[A variant of my session from http://bit.ly/nozu_istc13a now with "The bright side of the NSA scandal!]
This session is about getting yourself ready for the future, whatever it may bring. Change is not something that we usually excel at in technical communications.
If we don’t update our thinking, content and methods, each new wave of technology puts us yet another step behind the curve. Even though tablets and smart phones have reached near ubiquity with professional users, most organisations do not have their people, processes, platforms or content ready for mobile delivery. Many are not even internet-ready. Today we’re bombarded by announcements of new content creation and consumption technologies that are wearable, social, dynamic or embedded directly in products.
Although we can talk about how to do something about it, before our content and processes can change, we must change. We must address what is actually holding us back: how we think about our content in the first place.
This session will provide a new and inspiring perspective on how you can and must work with content to be ready for the future. We’ll look at updating our processes, structures and the biases and habits that surround them.
8. Combined solutions
~
~
~
~
~
~
Two engineers (one onsite, one at a desk) +
Augmented reality headsets +
High quality gesture control +
Large displays +
The cloud +
Extranet content +
= Your best engineer anywhere
16. Customer experience is 4D
Authored
“I’d like an answer now please”
(14: 25 Sep 26, 2013)
All publishing is now
database publishing
Watch my blog for more detail...
Lessoworkmoreflow.blogspot.com
17. Twitter is a first-D platform
~ Each tweet provides the tips of various
content “pyramids” you can drill into
20. How we create meaning
We compare each individual situation…
… with personal past experience…
… by matching…
Mental models
~ Semi-consciously selected, incomplete images
~ What (we think) we understand of the world
~ How we face the world: Options? Solutions?
Confidence?
Kai Weber, http://bit.ly/kai_meaning
21. The biggest barrier
~ Our mental models of content are going
out of date
– Our flat, 2D models of content don’t map to the
4D world of customers
~ User expectations are driven by the world
they live in, not (just) what we publish to
them
28. Proactive assistance
~ Timed appropriately for my skills and context
– UI item descriptions
– Field validation guidance (number or date formats; where
the user can find the data; banned characters)
– Concept short descriptions
– Terminology / Glossary
– Wizard introductions
– Lists of related help tasks
~ Could be replace (or at least reuse to/from)
traditional help or manuals.
36. Content Strategy
More than words, more than tech
Development
efficiency &
significant cost
avoidance
Brand Equity,
regional markets
& revenue
channels
Business
Goals
Enabling,
Product data
& Technical
Content
Persuasive,
Sales &
Marketing
Content
Unified Framework for Content
Delivery, Measurement and Improvement
37. Final Take-Aways
~ Don't think about your year at the expense of
your career
~ We are responsible for the whole customer
experience
~ We have to collaborate
~ Structuring content gives it agility
– You’re not making deliverables. You’re making content
that might be expressed in many, many deliverables
Survey response metrics (Stuff we’d want to be capturing for Nick anyway)What do users want to see? How does DITA track back to that?Screenshot CHM version of the Elekta content?Users want to know “known problems in the field” for every release. Connect with the user community to see what needs solving in advance. Currently delivering an excel file of this list of content. Even a tiny change that links up the community’s collective knowledge is enough to get users excited.DURATION: 35, Q&A, talk, 5 minutes to change“Social” isn’t limited to WIKIs, Forums, Facebook, and Twitter. More and more organisations are looking at how community content can complement (and select few cases, replace) their formal product content. Also, many are noticing how much overlap there is with social content platforms and their own intranets, internal business collaboration and knowledge sharing platforms. For most, putting documentation fully in the hands of the users – even internal subject matter experts – isn’t an option, or is simply not desirable. Also, creating yet another silo of social content isn’t helpful for users trying to find answers. So, how can community and formally created content play nicely together? In this session see best practice concepts and case study examples from software and regulated high-tech manufacturing demonstrating: - What a content lifecycle means in socially enabled landscape- How mobile and embedded documentation tie-up with social content- How the DITA platform can form the core of a socially-enabled documentation platform- How internal SME and external customer communities can be leveraged for maximum benefit to both - The impact on: editorial process, metrics and measurement, version management, content models, workflow, and metadata strategies
Building up a content as a strategic business assetDelivering to native apps and the mobile webEstablishing cross-silo integrated practices for meeting customer needsApplying content standards and best practiceMeasuring content's cost and performance with metricsDeveloping your content strategyImplementing Component Content Management Systems (CCMS)Mastering change managementRay: