LavaCon 2024 delivered actionable insights, emphasizing that your business case for content operations requires strong alignment with business goals. Successful content modernization hinges on executive support, effective change management, and a wary eye on AI.
Being a native English speaker and first-time visitor to the incredible country of Japan, I found several takeaways for creating content with translation in mind.
Plus, in this blog, you’ll find delicious pictures of world-class food. (Caution: may cause salivation and a desperate urge to buy a plane ticket. Or is that just me?)
Are you looking for real-world examples of enterprise content operations in action? Join Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Adam Newton, Senior Director of Globalization, Product Documentation, & Business Process Automation at NetApp for episode 175 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast. Hear insights from NetApp’s journey to enterprise-level publishing, lessons learned from leading-edge GenAI tool development, and more.
We have writers in our authoring environment who are not writers by nature or bias. They’re subject matter experts. And they’re in our system and generating content. That was about joining us in our environment, reap the benefits of multi-language output, reap the benefits of fast updates, reap the benefits of being able to deliver a web-like experience as opposed to a PDF. But what I think we’ve found now is that this is a data project. This generative AI assistant has changed my thinking about what my team does. Yes, on one level, we have a team of writers devoted to producing the docs. But in another way, you can look at it and say, well, we’re a data engine.
— Adam Newton
Translation troubles? This podcast is for you! In episode 173 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and special guest Mike McDermott, Director of Language Services at MadTranslations, share strategies for overcoming common content localization challenges and unlocking new market opportunities.
Mike McDermott: It gets very cumbersome to continually do these manual steps to get to a translation update. Once the authoring is done, ideally you just send it right through translation and the process starts.
Bill Swallow: So from an agile point of view, I am assuming that you’re talking about not necessarily translating an entire publication from page one to page 300, but you’re saying as soon as a particular chunk of content is done and “blessed,” let’s say, by reviewers in the native language, then it can immediately go off to translation even if other portions are still in progress.
Mike McDermott: Exactly. That’s what working in this semantic content and these types of environments will do for a content creator. You don’t need to wait for the final piece of content to be finalized to get things into translation.
It’s hard to believe that the DITA standard needs additional tags. I tried counting them, but gave up at 150, when I had only reached the letter G. (Be my guest: https://www.oxygenxml.com/dita/1.3/specs/langRef/quick-reference/all-elements-a-to-z.html)
When organizations replatform from one content management system to another, unchecked technical debt can weigh down the new system. In contrast, strategic replatforming can be a tool for reducing technical debt. In episode 172 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow share how to set your replatforming project up for success.
Here’s the real question I think you have to ask before replatforming—is the platform actually the problem? Is it legitimately broken? As Bill said, has it evolved away from the business requirements to a point where it no longer meet your needs? Or there are some other questions to ask, such as, what are your processes around that platform? Do you have weird, annoying, and inefficient processes?
— Sarah O’Keefe
In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series, Scriptorium principals Sarah O’Keefe (CEO), Alan Pringle (COO), and Bill Swallow (Director of Operations) provide practical insights on the future of content operations. They’ll deliver sunny predictions, warn of upcoming storms, and equip you to weather unprecedented fronts in the content industry.
Is your team skilled in navigating your current CCMS, but unfamiliar with the system you plan to adopt? During a recent replatforming project, we worked with a team of in-house experts to build out a new CCMS. The combination of their domain expertise and our replatforming experience was a big success. The client is now self-sufficient and thriving in their new CCMS environment.
In episode 168 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Leslie Farinella, Chief Strategy Officer at Xyleme, discuss the challenges facing content operations for learning content, insights for navigating information silos, and recommendations for successful enterprise-wide collaboration.
Why do we still have these silos of content? Back to what you said, Sarah, if we’re thinking about the learner experience, the learner doesn’t distinguish between classroom, e-learning, looking something up, or going to technical documentation. They just know, “I gotta get my job done. I need to perform. I need to know what I’m doing.”
— Leslie Farinella
In the wide world of content, we’ve got a lot of terms. Some may be new to you, and others have contested definitions, which makes clear communication—typically our bread and butter—a challenge. If you’re exploring efficiency in your organization’s content processes, this post clarifies the foundational concepts of an enterprise content strategy.
