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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
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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
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Content lifecycle Content management Podcasts

Full transcript of Battling content strategy inertia podcast

Sarah O’Keefe: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 34 of this podcast, we talk about inertia. It’s August, so here we are in the dog days of summer in North Carolina. It’s hot and humid, and doing absolutely nothing seems like pretty much the best and only strategy right now. That got us thinking about inertia in content strategy. It takes a big push to get a content strategy project moving, and a lot of times, do nothing seems like a much safer strategy than actually taking action and doing something. But of course, the choice to do nothing is, itself, a decision, and may lead to sunburn if you just stay out there too long.

Sarah O'Keefe
August 15, 2018
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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.

Bill Swallow
September 8, 2015
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