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, which includes techcomm, but also learning content, support content, product data potentially, and some other things like that. And ultimately, when I look at this, again bringing the lens back or going back to the 10,000-foot view, we have some enterprise solutions but only on the delivery side. The authoring side of this is basically a wasteland. So I have the capability of creating technical content, learning content, support content, and putting them all into what appears to be some sort of a unified delivery system. But what I don’t really have is the ability to manage them on the back end in a unified way, and that’s what I want to talk about today.

BS: So those who are delivering in that fashion, so being able to provide customer-facing information in a unified way, as far as their system for content ops goes, it’s more, I would say, human-based. So it’s a lot of workflow. It’s a lot of actual management of content and management of content processes outside of a unified system.

SO: So almost certainly they don’t have a unified system for all the content, and we’ll talk about why that is I think in a minute. It’s not necessarily human-based, it’s more that it’s fragmented. So the techcomm group has their system, and the learning group has their system, and the support team has their system, et cetera. And then what we’re doing is we’re saying, okay, well once you’ve authored all this stuff in your Snowflake system, then we’ll bring it over to the delivery side where we have some sort of a portal, website portal, content delivery CDP that puts it all together and makes it appear to the end user that those things are all in some sort of a, it puts it in a unified presentation. But they’re not coming from the same place, and that causes some problems on the backend.

BS: Right, and ultimately the user of that content doesn’t really care if it’s a unified presentation. They just want their stuff. They don’t want to have a disjointed experience, and they want to be able to find what they’re looking for regardless of what type of content it is.

SO: Right, and the cliche is “don’t ship your org chart,” which is 100% what we’re doing. And so let’s talk a little bit about what does that mean, what are the pre-reqs? So in order to have something that appears to me as the content consumer to be unified, well for starters, you mentioned search. I have to have search that performs across all the different content types and returns the relevant information. And what that usually means is that I have to have unified terminology. I’m using the same words for the same things in all the different systems. And I need unified taxonomy, classification system metadata so that when I do a search, everything, and maybe I’m categorizing or I’m classifying things down and filtering, that when I do that filtering, that the filtering works the same way across all the content that I’ve put into the magic portal. So taxonomy and terminology are the things that’ll make your search, relatively speaking, perform better. So we have this on the delivery side and that’s okay-ish, or it can be, but then let’s look at what we’re doing on the authoring side of things because that’s where these problems start.

BS: So what do they start looking like?

SO: Well, maybe let’s focus in on techcomm and learning content specifically. We’ll just take those two because if I try and talk about all of them, we’re going to be here for days and nobody wants that. All right, so I have technical content, user guides, online help, quick snippets, how-tos. And I have learning, training content, e-learning, which is enabling content, I’m going to try and teach you how to do the thing in the system so that you can get your job done. Now, let’s go all the way back to the world where we have an instructional designer or a learning content developer and a technical content developer. So for starters, almost always those are two different people, just right off the bat. And instructional designers tend to be more concerned with the learning experience, how am I going to deliver learning and performance support to the learner? And the technical writers, technical content people tend to be more interested in how do I cover the universe of what’s in this tool set, or this product, and cover all the possible reasonable tasks that you might need to perform, the reference information you need, the concepts that you need? It’s a lot of the same information. It’s there’s a slightly different lens on it. And in the big picture, we should be able to take a procedure out of the technical content, step one, step two, step three, step four, and pretty much use that in a learning context. In a learning context, it’s going to be, hey, when you arrive for your job at the bank every morning you need to do things with cash that I don’t understand. And here’s a procedure, and this is what you’re going to do, steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and you need to do them this way and you need to write them down, and it tends to be a little more policy and governance focused, but broadly it’s the same procedure. So there should be the opportunity to reuse that content. And big picture, high-level estimate is probably something like 50% content overlap. So 50% of the learning content can or should be sourced from the technical content. The technical content is probably a superset in the sense that the technical content covers, or should cover, all the things you can