In this presentation, Bill Swallow explores the weird yet effective applications of smart content in groups outside of techcomm.
“Moving to smart content or intelligent content has largely so far been driven by efficiency. But the places that are looking at using smarter content now are less interested in the efficiency of that content. They’re more interested in the value that it’s going to bring.”
– Bill Swallow
Content Operations (content ops or ContentOps) is the engine that drives your content lifecycle.
The Scriptorium Content Ops Manifesto describes the four basic principles of content ops:
Enterprise content strategy means including all customer-facing content in your planning. Our enterprise content strategy maturity model provides requirements for that strategy. This article focuses on content integration. How do you unify content across disparate content teams and technology stacks?
In episode 93 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Sarah O’Keefe talk about how to determine whether DITA XML is a good fit for smaller content requirements.
“Scalability or anticipated scale is actually a good reason to implement DITA for a small team.”
–Sarah O’Keefe
Learning content is any material used for educational purposes, including e-learning courses, training guides, instructor guides, instructional videos, and more. This might represent the bulk of the content you produce, or it might be just one part of your overall content set. Either way, it’s important to develop a plan for creating, updating, and delivering learning content as efficiently as possible. Here are some tips for addressing learning content as part of your content strategy.
In episode 91 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Simon Bate continue their discussion about using text strings and microcontent. This is part two of a two-part podcast.
“Make sure that their voice is heard. All groups that are using your strings need to have some input or have a way of communicating their needs to the organizations controlling those strings.”
– Simon Bate
In episode 88 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and special guest Amber Swope of DITA Strategies talk about information architecture.
“Information architecture is a role, not necessarily a position, but by ignoring it, you end up without the discipline and the consistency that really enables great customer experiences.”
– Amber Swope
When we look at structured content, the first priorities are usually efficiency and cost savings. These savings are gained through intelligent content reuse and automated content delivery. The implicit promise of structured authoring is consistency; use structure, get consistent content. But this isn’t always the case, nor should it be.
In episode 87 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Nenad Furtula of Bluestream talk about finding the value when selling structure. Why do so many tech pubs departments fail to get support for structured content and what can we potentially do to change that?
In episode 85 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bill Swallow talk about the steps to structure, how to move from unstructured content to structure, and what each level of maturity looks like.
“It’s important to keep in mind when you move from step two to step three that your authoring tools may change. The writers might have gotten used to working with one set of tools in steps one and two. But as you move to structure, the tools that you’re using for unstructured content may not support the underlying framework for the structure that you’re moving forward with.”
– Bill Swallow
