Is it really possible to configure enterprise content—technical, support, learning & training, marketing, and more—to create a seamless experience for your end users? In episode 177 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow discuss the reality of enterprise content operations: do they truly exist in the current content landscape? What obstacles hold the industry back? How can organizations move forward?

Sarah: You’ve got to get your terminology and your taxonomy in alignment. Most of the industry I am confident in saying have gone with option D, which is give up. “We have silos. Our silos are great. We’re going to be in our silos, and I don’t like those people over in learning content anyway. I don’t like those people in techcomm anyway. They’re weird. They’re focused on the wrong things,” says everybody, and so they’re just not doing it. I think that does a great disservice to the end users, but that’s the reality of where most people are right now.

Bill: Right, because the end user is left holding the bag trying to find information using terminology from one set of content and not finding it in another and just having a completely different experience.



Related links:



* The business case for content operations (white paper)

* Replatforming an early DITA implementation (case study)

* Hear Sarah speak about The reality of enterprise customer content at tcworld 2024!

* Hear Bill speak about the The challenges of replatforming, also at tcworld 2024.



LinkedIn:



* Sarah O’Keefe

* Bill Swallow



Transcript:

Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.

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 about enterprise content operations. Does it actually exist? And if so, what does it look like? And if not, how can we get there? Hi, everyone. I’m Bill Swallow.

Sarah O’Keefe: And I’m Sarah O’Keefe.

BS: And Sarah, they let us do another podcast together.

SO: Mistakes were made.

BS: So today we’re talking a little bit about enterprise content operations. If it exists, what it looks like. If it doesn’t, why doesn’t it exist? What can people do to get there?

SO: So enterprise content ops, I guess first we have to define our terms a little bit. Content operations, content ops is the system that you use to manage your content. And manage not the software, but how do you develop it, how do you author it, how do you control it, how do you deliver it, how do you retire it, all that stuff. So content ops is the overarching system that manages your content lifecycle. And when we look at content ops from that perspective, and of course we’re generally focused on technical content, but when we talk enterprise content ops, it’s customer-facing content,