For his 1959 horror movie The Tingler, director/producer William Castle had movie theater seats rigged with buzzers to scare moviegoers during a scene when the Tingler creature is loose in a theater. Patrons in those seats probably didn’t enjoy the jolt—or making a spectacle of themselves because of the Tingler’s “attack.”
Quick! What’s the first thing you think about when you want to change your content strategy (the way you produce and distribute content)? If your answer is “tools,” you’re in good company.
If you can’t handle some rough-and-tumble adversity, you are not ready to manage the implementation of a new content strategy.
We are moving companies away from a heroic model to a process-driven model. Processes are much less exciting that the adrenaline rush that comes from working miracles to deliver the impossible.
Every department has its resident tech wizard: the maintainer of the templates, the DITA Open Toolkit, the wiki, and so on. What happens when that wizard flies off to a new kingdom?
When selecting authoring and publishing tools, there is an unfortunate human instinct to cling to the familiar. This ranges from a slight preference for the tool currently in use to “You will pry this software from my cold, dead hands.”
Knowing you can rely on someone is vital to professional relationships. But when it comes to proposing process change, the words “trust me” are never, ever enough.
This morning, I was among the many who received an email from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. He was responding to criticisms that Netflix “lacked respect and humility in the way [the company] announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes.”
Getting attractive PDF output out of XML is a serious technical challenge. But in some organizations, the PDF requirement is being used to prevent to unwanted workflow changes.
Over the weekend, I was catching up with a friend I hadn’t seen since the mid-term elections here in the US. While hashing out what the election results meant, my friend said that he felt that history would be kinder to the accomplishments of Congress than the electorate was.
