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Content pitfalls Industry insights Structured content

Do I need a content strategy consultant?

Do you need a content strategy consultant? If the following signs are uncomfortably familiar to you, the answer is yes:

  • You have contradictory content across departments. Customers get frustrated when the specifications in product literature don’t match what’s in the sales content they read earlier. They then call support to clear up the contradictions. It’s much more efficient to create the content once and reuse it across departments. Increased consistency and accuracy follow.

Alan Pringle
March 21, 2016
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Change management DITA DITA XML—authors Structured content

XML overview for executives

Over the past year or two, our typical XML customer has changed. Until recently, most XML publishing efforts were driven by marketing communications, technical publications, or IT, usually by a technical expert. But today’s customer is much more likely to be an executive who understands the potential business benefits of XML publishing but not the technical details. This article provides an XML overview for executives. What do you need to know before you decide to lead your organization into an XML world?

Sarah O'Keefe
January 20, 2015
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DITA

The politics of DITA

Deciding on a content model is a critical step in many of our projects. Should it be DITA or something else? The answer, it seems, often has more to do with our client’s corporate culture than with actual technical requirements.

Sarah O'Keefe
March 6, 2013
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Structured content

Managing implementation of structured authoring


An updated version of this white paper is in Content Strategy 101. Read the entire book free online, or download the free EPUB edition.

Moving a desktop publishing–based workgroup into structured authoring requires authors to master new concepts, such as hierarchical content organization, information chunking with elements, and metadata labeling with attributes. In addition to these technical challenges, the implementation itself presents significant difficulties. This paper describes Scriptorium Publishing’s methodology for implementing structured authoring environments. This document is intended primarily as a roadmap for our clients, but it could be used as a starting point for any implementation.

ScriptoriumTech
December 31, 2009
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AI Industry insights Podcasts

From black box to business tool: Making AI transparent and accountable

As AI adoption accelerates, accountability and transparency issues are accumulating quickly. What should organizations be looking for, and what tools keep AI transparent? In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe sits down with Nathan Gilmour, the Chief Technical Officer of Writemore AI, to discuss a new approach to AI and accountability.

Sarah O’Keefe: Okay. I’m not going to ask you why this is the only AI tool I’ve heard about that has this type of audit trail, because it seems like a fairly important thing to do.

Nathan Gilmour: It is very important because there are information security policies. AI is this brand-new, shiny, incredibly powerful tool. But in the grand scheme of things, these large language models, the OpenAIs, the Claudes, the Geminis, they’re largely black boxes. We want to bring clarity to these black boxes and make them transparent, because organizations do want to implement AI tools to offer efficiencies or optimizations within their organizations. However, information security policies may not allow it.

Sarah O'Keefe
January 26, 2026
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