your content lifecycle. You need the right workflows in place to ensure your engine is running efficiently. Here are some resources to help you get started:
In episode 122 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Gretyl Kinsey talk about content authors as content ops stakeholders.
“I think it’s really important to note here, a lot of these resources are not human people. They are systems or databases that provide information. You pull information from these multiple sources and put it together to provide a really dynamic and personalized user experience for the people who are reading your content.”
– Alan Pringle
We’ve had the pleasure of implementing DITA in many companies both large and small. Unfortunately, writers almost always have some trepidation about the move. At the same time, there’s a lot for writers to get excited about!
Here are some common remarks from writers—along with responses to encourage a positive outlook about the change.
In episode 121 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow talk about content consumers as content ops stakeholders.
“If you look up a restaurant on your phone and go to view the menu, most of the time, that menu is going to be a PDF. And you are sitting there, zooming in, scrolling around, and pinching, and trying to read this menu that really should have just been a responsive HTML page.”
– Bill Swallow
In episode 120 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Sarah O’Keefe discuss content ops stakeholders in risk management.
“Your regulatory environment for a single product could actually be different depending on where you’re selling it. You have to do things a certain way in Europe. You have to do things a certain way in the US.”
– Sarah O’Keefe
Content as a Service (CaaS) changes publishing from a “push” model to an on-demand model. If you’re looking to pull content from multiple sources and incorporate more flexibility into your content operations, it may be time to consider CaaS. Here are some resources to help you get started:
In episode 119 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Bob Johnson of Tahzoo discuss accessibility when authoring DITA content.
“By its very nature, DITA being strongly structured facilitates more accessible content.”
– Bob Johnson
If you were an early adopter of structured content, there’s a good chance that you have a custom XML content model. This article describes the process Scriptorium uses to make a shift from custom XML into DITA.
A Content as a Service (CaaS) model lets you provide on-demand content that integrates information from various sources to enable richer, customized user experiences.
In episode 118 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Sarah O’Keefe discuss content ops stakeholders in tech support.
“If you are delivering multi-hundred page PDFs to your tech support people, then I can assure you that your tech support people hate you. Opening a 600 page document and then having to search through it while you’re on the phone under all this pressure is not the experience that you want.”
– Sarah O’Keefe
