Position enterprise content operations for success (podcast)

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In episode 174 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle explore the mindset shifts that are needed to elevate your organization’s content operations to the enterprise level.

If you’re in a desktop tool and everything’s working and you’re happy and you’re delivering what you’re supposed to deliver and basically it ain’t broken, then don’t fix it. You are done. What we’re talking about here is, okay, for those of you that are not in a good place, you need to level up. You need to move into structured content. You need to have a content ops organization that’s going to support that. What’s your next step to deliver at the enterprise level?

— Sarah O’Keefe

Related links:

• The business case for content operations
• Do you have efficient content ops?
• Technical debt in content operations
• Content Ops Forecast: Mostly Sunny With A Chance Of Chaos (webinar)

LinkedIn:

• Sarah O’Keefe
• Alan Pringle

Transcript:

Alan Pringle: 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 this episode, we talk about setting up your content operations for success. Hey everyone, I am Alan Pringle and I am back here with Sarah O ‘Keefe in yet another podcast episode today. Hello, Sarah.

Sarah O’Keefe: Hey there.

AP: Sarah and I have been chatting about this issue. It’s kind of been this nebulous thing floating around and we’re gonna try to nail it down a little bit more in this conversation today. This idea of setting up your organization for success and their content operations. And to start the conversation, let’s just put it out there. Let’s define content ops. What are content operations, Sarah?

SO: Content strategy is the plan. What are we going to do, how do we want to approach it? Content ops is the system that puts all of that in place. And the reason that content ops these days is a big topic of conversation is because content ops in sort of a desktop world is, well, we’re going to buy this tool, and then we’re going to build some templates, and then we’re going to use them consistently. And the end, right? That’s pretty straightforward. But content operations in a modern content production environment means that we’re talking about lot of different kinds of automation and integration. So the tools are getting bigger, they’re scarier, they’re more enterprise level as opposed to a little desktop thing. And configuring a component content management system, connecting it to your web CMS and feeding the content that you’re generating in your CCMS, your component content management system, into other systems via some sort of an API is a whole different kettle of fish than dealing with, you know, your basic old school unstructured authoring tool. So yeah.

AP: Right. But in their defense, for the people who are using desktop publishing, that is still content operations.

SO: Sure, it is.

AP: It’s just a different flavor of content operations. And frankly, a lot of people, a lot of companies and organizations outgrow it, which is why they’re going to this next level that you’re talking about.

SO: Right. So if you’re in a desktop tool and everything’s working and you’re happy and you’re delivering what you’re supposed to deliver and basically it ain’t broken, then don’t fix it. You are done. You should shut off this podcast and go do something more fun with your time. Right? What we’re talking about here is, okay, for those of you that are not in a good place, you need to level up. You need to move into structured content. You need to have a content ops organization that’s going to support that. What do you do? What’s your, you know, what’s your next step and what does it look like to organize this project in such a way that you move into, you know, that next level up and you can deliver all the things that you’re required to deliver in the bigger enterprise, whatever you want to call that level of things. So desktop people, I’m slightly jealous of you because it’s all working and you’re in great shape and good for you. I’m happy for you.

AP: So making this shift from content operations and desktop publishing to something more enterprise level like you’re talking about, that is a huge mind shift. is also technically something that can be quite the shock to the system. How do you go about making that leap?

SO: Well, I’m reminded of a safety announcement I heard on a plane one time where they were talking about how, you know, when you open the overhead bins after landing, you want to be careful. And the flight attendant said, shift happens. And we all just looked at her like, did you actually just say that? And she sort of smirked. So making this shift can be, it’s can be, it’s difficult, right? And what we’re usually looking at is, okay, you’ve been using, you know, Word for the past 10, 15, 20, 57 years. And now we need to move out of that into, you know, something structured XML, maybe it’s DITA, and then get that all up and running. And so what’s going to happen is that you have to think pretty carefully about what does it look like to build the system and what does it look like to sustain it? Now here I’m talking particularly to large companies because what we find is the outcome in the end, right, when this is all said and done and everything’s up and running and working, what you’re probably going to have is some sort of an organization that’s responsible for sustainment of your content ops. So you’re to have a content ops group of some sort, and they’re going to do things like run the CCMS and build new publishing pipelines and keep the integrations moving and help train the authors. And in some cases, they’re kind of a services organization in the sense that you have an extended group of maybe hundreds of authors who are never going to move into structured content. So you’re taking on the, again, word content that they are producing, but you’re moving it into the structured content system as a service, like an ingestion or migration service to your larger staff or employee population. Okay, so in the future world, you have this group that knows all the things and knows how to keep everything running and knows how to kind of manage that and maintain it and do that work. And probably in there, you have an information architect who’s thinking about how to organize content, how to classify and label things, how to make sure the semantics, you know, the actual element tags are good and all that stuff. But right now, you’re sitting in desktop authoring land with a bunch of people that are really good at using whatever your desktop authoring tool may be. And you have to sort of cross that chasm over to, now we’re this content ops organization with structured content, probably a component content management system. So what I would probably look at here is, you know, what is the outcome? You know, thinking about the system has stood up, we’ve made our tool selection, everything’s working, everything’s configured, everything’s great. What does it look like to have an organization that’s responsible for sustaining that? And that could be, you know, two or three or 10 people, depending on the size, again, the size and scope of your organization and the content that you’re supporting. But in order to get there, you first have to get it all set up. You have to do the work to get it all up and running. Our job typically is that we get brought in to make that transition. Right? So we’re not going to be for a large organization, we’re not going to be your permanent content ops organization. We might provide some support on the side, but you’re going to have people in-house that are going to do that. They’re going to be presumably full-time permanent kind of staff members. They know your content and your domain and they have expertise in, you know, whatever your industry may be.

AP: Right.

SO: Our job is to get you there as fast as possible. So we get brought in to do that setting up piece, right? What are the best systems? What are the things you need to be evaluating? What are the weird requirements that you have that other organizations don’t have that are going to affect your decisions around systems and for that matter, people, right? Are you regulated? What is the risk level of this content? How many languages are you translating into? What kind of deliverables do you have? What kind of integration requirements do you have? And when I say integration, to be more specific, maybe you’re an industrial company and so you have tasks, service, maintenance kinds of things, and you need those tasks like how to replace a battery or how to swap out breaks to be in your service management system so that a field service tech can look at their assignments for the day, which are, you know, go here and do this repair and go here and do this maintenance. And then it gets connected to, and here’s the task you need and here’s the list of tools you need. And here are all the pieces and parts you need in order to do that job correctly. Diagnostic troubleshooting systems. You might have a chat bot and you want to feed all your content into the chat bot so that it can interact with customers. You may have a tech support organization that needs all this content and they want it in their system and not in whatever system you’re delivering. So we get into all these questions around where does this content go? You know, where does it have tentacles into your organization and what other things do we need to connect it to and how are we going to do that? So I think it’s very helpful to look at the upfront effort of configure or, you know, making decisions, deciding on designing your system and setting up your system versus sustaining, enabling, and supporting the system.

AP: There are lots of layers that you just talked about and lots of steps. It is very unusual, at least in my experience, to find someone, some kind of personnel resource, either within or hiring, who is going to have all of the things that you just mentioned because it is a lot to expect one person to have all of that knowledge, especially if you are moving to a new system, and you’ve got a situation where the current people are well versed in what is happening right now in that infrastructure, that ecosystem. To expect them to magically shift their brain and figure out new things, that’s a lot to ask for. And I think that’s where having this third-party consultant person, voice, is very helpful because we can help you narrow in on the things that are better fits for what you’ve got going on now and what you anticipate coming in the future.

SO: Yeah, I mean, the thing is that what you want from your internal organization is the sustainability. But in order to get there, you have to actually build the system, right? And nearly always when people reach out to us and say, we’re making this transition, we’re interested, we’re thinking about it, et cetera, they’re doing it because they have a serious problem of some sort. We are going into Europe and we have no localization capabilities or we have them, but we’ve been doing, you know, a little bit of French for Canada and a tiny bit of Spanish for Mexico. And now we’re being told about all these languages that we have to support for the European Union. And we can’t possibly scale our, you know, 2 .5 languages up to 28. It just, it just can’t be done. We’ll, we’ll drown. Or people say, We have all these new requirements and we can’t get there. We’ve been told to take our content that’s locked into, you know, page based PDF, whatever, and we’re being required to deliver it, not just onto the website and not just into HTML, as you know, content as a service, as an API deliverable, as micro content, all this stuff. And they just, they just can’t, you can’t get there from here. And so you have people on the inside who understand, as you said, the current system really well, and understand the needs of the organization in the sense of these things that they’re being asked to do and they understand the domain. They understand their particular product set internally. But it’s just completely unreasonable to ask them to stand up, support and sustain a new system with new technology while still delivering the existing content because, you know, that doesn’t go away. You can’t just push the pause button for five months.

AP: No, the real world does not stop when you are going on some kind of huge digital transformation project like one of these content ops projects. So basically what we’re talking about here, especially on the front end, the planning discovery side, is we can help augment, help you focus. And then once you kind of picked your tools and you start setting things up, there’s some choices there that sometimes have to do with like the size of an organization about how to proceed with implementation and then maintenance beyond that. Let’s focus on that a little bit.

SO: Most of the organizations we deal with are quite large. Actually, all of the organizations we deal with are quite large compared to us, right? It’s just a matter of are they a lot bigger or are they a lot, a lot, a lot, lot bigger?

AP: Correct.

SO: Within that, the question becomes how much help do you want from us and how much help do your people need in order to level up and get to the point where they can be self-sufficient? We have a lot of projects we do where we come in and we help with that sort of big hump of work, that big implementation push, and help get it done. And then once you go into sustainment or maintenance mode, it’s 10% of the effort or something like that. And so either you staff that internally as you’re building out your organization internally, or we stick around in sort of a fractional, smaller role to help with that. The pendulum kind of shifted on this for a while, or way back, way back when it was get in, do the work and get out. We rarely had ongoing maintenance support. Then for a bit, we were doing a lot of maintenance relative to the prior efforts. And now it feels as though we’re seeing a shift in a little bit of a shift back to doing this internally. Organizations that are big enough to have staff like a content ops group or a content ops person are bringing it back in-house instead of offloading it onto somebody like us. We’re happy to do whatever makes the most sense for the organization. At a certain size, my advice is always to bring this in-house because ultimately, your long-term staff member who has domain expertise on your products and your world and your corporate culture and has social capital within your organization will be more effective than offloading it onto an external organization, no matter how great we are.

AP: To wrap up, think I want to touch on one last thing here, and that’s change management. And yes, we beat that drum all the time in these conversations on this podcast, but I don’t think we can overstate how important it is to keep those communication channels open and be sure everyone understands what’s going on and why you’re doing what you’re doing. What we’ve talked about so far is very much, okay, we’ve come up with a technical plan, we’ve done a technical implementation, and now we’re going to set it up for success and maintain it for the long haul and adjust it as we need to as things change. But there are still a group of people who have to use those tools, your content creators, your reviewers, all of those people, your subject matter experts, I mean, I can go on and on here, they are still part of this equation here and we can’t forget about them while we’re so focused on the technical aspects of things.

SO: I would say this and directly to the people that are doing the work, know, the authors, the subject matter experts, the people operating within the system. I would look at this as an opportunity. It is an opportunity for you to pick up a whole bunch of new skills, new tools, new technologies, new ways of working. And while I know it’s going to be uncomfortable and difficult and occasionally very annoying as you discover that the new tools do some things really well, but the things that were easy in the old tools are now difficult, right? There’s just going to be that thing where the expertise you had in old tool A is no longer relevant and you have to sort of learn everything all over again, which is super, super annoying. But it’s fodder for your resume, right? I mean, if it comes to it, you’re going to have better skills and you’re going to have another set of tools and you’re going to be able to say, yes, I do know how to do that. So I think that just from a self-preservation point of view, it makes a whole lot of sense to get involved in some of these projects and move them forward because it’s going to help you in the long run, whether you stay at that organization or whether you move on to somewhere else, you know, at some point in the future. That’s one of the ways I would look at this. It is certainly true that the change falls on the authors, right?

AP: Correct.

SO: They all have to change how they work and learn new ways of working and there’s a lot there and I don’t want to you know sort of sweep that aside because it can be very painful. We try to advocate for making sure that authors have time to learn the new thing that people acknowledge that they’re not going to be as productive day one in the new system as they were in the old system that they know inside out and upside down that they get training and knowledge transfer and just, you a little bit of space to take on this new thing and understand it and get to a point where they use it well. So I think there’s a, you know, there’s a combination of things there. For those of you that are leading these projects, it is not reasonable, again, to stand the thing up and say, go live is Monday. So, you know, I expect deliverables on Tuesday. That is not okay.

AP: Yeah. And you’ve just wasted a ton of money and effort because you’ve thrown a tool at people who don’t know how to use it. So all of your beautiful setup kind of goes to waste. So there are lot of options here as far as making sure that your content ops do succeed. And I don’t think it’s like pretty much everything else in consulting land. It is not one size fits all.

SO: It depends, as always. We should just generate one podcast and put different titles on it and just say it depends over and over again.

AP: Pretty much, we’d probably just get an MP3 of us saying that phrase over and over again and just loop it and that will be a podcast episode. And on that not-great suggestion for our next episode, I’m gonna wrap this up. So thank you, Sarah.

SO: Thank you.

AP: I think she just choked on her tea, everyone.

SO: I did.

AP: Thank you for listening to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.