The Content Strategy Experts - Scriptorium Scriptorium - The Content Strategy Experts

In episode 164 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and special guest Chris Hill of DCL talk about where you can find redundancy in your learning content, what causes it, and how a single source reuse strategy can eliminate duplication.

You really start to run into trouble when you need to make version two, and you discover a problem with version one. If I’m making some marketing materials, maybe I need to use some information from the engineering team or from the manuals for whatever product I’m marketing. I might just copy that information over and put it into my marketing materials. Then, when we go to produce our training for that particular product, we might say, “Okay, I need that stuff. I’m gonna copy that from wherever I can find it,” which might be from marketing or engineering depending on where I look and who I know better or which repository is easier for me to get to. The problem here is that if anybody has made any edits along the way, they have to ensure that those edits are propagated through all these departments. And that doesn’t always happen. 

— Chris Hill





Related links:



* Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL)

* Harmonizer by DCL

* Confronting the horror of modernizing content (case study)

* Training content paradox: Standardization = personalization



LinkedIn:



* Chris Hill, DCL

* Alan Pringle, Scriptorium



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 with guest Chris Hill of DCL about learning content and where you can find redundant duplicated content, what causes it, and how a reuse strategy can eliminate that duplication. Hey everyone, I am Alan Pringle and we have a guest here today, Chris Hill of DCL. Hey Chris, how are you doing?

Chris Hill: Doing well, thank you, Alan. It’s nice talking to you.

AP: Great, yes as always. Chris, tell folks out there a little bit about yourself, DCL, and your role there if you would.

CH: Sure. DCL stands for Data Conversion Laboratory. And so we got our start doing data conversion, which is moving content between formats. And over the last, let’s see, that started in the 80s, if you can imagine a tech company starting in the 80s. 

AP: Yes, I can. I am of an age, yes.

CH: So since then, we’ve expanded out into lots of areas, but basically any kind of content transformation, workflows, content enrichment, all sorts of activities around content. So that’s our key theme. I joined DCL about four years ago, and I’ve actually been in the content management space for a good more than 20 years now, and have a lot of experience with both migrating from, you know, using tools like Word and such, and then moving into a content management system. I actually managed, product managed a content management system and then got into conversion. And as part of my job here, I oversee a product called Harmonizer, which is our tool for doing content analysis and specifically reuse analysis to find places where content is redundant, duplicated,

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.

In episode 162 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar discuss the benefits of single sourcing as part of your content strategy through the example of two things they love: coffee and beer.

“We know companies that have moved away from a do-it-yourself approach because they had maybe two or three different people putting in half to almost full-time work on the publishing system and not on other facets of the company’s core business or the writing. They were simply there to keep everything working. It just blows my mind that on a scale where you have hundreds of writers contributing content, you are saying, Okay, you three people are going to be solely responsible for keeping this thing up and running so that they can produce their content, rather than having a system that’s designed to keep itself up and running.”

— Bill Swallow



Related links:



* The truth is out there

* Content as a service (white paper)

* Prerequisites for efficient content operations (podcast)



LinkedIn:



* Bill Swallow

* Christine Cuellar



Transcript:

Christine Cuellar: 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’re talking about how you can brew a better content strategy through single sourcing. Hi, I’m Christine Cuellar.

Bill Swallow: and I’m Bill Swallow.

CC: Hey, Bill, thanks for being here today. 

BS: Hey, thanks.

CC: So what I mean by brewing a better content strategy is that both Bill and I really love coffee. Right now for both of us, we’re recording it fairly early times in the morning. So actually we’re heavily reliant on coffee and other caffeinated sources to enable this conversation. Also, Bill, I know you like homebrewing beer. I like drinking beer. I have no idea how to homebrew, but I do enjoy beer as well. So we just thought that beer, coffee, drinks in general actually have some good analogies for single sourcing, which can be part of your content strategy. And it’s something that’s been coming up more and more in a lot of conversations with clients and people that are interested in content strategy so we thought this would be a good topic for today. So Bill I’m gonna kick it over to you for our first really big-picture question. First of all what is single sourcing? What do we mean when we say that? Let’s kick it off there.

BS: All right, so in a nutshell, single sourcing is writing content once for multiple purposes. It’s about as simple as you can get. It could be authoring centrally, it could be authoring collectively in a group or centrally as a single person for a wide variety of publishing needs, whether it be for different audiences, different output types, or what have you.

CC: Okay, yeah, that’s great. So how does, what are some ways that single sourcing can start to mimic drinks? Coffee, beer, any of that?

BS: We could take the example of multiple output formats. So traditionally with single sourcing, we’ve been doing that since I think the mid-90s. I remember working in. Oh, that’s based in the name. I remember working in Doc to help back in, I think it was 1996,

In episode 161 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle share their ideal world for enterprise content operations software, including specific requests for how content management software needs to evolve.

SO: “When I envision this in the ideal universe, it seems that the most efficient way to solve this from a technical point of view would be to take the DITA standard, extend it out so that it is underlying these various systems, and then build up on top of that. I don’t really care. What I do care about is that I need, and our clients need, the ability to move technical content into learning content in an efficient way. And right now that is harder than it should be.”

AP: “Oh, entirely. And I would even argue it should go the other way, because there is stuff possibly on the training side that the people in the product content side need. So both sides need that ability.”

SO: Right, so give us seamless content sharing, please. Pretty please.”



Related links:



* The business case for content operations (white paper)

* Ask Alan Anything: Resolving pain in content operations (podcast, part 1)

* Developing a strategy for learning content

* Prerequisites for efficient content operations (podcast)



LinkedIn:



* Sarah O’Keefe

* Alan Pringle



Transcript:

Sarah O’Keefe: 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. You may have heard that Madcap has added a learning content management system called Xyleme to their portfolio. In this episode, we are providing an entirely unsolicited roadmap to the vendors in this space, including but not limited to MadCap, for enterprise content ops software as we move forward. Vendors, welcome to the show and think of this as your roadmap to success and call us if you need help. You totally do. Hi there. I’m Sarah O’Keefe and I’m here with Alan Pringle.

Alan Pringle: Hey there, I’m not sure this is the best idea, but we’re about to find out.

SO: Yes, it’s going to be great. We will totally not get in trouble. Alan, let’s dive in and maybe get in trouble as fast as possible. What is the number one item on our list of demands for content ops enterprise software?

AP: Going to vote for seamless content sharing and with a little asterisk here this is not just about us as consultants I think this is as much about our clients and what we have seen over the past few years in the content operation space. We need some kind of way where you can author in a component content management system and then turn around and use that information, for example, in a learning content management system. And there’s, well, exactly, and I was just getting to that. There’s some logistics here. It would be maybe nice to have the same content model underlying all of this, but considering the different authoring audiences, I don’t know if that necessarily has to be the case.

SO: And does that have to be DITA?

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



Related links:



* Wrangling the Meg of learning content

* Content operations for elearning content (podcast)

* Developing a strategy for learning content

* Flexible learning content with the DITA Learning and Training specialization (white paper)





LinkedIn:



* Phylise Banner

* 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’re talking about how people in the learning space are addressing challenges in their content operations. What do those changes mean for learning management systems? Is this the end of the monolithic LMS?

Hey, everybody, I’m Alan Pringle. Today, we have a special guest, Phylise Banner. Phylise, welcome. Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your background. 

Phylise Banner: Sure. Thanks for having me, Alan. My name is Phylise Banner. I’m a learning experience designer. I have, I want to say, over 25 years. I did the math the other day, actually. It’s about 27 years in higher education, and corporate and non-profit government learning design. Before that, I worked in data visualization and information design. I came into this field in a little bit of a different way, although there’s other folks who came in it the same way that I did, considering this from an information perspective rather than from a teaching perspective. 

The minute I started working in the field, I was fascinated by educational theory, and pedagogy, and philosophies, and andragogy, and hudagogy. And techno-hudagogy, thanks to my friend Bill Pelz, there. But throughout the years, I have watched technology evolve alongside learning theory, and I’m fascinated by that. I had been in the content strategy space this whole time, both from the information design, data visualization side, also going over into learning design. I’ve had a focus on content strategy all along. I’ve known folks at Scriptorium for probably 25 years. 

AP: Well, probably so because we’ve been around since ’97. And we have crossed paths in conferences probably more times than we can tell people. Indeed.

Well, with your background,

In episode 159 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and special guest Dipo Ajose-Coker share tips for moving from unstructured to structured content.

“I mentioned it before: invest in training. It’s very important that your team knows first of all not just the tool, but also the concepts behind the tool. The concept of structured content creation, leaving ownership behind, and all of those things that we’ve referred to earlier on. You’ve got to invest in that kind of training. It’s not just a one-off, you want to keep it going. Let them attend conferences or webinars, and things like that, because those are all instructive, and those are all things that will give good practice.”

— Dipo Ajose-Coker



Related links:



* Challenges of moving from unstructured to structured content with Dipo Ajose-Coker (podcast, part 1)



* MadCap IXIA CCMS

Webinar: Everything is Awesome! A DITA Story: A webinar on Dipo’s experience migrating from unstructured FrameMaker to DITA XML

Structured content: the foundation for digital transformation (podcast)



LinkedIn:



* Dipo Ajose-Coker

* Bill Swallow



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.

This is part two of a two-part podcast. I’m Bill Swallow. In this episode, Dipo Ajose-Coker and I continue our discussion about the top challenges of moving from unstructured to structured content. 

So we talked about a lot of different challenges, and I don’t want this to be some kind of a scary episode for people. Let’s talk about some tips you might have for people, as they do approach this move from unstructured content to structured content. 

Dipo Ajose-Coker: Yeah. Now, I would always say the first thing is start small and then scale up. You need to take one example of each type of manual. I used to work with we had user manual, pre-installation manual, service manuals, maintenance manuals, and so on. Some of them are similar in that they’ve got similar type of content, we’re just removing parts of it. But some of them are really radically different. So we took one user manual, and one service manual, and one pre-installation manual, three major types of content. And then you convert that, test it to breaking point. And then, by the back-and-forth that you’re doing in making that the conversion matrix, so fine-tuning that conversion matrix, you’re more confident that, when you then throw the rest of the manuals in there, you’ll have a lot less cleanup. I’m never going to say that you’re going to have zero cleanup, you will always have cleanup. But you will have a lot less to do in cleanup, in manually going to look for those areas where the conversion didn’t work.