Content lifecycle

Content lifecycle Content management Content reuse Scalability Structured content

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

Content lifecycle Content management

The content lifecycle: Archiving

You’ve started developing a content strategy and are getting a better grasp on the content lifecycle. But what do you do about older content? It’s not as relevant as your most recent content, but there are still times when it proves useful. Your archiving approach is an important part of your content strategy and is often overlooked.

If you are moving from one content environment to another, you only want to convert what’s necessary. Archiving and organizing your content will help you decide what legacy content you want to convert. Here are some things to keep in mind when putting a plan in place for archiving content.

ScriptoriumTech

February 22, 2021

Content lifecycle Content management Content pitfalls

Content lifecycle challenges

“When you share content across the company in ways you haven’t before, everyone has to shift to a culture of collaboration.”

Gretyl Kinsey

May 11, 2020

Content lifecycle Content management Food & fun

Plumber’s guide to content workflows

Last week I was working in my home office when I heard an odd hissing sound. Upon investigation, I found that my hot water heater had decided to empty itself onto the basement floor.

Fortunately I had some failsafes in place; the heater’s pressure release valve was doing its job by routing scalding hot water onto the floor, and my floor is slightly slanted toward a drain in the floor. This got me thinking (because my brain is oddly wired this way) about failsafes in content workflows.