When a DITA-based workflow is the best choice to support business requirements for your content, you may face the daunting task of convincing leadership to move forward with this enterprise-wide change. Sarah O’Keefe shared practical tips for overcoming common objections to DITA during her session at the AEM Guides user conference.
If you’ve taken the courses at LearningDITA.com and you’re interested in starting a DITA project, check out episode 163 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast where Bill Swallow and Sarah O’Keefe talk about the steps you can take to get funding.
“Showing up with cookies never hurts, but what is your executive’s motivation from a business point of view? What are they trying to accomplish in their goals for this next quarter or month or year, and so on? You need to show them, assuming that you can, that moving to structured content, moving to DITA, and changing tools is going to help achieve those business goals.”
— Sarah O’Keefe
Organizations are recognizing the need for a strategic approach to content creation, management, and distribution, but content operations require upfront and continued investment. In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Mark Kelley discuss how to build the business case for content operations.
In this webinar, you’ll learn
What if your training content could be seamlessly tailored to a learner’s environment no matter where or how they interact with it?
In episode 160 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and special guest Phylise Banner talk about the limitations of the learning management system, the rise of the learning content ecosystem, and more.
“I think about enterprise-wide applications. Consider the tools that are used to generate help solutions. Let’s just use Jira as an example. You have a knowledge base, enterprise-wide, and everyone at the organization has access to ask a question or search the knowledge base, or something like that. That’s where I want to go, that’s what I want to see. I want my learning experience platform to be like that. I want a knowledge base that I can tap into any place, anytime, anywhere. And then, have my mastery checked in the ways that I want to have it checked. ”
— Phylise Banner
This content was first published in Content Operations from Start to Scale: Perspectives from Industry Experts, Dr. Carlos Evia, editor; Virginia Tech Publishing.
We have an ingrained mental model of writers as introverted hermits, toiling away in solitude. Eventually, they produce manuscripts, which are fed into a publishing pipeline for editing and production. This model might hold for some fiction writers, but content production looks very different for marketing and technical efforts.
In episode 158 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and special guest Dipo Ajose-Coker discuss the challenges of moving from unstructured to structured content.
“I think we could make broad categories of challenges as tools, technology, people, and methodologies, and I think we’ll just dive into these because they’re not necessarily independent—some of them flow one into the other. One of the most complex and challenging parts is implementation. Changing over to a new tool also involves changing processes and training the staff. Basically, some documentation teams struggle with that initial learning curve.”
— Dipo Ajose-Coker
In episode 155 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and Christine Cuellar dig into pain points that Scriptorium has helped organizations resolve since 1997.
“The amount of time content creators spend on formatting and for little payoff, it’s just… the numbers don’t add up. Especially in the 21st century now that we have so many automated ways to publish things to multiple channels, if you are futzing and tinkering with formatting trying to deliver to multiple channels, I can say with a great degree of certainty, you are absolutely doing it wrong.”
— Alan Pringle
In episode 154 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar discuss the similarities between the industry-disrupting innovations of machine translation and AI, lessons we learned from machine translation that we can apply to AI, and more.
“Regardless of whether you’re talking about machine translation or AI, don’t just run with whatever it provides without giving it a thorough check. The other thing that we’re seeing with AI that wasn’t so much an issue with machine translation is more of a concern around copyright and ownership.”
— Bill Swallow
Our team enjoyed meeting the passionate people we met during MadWorld 2023. Now that the MadCap Software family has acquired the IXIA CCMS, learn more about what it is, how it adds value to Flare users, and when you may consider transitioning to this powerful tool.
