17 min
What’s next after LearningDITA? (podcast) The Content Strategy Experts - Scriptorium
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- Business
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
Related links:
* Content operations ROI calculator
* The business case for content operations
* Content operations from start to scale
* LearningDITA
LinkedIn:
* Bill Swallow
* Sarah O’Keefe
Transcript:
Bill Swallow: 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 to you about next steps after LearningDITA, how to get your boss to sign off on a DITA project. Hey everybody, I’m Bill Swallow.
Sarah O’Keefe: And I’m Sarah O ‘Keefe, hi.
BS: So yeah, we’re going to talk a little bit about what to do after you’ve completed your learningDITA.com courses and you have some DITA knowledge under your belt. So I guess we’ll start off with completing the courses. You pretty much have a working DITA environment then after you complete all of the courses on learningDITA .com, you have a batch of topics, a batch of tasks, a batch of other types of files, a map, you have a publishing scenario, you have some reuse going on. So it kind of makes for a neat little proof of concept package. But now that you’ve got that, how do you bring it to management? How do you sell it as we want to move forward in this direction?
SO: We’re assuming, of course, that I think a lot of the people that do LearningDITA, they come for different reasons. And a big chunk of it is just, I need to learn this because I want to be more marketable. I want to get a new job. I want to have a chance at the jobs that require DITA information or DITA knowledge.
BS: Right.
SO: But I guess what we’re focused on here today is this question of, all right, so you’ve run through the courses and you’ve decided that this is potentially a good idea for your company, for your employer. You really want to advocate for “we need to move our content into DITA because it feels like this is a good idea for this particular organization.” So what do you do next? And at that point, you’re right, you’ve got a proof of concept and that may be enough to show to your peers and maybe your immediate manager just to let them look at that. Almost certainly the next thing they’re gonna ask you for though is to take some of your content because the learning ditto ducklings are only gonna get you so far. They’re gonna say, well, how does this apply to our content? So probably you’re gonna have to go off and do some…
BS: Haha.
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
Related links:
* Content operations ROI calculator
* The business case for content operations
* Content operations from start to scale
* LearningDITA
LinkedIn:
* Bill Swallow
* Sarah O’Keefe
Transcript:
Bill Swallow: 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 to you about next steps after LearningDITA, how to get your boss to sign off on a DITA project. Hey everybody, I’m Bill Swallow.
Sarah O’Keefe: And I’m Sarah O ‘Keefe, hi.
BS: So yeah, we’re going to talk a little bit about what to do after you’ve completed your learningDITA.com courses and you have some DITA knowledge under your belt. So I guess we’ll start off with completing the courses. You pretty much have a working DITA environment then after you complete all of the courses on learningDITA .com, you have a batch of topics, a batch of tasks, a batch of other types of files, a map, you have a publishing scenario, you have some reuse going on. So it kind of makes for a neat little proof of concept package. But now that you’ve got that, how do you bring it to management? How do you sell it as we want to move forward in this direction?
SO: We’re assuming, of course, that I think a lot of the people that do LearningDITA, they come for different reasons. And a big chunk of it is just, I need to learn this because I want to be more marketable. I want to get a new job. I want to have a chance at the jobs that require DITA information or DITA knowledge.
BS: Right.
SO: But I guess what we’re focused on here today is this question of, all right, so you’ve run through the courses and you’ve decided that this is potentially a good idea for your company, for your employer. You really want to advocate for “we need to move our content into DITA because it feels like this is a good idea for this particular organization.” So what do you do next? And at that point, you’re right, you’ve got a proof of concept and that may be enough to show to your peers and maybe your immediate manager just to let them look at that. Almost certainly the next thing they’re gonna ask you for though is to take some of your content because the learning ditto ducklings are only gonna get you so far. They’re gonna say, well, how does this apply to our content? So probably you’re gonna have to go off and do some…
BS: Haha.
17 min