For nine years, the Scriptorium site LearningDITA.com served more than 16,000 students seeking knowledge about the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) XML standard. A critical system failure forced Scriptorium to rebuild the site, so we focused our consulting expertise on ourselves to address a replatforming challenge for structured learning content.
Your organization’s content debt costs more than you think. In this podcast, host Sarah O’Keefe and guest Dipo Ajose-Coker unpack the five stages of content debt from denial to action. Sarah and Dipo share how to navigate each stage to position your content—and your AI—for accuracy, scalability, and global growth.
The blame stage: “It’s the tools. It’s the process. It’s the people.” Technical writers hear, “We’re going to put you into this department, and we’ll get this person to manage you with this new agile process,” or, “We’ll make you do things this way.” The finger-pointing begins. Tech teams blame the authors. Authors blame the CMS. Leadership questions the ROI of the entire content operations team. This is often where organizations say, “We’ve got to start making a change.” They’re either going to double down and continue building content debt, or they start looking for a scalable solution.
— Dipo Ajose-Coker
How can global brands use AI in localization without losing accuracy, cultural nuance, and brand integrity? In this podcast, host Bill Swallow and guest Steve Maule explore the opportunities, risks, and evolving roles that AI brings to the localization process.
The most common workflow shift in translation is to start with AI output, then have a human being review some or all of that output. It’s rare that enterprise-level companies want a fully human translation. However, one of the concerns that a lot of enterprises have about using AI is security and confidentiality. We have some customers where it’s written in our contract that we must not use AI as part of the translation process. Now, that could be for specific content types only, but they don’t want to risk personal data being leaked. In general, though, the default service now for what I’d call regular common translation is post editing or human review of AI content. The biggest change is that’s really become the norm.
—Steve Maule, VP of Global Sales at Acclaro
At LavaCon 2025, we investigated the impossible dream of customer content, uncovered the potential of structured learning content, and shared solutions to make sure your content doesn’t sleep with the fishes—or the whale sharks.
What if you could escape copy-and-paste and build dynamic learning experiences at scale? In this podcast, host Sarah O’Keefe and guest Mike Buoy explore the benefits of structured learning content. They share how organizations can break down silos between techcomm and learning content, deliver content across channels, and support personalized learning experiences at scale.
The good thing about structured authoring is that you have a structure. If this is the concept that we need to talk about and discuss, here’s all the background information that goes with it. With that structure comes consistency, and with that consistency, you have more of your information and knowledge documented so that it can then be distributed and repackaged in different ways. If all you have is a PowerPoint, you can’t give somebody a PowerPoint in the middle of an oil change and say, “Here’s the bare minimum you need,” when I need to know, “Okay, what do I do if I’ve cross-threaded my oil drain bolt?” That’s probably not in the PowerPoint. That could be an instructor story that’s going to be told if you have a good instructor who’s been down that really rocky road, but again, a consistent structure is going to set you up so that you have robust base content.
— Mike Buoy
CompTIA plays a pivotal role in the global technical ecosystem. As the largest vendor-neutral training and credentialing organization for technology professionals, CompTIA creates career-advancing opportunities across a wide range of disciplines—cybersecurity, infrastructure, data, and more.
With the support of Scriptorium and other partners, CompTIA consolidated fragmented workflows into a unified ecosystem for structured learning content. The transformation has improved production efficiency and allows CompTIA to deliver global content without pausing ongoing content production. Additionally, it allows instructional designers to invest in compelling learning experiences instead of spending their time manually formatting content.
Every time someone views your product content, it’s a purposeful engagement with direct business value. Are you making the most of that interaction? In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, special guest Patrick Bosek, co-founder and CEO of Heretto, and Sarah O’Keefe, founder and CEO of Scriptorium, explore how your techcomm traffic reduces support costs, improves customer retention, and creates a cohesive user experience.
Patrick Bosek: Nobody reads a page in your documentation site for no reason. Everybody that is there has a purpose, and that purpose always has an economic impact on your business. People who are on the documentation site are not using your support, which means they’re saving you a ton of money. It means that they’re learning about your product, either because they’ve just purchased it and they want to utilize it, so they’re onboarding, and we all know that utilization turns into retention and retention is good because people who retain pay us more money, or they’re trying to figure out how to use other aspects of the system and get more value out of it. There’s nobody who goes to a doc site who’s like, “I’m bored. I’m just going to go and see what’s on the doc site today.” Every person, every session on your documentation site is there with a purpose, and it’s a purpose that matters to your business.
In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow unpack the promise, pitfalls, and disruptive impact of AI on multilingual content. From pivot languages to content hygiene, they explore what’s next for language service providers and global enterprises alike.
Bill Swallow: I think it goes without saying that there’s going to be disruption again. Every single change, whether it’s in the localization industry or not, has resulted in some type of disruption. Something has changed. I’ll be blunt about it. In some cases, jobs were lost, jobs were replaced, new jobs were created. For LSPs, I think AI is going to, again, be another shift, the same that happened when machine translation came out. LSPs had to shift and pivot how they approach their bottom line with people. GenAI is going to take a lot of the heavy lifting off of the translators, for better or for worse, and it’s going to force a copy edit workflow. I think it’s really going to be a model where people are going to be training and cleaning up after AI.
Every few years, a new publishing trend sends leadership into a frenzy:
Sound familiar?
In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps webinar series, host Sarah O’Keefe and guest Jack Molisani explored how structured content will futureproof your content operations no matter what tech trends come along. Learn how to prepare content once and publish everywhere, from toasters to chatbots to jumbotrons and beyond.
Is AI really ready to generate your training materials? In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle tackle the trends around AI in learning content. They explore where generative AI adds value—like creating assessments and streamlining translation—and where it falls short. If you’re exploring how AI can fit into your learning content strategy, this episode is for you.
Sarah O’Keefe: But what’s actually being said is AI will generate your presentation for you. If your presentation is so not new, if the information in it is so basic that generative AI can successfully generate your presentation for you, that implies to me that you don’t have anything interesting to say. So then, we get to this question of how do we use AI in learning content to make good choices, to make better learning content? How do we advance the cause?
