CHANGING HOW WE THINK ABOUT CONTENT2015 AIIM Roadtrip – Calgary, AB

Rob Hanna, Precision Content Authoring Solutions

May 2, 2023

©2015 Ascan Information Architects Limited

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ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER▪ Rob Hanna, ECMs

▪ President of Precision Content Authoring Solutions Inc. and a director of AIIM First Canadian Chapter

▪ Expert in structured authoring and content management practices and technology

▪ Instructor at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies – Metadata and Controlled Vocabularies

WHO IS PRECISION CONTENT AUTHORING SOLUTIONS INC.?▪ We help organizations make their information easier to use

▪ Our solutions consist of ▪ Content strategy

▪ Detailed information architecture

▪ Content lifecycle design and development

▪ Turn-key content transformation

▪ Tools selection and development

▪ Multi-channel publishing

▪ www.precisioncontent.com

©2015 Precision Content Authoring Solutions Inc.

HOW SHOULD MOBILE/CLOUD CHANGE THE WAY YOU DEVELOP CONTENT AND DEPLOY PROCESSES?

May 2, 2023

©2015 Precision Content Authoring Solutions Inc.5

WHY CHANGE?▪ The complexity of requirements for moving towards more agile content

development is rapidly outpacing an organization’s ability to▪ create

▪ manage, and

▪ publish content.

▪ The promises of improved▪ collaboration

▪ accessibility, and

▪ time-to-market are falling flat.

▪ This isn’t simply a technology problem. The solution also involves new processes and skills.

THE ERA OF ECM IS PASSINGOr what I learned from John Mancini, President of AIIM

AIIM 2015 Conference – Closing Keynote Presentationhttp://www.aiim.org/~/media/Files/Events/AIIM%20Conference%202015/Presentations/AIIM15_John%20Mancini_Concluding%20Keynote%20Read-Only.ashx

info.AIIM.org/cm2020

The forecast for 2020: 1. “ECM" as we know it will be gone, but

“content” will be more important than ever.

2. New best practices are desperately needed.

Every organization, every executive, every individual, every object is on a digital journey

--Thornton A. May, Futurist

“and content and information are at the heart of that journey.Content is ubiquitous and critical, but ECM is rapidly becoming invisible.”

Whatever we call it, organizations are desperate for best practices – and for digital

transformation heroes -- amidst the chaos of the emerging sixth

era.

CONTENT MUST TRANSCEND SILOSIntegration across silos to support collaboration across teams

Michael Priestley – Enterprise Content Technology Strategist IBMhttp://www.slideshare.net/mpriestley/let-your-content-flow

THE EVOLUTION OF CONTENT

What if I could take a piece of content and publish it to multiple output channels, all set to display in different ways (because of the rules that I set) without having to handcraft each piece of content separately?

Technical communicators have been doing this for years

Joe Pullizi, The Evolution of Content Marketing Will Include Intelligent Content

WE NEED STANDARDS

Needs and standards:• Adaptive display

• Reusable modules

Process: Benefits

• Taxonomy and metadata standards

• Content standards for type, format, and granularity that enable smart or intelligent content

• Create templates and transforms

• Focus on industry standardslike DITA/XML

• Support co-existence of single-use and multi-use content

• Provide support for incremental migration

• Consistent structure across formats

• Consistent metadata acrossformats

• Avoid single-vendor dependencies

• More ROI for content

• Content is Findable, Usable and Reusable

Content is findable, usable, and reusable

We need content that is intelligent:

1. Portable across systems 2. Useful across applications 3. Findable, usable and reusable

SO WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO US?

DO WE HAVE A PROBLEM THAT NEEDS SOLVING?

▪ 5,900,000,000 google searches per day (who did we ask these questions to before Google?)

▪ 540,000 word in the English language – 5 times more than in Shakespeare’s time

▪ 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the last 2 years

In the year … Human knowledge doubled every…

1900 100 years

1945 25 years

2014 13 months

2020 12 hours

Did you know? Shift Happens 2014 Remix – Youtube.com

STOP THE INSANITY!

Stop throwing more

technology at your content

problems!

Content problemsrequire

content solutions!

IMPORTANCE OF CONTENT STRATEGYBefore any technology is considered, organizations must first consider their content strategy to fully understand what they need and how they are going to get there.Several factors must be examined.

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INTELLIGENT CONTENT▪ is content that is

▪ not limited to one▪ purpose▪ technology, or▪ output, and is

▪ structurally rich and semantically aware, making it▪ discoverable▪ reusable▪ reconfigurable, and▪ adaptable.

SINGLE-SOURCING TECHNOLOGYSingle-sourcing is a methodology, not a technology. Although the

software tools associated with single-sourcing are complex, it is the modular writing, not technology, that ultimately determines the success of your single-sourcing project.▪ Kurt Ament – Single Sourcing: Building Modular Documentation, 2003

STRUCTURED BUILDING BLOCKS OF INFORMATION

MEETING 2 SETS OF FUNDAMENTAL NEEDS

The Human Brain

Technology

Find

Understand

Use, and

Retain

Integrate

Search

Process, andReuse

Well-structured content helps

OKAY… BUT HOW?Entering the world of structured content

WHAT IS XML?

▪ (eXtensible Markup Language) is an open standard for the exchange of information▪ first published in 1998 by W3C

▪ to encode electronic documents readable by▪ human, and▪ machine

▪ for a multitude of applications ranging from▪ corporate financial reporting applications, to ▪ Microsoft Word

XML IS EVERYWHEREXML defines meaningful data structures for documents and data. It is a human-readable file format used to power

• manufacturing assembly lines

• medical devices

• military applications, and

• many other things.

XML is the language of the Web. It enables smart phones and web browsers.

©2015 Precision Content Authoring Solutions Inc.

XML PROVIDES▪ Database-functionality for content

▪ A separation of presentation and content

▪ A structure with which to modularise

▪ A single piece of information can start it’s life in any department, and be shared inside and outside the department or organisation

▪ By explicitly labelling all units of information inside a document based on meaning, source, and status▪ i.e., everything is tagged and accessible

▪ This enables content management and publishing automation

WHAT IS DITA? (N. DIT-UH)

▪ (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an XML standard▪ developed in late 90’s at IBM, and

▪ given to the open source community in 2004

▪ used for topic-based, structured authoring

▪ designed for scalability using mechanisms for specialization and inheritance

▪ defining an extendable set of information types

MULTI-CHANNEL PUBLISHING▪ Supports complex, multi-

channel publishing to many common output formats

▪ Add new formats or styles easily

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WHO USES DITA?

▪ Hundreds of companies worldwide, including: ▪ Adobe, Apple, Caterpillar, Dell, Elekta, IBM,

Juniper Networks, McAfee, Nokia, PayPal, Philips, RIM, SAP, SDL, Xerox and many more

▪ IBM publishes 60M pages of content in 40 languages using DITA

DEFINITION OF PRECISION CONTENT™▪ Precision Content™ is an authoring system for high-value enterprise

content.▪ Benefits of use include

▪ greater accessibility and ease of use▪ increased consistency and accuracy, and▪ extensive multi-channel publishing capabilities.

▪ This system consists of▪ content strategy and management best practices▪ innovative applications of open-source technology and standards, and▪ modernized adaptations to information mapping writing practices researched

and developed at Harvard University in the 1960’s.

INFORMATION TYPES

Reference

Principle

Task

Process

Concept

“We will be flying at an altitude of

60,000 feet.”

“Always put on your oxygen mask

before assisting other passengers.”

“To open the emergency exit,

look out the window, pull the

lever, and push out the exit door.”

“In the event of loss of cabin pressure, an

oxygen mask will drop from the overhead

compartment.”

“We are a member of the Star Alliance group of airlines.”

Flight safety briefing

EXCERPT FROM A MEDICAL JOURNAL...

▪ pN3 description only closely mirrors descriptions for pN3a +pN3b + pN3c

▪ Use of footnotes confusing

▪ “Clinically detected” and “Not clinically detected” are not exact opposites

▪ Inconsistent enumeration of lymph nodes

SAME CONTENT AFTER RESTRUCTURE TRANSFORMATION

▪ 44.2% reduction in word count

▪ 20% reduction in passive voice

▪ 18.4% increase in Flesch Reading Ease score

▪ 30% increase in white space

▪ Elimination of footnotes

▪ Addition of labels and visual elements

QUESTIONS?

Come over to our booth and speak with us.