Are you tired of chasing paper around your organization? Is the network drive no longer sufficient to drive collaboration for your content development and review process? It may be time for you to consider how workflow can improve your content development processes. You can reduce the chaos around interdepartmental collaboration by instituting workflows for any process and even reduce your process cycle times by up to 75%!
Keith Schengili-Roberts - DITA Worst PracticesJack Molisani
While people are interested in hearing about successes, we can actually learn more from failure. Not only do we discover what not to do, but also how to avoid the circumstances that led to it. Presenter Keith Schengili-Roberts has seen a lot of good and bad things happen to DITA implementations over the years, and part of his job at IXIASOFT is to investigate what works, what doesn’t, and why. Listen to his stories on the best (worst) DITA practices!
LavaCon 2017 - Developing Your Edge: Getting a Seat at the Customer’s TableJack Molisani
In many businesses, Sales account teams closely guard and regulate contact with customers. I have heard of, and have experienced situations where technical communications staff are refused access to customers unless there is a major issue. Customer engagement is the linchpin to understanding requirements and delivering value. It is the critical factor between celebrating success and wasting cycles. My session explores the idea of getting communications professionals to overcome the trust and perception deficits we often face.
A large part of the problem is the perception of how we communicate and a fear of what we’ll say. This mentality impedes and undermines our value proposition. I’ll share ideas and anecdotes about what can we do to:
LavaCon 2017 - How Modern Analytics Will Turn Your Technical Content Into a R...Jack Molisani
Understanding how product documentation is consumed can fuel your company with data that has the potential to transform operations and impact decisions. To gain this insight, you need to change the way you track and mine the behavior of users when they search, read and interact with your technical content. By combining the latest delivery, text-mining and analytics technologies, you will transform tech content into a sensor and its delivery into a data generator.
After reviewing the flaws of the “old” approaches to content analytics, we will study how to properly capture the interactions of users with content. We will also explore the different levels of value that we can derive from modern delivery, text-mining and analytics. We will see how those new technologies can multiply the value of tech content. And we will learn how tech content can be impactful for many different activities and constituencies of the company, gathering more support and becoming more strategic.
LavaCon 2017 - Agile Localization: Building Bridges Between Translation Quali...Jack Molisani
Staying in sync with the rapid cycles of Agile software development can be a challenge for any technical communicator, and even more so when localization is involved. Localization includes both the technical and linguistic aspects of translating software and documentation into other languages. You can be a hero in your organization by creating a smooth process to build a bridge between the seemingly incompatible processes of agile development and localization.
Content moves around. It passes back and forth between authoring, editing, reviewing, and publishing before ever reaching its intended audience. Each touch point creates change, but often that change is elusive or unknown. In regulated industries such as healthcare, aerospace, and pharmaceuticals, proving that you have control over content change is a vital capability. How can you gain and demonstrate that control and how do you present an audit trail of change to the relevant audiences in an appropriate format?
LavaCon 2017 - Much Ado About Templates: Reduce the Learning Curve and Increa...Jack Molisani
How did our team of five information specialists and 100 SMEs, who provide content for a worldwide audience of 3,500 service technicians in a regulated industry, move from Word to XML? We adapted – and used templates! Since we were used to Word templates, it made sense to mimic that for simplicity in training and transition. Templates provide a built-in structure and allow customization of the user experience. Please join us as we expose our experiences with templates in XML.
LavaCon 2017 - Building an Enterprisewide Content Platform—and Why DITA will ...Jack Molisani
Breaking down content silos requires an enterprise-wide strategy that serves a number of distinct departments, creators, reviewers, and consumers. However, an enterprise-wide strategy that requires an enterprise-wide deployment of DITA will very likely fail. DITA simply is not made for ALL the content types and workflows within an organization, which usually span support, marketing, product documentation, legal, and more. In this session, we’ll focus on why an enterprise-wide content strategy is important, alternatives to DITA, and how to get started.
LavaCon 2017 - Take the Risk, Embrace the Change!Jack Molisani
Hoa Aldous has made many difficult choices throughout her life. From escaping Vietnam to opting out of an arranged marriage, she’s had to risk it all on more than one occasion.
In this keynote, Hoa will share her life experiences, how she assessed the risks she’s faced, and that embracing the resulting changes can often lead to the experience you were looking for all along.
Keith Schengili-Roberts - DITA Worst PracticesJack Molisani
While people are interested in hearing about successes, we can actually learn more from failure. Not only do we discover what not to do, but also how to avoid the circumstances that led to it. Presenter Keith Schengili-Roberts has seen a lot of good and bad things happen to DITA implementations over the years, and part of his job at IXIASOFT is to investigate what works, what doesn’t, and why. Listen to his stories on the best (worst) DITA practices!
LavaCon 2017 - Developing Your Edge: Getting a Seat at the Customer’s TableJack Molisani
In many businesses, Sales account teams closely guard and regulate contact with customers. I have heard of, and have experienced situations where technical communications staff are refused access to customers unless there is a major issue. Customer engagement is the linchpin to understanding requirements and delivering value. It is the critical factor between celebrating success and wasting cycles. My session explores the idea of getting communications professionals to overcome the trust and perception deficits we often face.
A large part of the problem is the perception of how we communicate and a fear of what we’ll say. This mentality impedes and undermines our value proposition. I’ll share ideas and anecdotes about what can we do to:
LavaCon 2017 - How Modern Analytics Will Turn Your Technical Content Into a R...Jack Molisani
Understanding how product documentation is consumed can fuel your company with data that has the potential to transform operations and impact decisions. To gain this insight, you need to change the way you track and mine the behavior of users when they search, read and interact with your technical content. By combining the latest delivery, text-mining and analytics technologies, you will transform tech content into a sensor and its delivery into a data generator.
After reviewing the flaws of the “old” approaches to content analytics, we will study how to properly capture the interactions of users with content. We will also explore the different levels of value that we can derive from modern delivery, text-mining and analytics. We will see how those new technologies can multiply the value of tech content. And we will learn how tech content can be impactful for many different activities and constituencies of the company, gathering more support and becoming more strategic.
LavaCon 2017 - Agile Localization: Building Bridges Between Translation Quali...Jack Molisani
Staying in sync with the rapid cycles of Agile software development can be a challenge for any technical communicator, and even more so when localization is involved. Localization includes both the technical and linguistic aspects of translating software and documentation into other languages. You can be a hero in your organization by creating a smooth process to build a bridge between the seemingly incompatible processes of agile development and localization.
Content moves around. It passes back and forth between authoring, editing, reviewing, and publishing before ever reaching its intended audience. Each touch point creates change, but often that change is elusive or unknown. In regulated industries such as healthcare, aerospace, and pharmaceuticals, proving that you have control over content change is a vital capability. How can you gain and demonstrate that control and how do you present an audit trail of change to the relevant audiences in an appropriate format?
LavaCon 2017 - Much Ado About Templates: Reduce the Learning Curve and Increa...Jack Molisani
How did our team of five information specialists and 100 SMEs, who provide content for a worldwide audience of 3,500 service technicians in a regulated industry, move from Word to XML? We adapted – and used templates! Since we were used to Word templates, it made sense to mimic that for simplicity in training and transition. Templates provide a built-in structure and allow customization of the user experience. Please join us as we expose our experiences with templates in XML.
LavaCon 2017 - Building an Enterprisewide Content Platform—and Why DITA will ...Jack Molisani
Breaking down content silos requires an enterprise-wide strategy that serves a number of distinct departments, creators, reviewers, and consumers. However, an enterprise-wide strategy that requires an enterprise-wide deployment of DITA will very likely fail. DITA simply is not made for ALL the content types and workflows within an organization, which usually span support, marketing, product documentation, legal, and more. In this session, we’ll focus on why an enterprise-wide content strategy is important, alternatives to DITA, and how to get started.
LavaCon 2017 - Take the Risk, Embrace the Change!Jack Molisani
Hoa Aldous has made many difficult choices throughout her life. From escaping Vietnam to opting out of an arranged marriage, she’s had to risk it all on more than one occasion.
In this keynote, Hoa will share her life experiences, how she assessed the risks she’s faced, and that embracing the resulting changes can often lead to the experience you were looking for all along.
LavaCon 2017 - Structured Content Authoring For All!Jack Molisani
Many say “Structured Content Authoring is too complex.” But organizations have no choice: to keep content consistent, findable and manageable, we simply must write and store in a structured format. Semantic tagging, re-use, targeting, conditions, references, all are essential and valuable features that form the essence of Structured Content schemas. If we simply ‘strip complexity’ –for ‘lightweight authoring’- chances are fair that we lose much of this value. The question is: how to make Structured Content Authoring a mainstream activity?
LavaCon 2017 - Building Catwalks Between Silos: Using Taxonomy to Drive Engag...Jack Molisani
While content marketing can improve brand preference, it’s hard to link it to product information directly while maintaining an authentic voice. Conversely, product documentation is perceived as authentic and trustworthy — a potentially powerful marketing asset itself — but can be hard to find and hard work to read. This live use case shows how content marketing can link customers to docs in a relevant, contextual, and scalable way by combining taxonomy and minimalist structured content.
LavaCon 2017 - Getting Dragged Along? Start Charting Your Team’s Course with ...Jack Molisani
To meet the demand for content, do you take a “peanut butter” approach and spread your resources evenly – but thinly – across the whole product? Or do you grease the squeakiest wheel, which means you neglect a wheel that’s more vital to the business? Either way, outside forces dictate how you’ll use your resources. Soon you’ll have a lot of mediocre content that doesn’t represent your team’s value. And that makes it hard to get headcount and funding.
LavaCon 2017 - DITA: Start Small, Grow Big Using Open Source ToolsJack Molisani
You’re considering using DITA and would like to try it out without incurring significant upfront costs, but also keeping your options open longer-term. Where do you start? How will you approach the challenges of content creation, content management, and publishing your content? There are in fact plenty of options. The good news is that XML and DITA are open standards. This has led to a healthy ecosystem with quality commercial and inter-operable open source tools, that do away with vendor lock-in and keep operating costs down. We will discuss the three challenges, show an example of how end-to-end solutions can be built based upon Git and other open source tools. In fact, the result may be better than you’d expect.
LavaCon 2017 - Feed the Goldfish in 19 Minutes and 52 SecondsJack Molisani
Content consumption patterns have dramatically changed over the last decade. The maximum selective sustained attention span of a human being is about 20 minutes. The length of this talk. Latest research shows that the transient attention span of human beings has even gone down from 12 to 8 seconds over the last decade – even a goldfish has a longer attention span.
To communicate technical content in the future successfully, we need to move from drops to drips, deliver smaller content chunks, improve findability and searchability and tailor content to the content consumer’s role and context automatically.
LavaCon 2017 - How UX and Content Can (and Should) Work TogetherJack Molisani
The Farmer and the Cowhand Should Be Friends, or, How UX and Content Can (and Should) Work Together.
Let’s be frank: If UX designers had their way, the only words you’d ever see on the web are lorem ipsum. And yet, words — from interfaces to microcopy to long narratives — are integral to the usability and delight of any web product. Based on his years of UX experience and love of good content, Dylan will talk about ways to bring the two sides together to make better things on the web.
LavaCon 2017 - Implementing a Customer-driven Transition to DITA Content: A S...Jack Molisani
When customer expectations uproot your documentation processes and PDF content offering, how do you mobilize a team that has used the same tools and processes to create book-based, unstructured content for over two decades? When new demands drive the change for structured content to support a myriad of users and multi-channel publishing, the logical choice is a DITA workflow.
Join Ciena, The Content Era and Adobe Tech Comm at LavaCon 2017 Portland for an immersive workshop that highlights how a DITA workflow is possible with familiar tools, a modest budget, and creative handling of the content.
LavaCon 2017 - Evolving the New Content OrderJack Molisani
We are at a critical moment in history, with knowledge bursting at the seams of our organizations. Many of us still struggle to manage numerous modes of omnichannel content engagement: published, interactive, and automated. The solution requires vision to move towards a new order of content intelligence encompassing our organization’s entire knowledge graph. It requires spanning silos, especially between marcomm and techcomm. Join Cruce Saunders as he explores the new content stack, and how to future proof content assets to meet the demands of ever-evolving customer experiences.
LavaCon 2017 - Managing Stakeholders Across the Content Ecosystem: The Key to...Jack Molisani
Trying to implement an content strategy that supports your customers across their entire journey–or even just sell the idea to decision makers? Having problems getting it to fly? More than any other single aspect, stakeholder management is critical to getting support for and implementing a unified content strategy (or ANY project, for that matter). You need to understand THEIR needs and ensure that you’re communicating continually to quiet objections and move your project forward. And it’s not always easy–especially when you’re leading initiatives across silos and teams with no direct authority. Influencing those stakeholders is key!
In this session, Andrea will discuss the success factors to aim for, and the behaviors that can trip you up, when managing stakeholders to successfully support your clients, solve business problems, and drive revenue and customer loyalty!
LavaCon 2017 - Future-proof Your Content: Beyond Traditional Publishing for S...Jack Molisani
This session delineates why the most common publishing methods in today’s technical space cannot survive into the middle of the next decade. Tools and methodologies are required that are scalable for vast increases of “atomic” content and to dozens of more language targets. Discover what the minimum ingredients are for survival in terms of tools, workflows and content strategies.
LavaCon 2017 - Silos. (And other concepts that make us average)Jack Molisani
Content crosses silos, giving content developers a unique perspective of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Years of experience leads to insight, but can also paralyze innovative ideas.
Has your experience given you tribal knowledge and wisdom, or preconceived notions that are no longer true or helpful?
In this keynote, Megan Gilhooly discusses new ways of thinking that challenge common business trends. She will provide examples highlighting how your ability to think critically and your passion for forging new trends can help you throughout your content career.
LavaCon 2017 - Management Workshop Part 1: Leadership and Management in Techn...Jack Molisani
Some of the unique challenges that Tech Comms managers face are offshoring, outsourcing, vendor management, managing across countries, justification of resources etc. In this workshop we will work with real life scenarios and learn from solutions that have been implemented in organizations to manage and lead effective content management teams. You will be exposed to ideas and and handy tools that we to build your team with a varied set of skills for scalability and longevity.
LavaCon 2017 - Stop, Listen, and Collaborate: Creating an Experience-first Co...Jack Molisani
Everyone in your organization wants to keep the user happy—they just have different ideas of how to go about it. Focusing on what information a user needs and when they need it along their journey can act as the bridge between product development, experience design, marketing and sales. Get tips on how to bring each group into the process and how to leverage content as a way to keep the user front of mind.
In this session, attendees will learn a mix of “soft” and “hard” skills to help put together an experience-first content strategy.
LavaCon 2017 - Engineering Content 4.0 for a Digital WorldJack Molisani
In 2016, the idea of Content 4.0 emerged as a community of thought leaders put their heads together to envision how the business of communication is going to change in the years ahead. The rapid unfolding of events in 2017 has confirmed our original ideas. So this year, our attention has shifted to exploring the details of how we make this happen and what specifically we need to change. Also in 2017, we have been exploring further the idea of information consumers and how the notion of Consumer 4.0 can help us better understand what we mean by Content 4.0.
All this encourages us to re-energize another idea – that of Content Engineering, about the discipline of designing content and content processes so that they work within, and empower, digital landscapes for businesses and consumers. It turns out that achieving Content 4.0 to satisfy the Consumer 4.0 depends entirely on engineering content for a fully digital lifecycle. Now while all of this may sound a little like cyberpunk science fiction, it is in fact about to become very real….
LavaCon 2017- We Are Single-Sourcing! But How Well Do We Work With Others?Jack Molisani
While single-source and content management workflows bring great benefits to core authoring teams, complications abound when trying to work with others. For every benefit that heavy content reuse and multi-channel publishing brings, we must ask the hard questions: “How do I share content with other departments?”, “How do I interact with subject matter experts?”, “How do we work with vendors and/or business partners?”
In this session, Mike Hamilton, Vice-President of Product Evangelism at MadCap Software, will look at strategies and techniques to help prevent the core documentation team from becoming a silo. How can we get other departments to use XML? Does getting other departments to use XML make business sense? If no, what other options exist? These questions and more will be addressed.
LavaCon 2017 - AI: Preparing Product Content for the Voice RevolutionJack Molisani
Virtual assistants such as SIRI, CORTANA, and OK GOOGLE are now penetrating and taking the corporate world by storm. Powered with natural language processing and personalization capabilities and promoted by the abundance of smart instant messengers, bots can leverage your rich topic-based content in ways that have never been seen before.
In this session you will learn how your taxonomy-based content strategy and semantic-enabled delivery platform can provide the content infrastructure you need to move forward with natural conversations that will give your users the answers they seek.
LavaCon 2017 - Presenting for Success: Achieving Buy-In (Almost) Every TimeJack Molisani
When budgets get tightened, it can become more difficult to convince stakeholders to green-light proposals for things like research and development – they can, over time, lead to an improved user experience, but may not seem to have many, if any, immediate financial returns. You NEED to get approval for this project, so prepare for the presentation to maximize your chances of approval: know your audience, evaluate whether they’re “ideas” or “data” people, and tailor your presentation to that audience.
LavaCon 2017 - Drawing the Line on Content Localization: How Much is Too Much?Jack Molisani
So much content, so many languages. When adding support for a new geography or language, how deep do you go? Localize every last help file, marketing page, tutorial video…or something less than that? Who gets to decide and what’s their process for doing so? I’ll share best practices and frameworks for making these decisions, collected from a number of content strategists at leading companies. I asked the tough questions of a number of your colleagues, so you don’t have to.
LavaCon 2017 - Static Site Generators are the Game ChangersJack Molisani
The best-known static site generator, Jekyll, was created eight years ago. That was a long time ago in tech years, yet many documentation specialists still don’t know about it. This established technology is a game changer for building documentation portals. Thanks to Jekyll, only the sky is the limit.
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
LavaCon 2017 - Structured Content Authoring For All!Jack Molisani
Many say “Structured Content Authoring is too complex.” But organizations have no choice: to keep content consistent, findable and manageable, we simply must write and store in a structured format. Semantic tagging, re-use, targeting, conditions, references, all are essential and valuable features that form the essence of Structured Content schemas. If we simply ‘strip complexity’ –for ‘lightweight authoring’- chances are fair that we lose much of this value. The question is: how to make Structured Content Authoring a mainstream activity?
LavaCon 2017 - Building Catwalks Between Silos: Using Taxonomy to Drive Engag...Jack Molisani
While content marketing can improve brand preference, it’s hard to link it to product information directly while maintaining an authentic voice. Conversely, product documentation is perceived as authentic and trustworthy — a potentially powerful marketing asset itself — but can be hard to find and hard work to read. This live use case shows how content marketing can link customers to docs in a relevant, contextual, and scalable way by combining taxonomy and minimalist structured content.
LavaCon 2017 - Getting Dragged Along? Start Charting Your Team’s Course with ...Jack Molisani
To meet the demand for content, do you take a “peanut butter” approach and spread your resources evenly – but thinly – across the whole product? Or do you grease the squeakiest wheel, which means you neglect a wheel that’s more vital to the business? Either way, outside forces dictate how you’ll use your resources. Soon you’ll have a lot of mediocre content that doesn’t represent your team’s value. And that makes it hard to get headcount and funding.
LavaCon 2017 - DITA: Start Small, Grow Big Using Open Source ToolsJack Molisani
You’re considering using DITA and would like to try it out without incurring significant upfront costs, but also keeping your options open longer-term. Where do you start? How will you approach the challenges of content creation, content management, and publishing your content? There are in fact plenty of options. The good news is that XML and DITA are open standards. This has led to a healthy ecosystem with quality commercial and inter-operable open source tools, that do away with vendor lock-in and keep operating costs down. We will discuss the three challenges, show an example of how end-to-end solutions can be built based upon Git and other open source tools. In fact, the result may be better than you’d expect.
LavaCon 2017 - Feed the Goldfish in 19 Minutes and 52 SecondsJack Molisani
Content consumption patterns have dramatically changed over the last decade. The maximum selective sustained attention span of a human being is about 20 minutes. The length of this talk. Latest research shows that the transient attention span of human beings has even gone down from 12 to 8 seconds over the last decade – even a goldfish has a longer attention span.
To communicate technical content in the future successfully, we need to move from drops to drips, deliver smaller content chunks, improve findability and searchability and tailor content to the content consumer’s role and context automatically.
LavaCon 2017 - How UX and Content Can (and Should) Work TogetherJack Molisani
The Farmer and the Cowhand Should Be Friends, or, How UX and Content Can (and Should) Work Together.
Let’s be frank: If UX designers had their way, the only words you’d ever see on the web are lorem ipsum. And yet, words — from interfaces to microcopy to long narratives — are integral to the usability and delight of any web product. Based on his years of UX experience and love of good content, Dylan will talk about ways to bring the two sides together to make better things on the web.
LavaCon 2017 - Implementing a Customer-driven Transition to DITA Content: A S...Jack Molisani
When customer expectations uproot your documentation processes and PDF content offering, how do you mobilize a team that has used the same tools and processes to create book-based, unstructured content for over two decades? When new demands drive the change for structured content to support a myriad of users and multi-channel publishing, the logical choice is a DITA workflow.
Join Ciena, The Content Era and Adobe Tech Comm at LavaCon 2017 Portland for an immersive workshop that highlights how a DITA workflow is possible with familiar tools, a modest budget, and creative handling of the content.
LavaCon 2017 - Evolving the New Content OrderJack Molisani
We are at a critical moment in history, with knowledge bursting at the seams of our organizations. Many of us still struggle to manage numerous modes of omnichannel content engagement: published, interactive, and automated. The solution requires vision to move towards a new order of content intelligence encompassing our organization’s entire knowledge graph. It requires spanning silos, especially between marcomm and techcomm. Join Cruce Saunders as he explores the new content stack, and how to future proof content assets to meet the demands of ever-evolving customer experiences.
LavaCon 2017 - Managing Stakeholders Across the Content Ecosystem: The Key to...Jack Molisani
Trying to implement an content strategy that supports your customers across their entire journey–or even just sell the idea to decision makers? Having problems getting it to fly? More than any other single aspect, stakeholder management is critical to getting support for and implementing a unified content strategy (or ANY project, for that matter). You need to understand THEIR needs and ensure that you’re communicating continually to quiet objections and move your project forward. And it’s not always easy–especially when you’re leading initiatives across silos and teams with no direct authority. Influencing those stakeholders is key!
In this session, Andrea will discuss the success factors to aim for, and the behaviors that can trip you up, when managing stakeholders to successfully support your clients, solve business problems, and drive revenue and customer loyalty!
LavaCon 2017 - Future-proof Your Content: Beyond Traditional Publishing for S...Jack Molisani
This session delineates why the most common publishing methods in today’s technical space cannot survive into the middle of the next decade. Tools and methodologies are required that are scalable for vast increases of “atomic” content and to dozens of more language targets. Discover what the minimum ingredients are for survival in terms of tools, workflows and content strategies.
LavaCon 2017 - Silos. (And other concepts that make us average)Jack Molisani
Content crosses silos, giving content developers a unique perspective of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Years of experience leads to insight, but can also paralyze innovative ideas.
Has your experience given you tribal knowledge and wisdom, or preconceived notions that are no longer true or helpful?
In this keynote, Megan Gilhooly discusses new ways of thinking that challenge common business trends. She will provide examples highlighting how your ability to think critically and your passion for forging new trends can help you throughout your content career.
LavaCon 2017 - Management Workshop Part 1: Leadership and Management in Techn...Jack Molisani
Some of the unique challenges that Tech Comms managers face are offshoring, outsourcing, vendor management, managing across countries, justification of resources etc. In this workshop we will work with real life scenarios and learn from solutions that have been implemented in organizations to manage and lead effective content management teams. You will be exposed to ideas and and handy tools that we to build your team with a varied set of skills for scalability and longevity.
LavaCon 2017 - Stop, Listen, and Collaborate: Creating an Experience-first Co...Jack Molisani
Everyone in your organization wants to keep the user happy—they just have different ideas of how to go about it. Focusing on what information a user needs and when they need it along their journey can act as the bridge between product development, experience design, marketing and sales. Get tips on how to bring each group into the process and how to leverage content as a way to keep the user front of mind.
In this session, attendees will learn a mix of “soft” and “hard” skills to help put together an experience-first content strategy.
LavaCon 2017 - Engineering Content 4.0 for a Digital WorldJack Molisani
In 2016, the idea of Content 4.0 emerged as a community of thought leaders put their heads together to envision how the business of communication is going to change in the years ahead. The rapid unfolding of events in 2017 has confirmed our original ideas. So this year, our attention has shifted to exploring the details of how we make this happen and what specifically we need to change. Also in 2017, we have been exploring further the idea of information consumers and how the notion of Consumer 4.0 can help us better understand what we mean by Content 4.0.
All this encourages us to re-energize another idea – that of Content Engineering, about the discipline of designing content and content processes so that they work within, and empower, digital landscapes for businesses and consumers. It turns out that achieving Content 4.0 to satisfy the Consumer 4.0 depends entirely on engineering content for a fully digital lifecycle. Now while all of this may sound a little like cyberpunk science fiction, it is in fact about to become very real….
LavaCon 2017- We Are Single-Sourcing! But How Well Do We Work With Others?Jack Molisani
While single-source and content management workflows bring great benefits to core authoring teams, complications abound when trying to work with others. For every benefit that heavy content reuse and multi-channel publishing brings, we must ask the hard questions: “How do I share content with other departments?”, “How do I interact with subject matter experts?”, “How do we work with vendors and/or business partners?”
In this session, Mike Hamilton, Vice-President of Product Evangelism at MadCap Software, will look at strategies and techniques to help prevent the core documentation team from becoming a silo. How can we get other departments to use XML? Does getting other departments to use XML make business sense? If no, what other options exist? These questions and more will be addressed.
LavaCon 2017 - AI: Preparing Product Content for the Voice RevolutionJack Molisani
Virtual assistants such as SIRI, CORTANA, and OK GOOGLE are now penetrating and taking the corporate world by storm. Powered with natural language processing and personalization capabilities and promoted by the abundance of smart instant messengers, bots can leverage your rich topic-based content in ways that have never been seen before.
In this session you will learn how your taxonomy-based content strategy and semantic-enabled delivery platform can provide the content infrastructure you need to move forward with natural conversations that will give your users the answers they seek.
LavaCon 2017 - Presenting for Success: Achieving Buy-In (Almost) Every TimeJack Molisani
When budgets get tightened, it can become more difficult to convince stakeholders to green-light proposals for things like research and development – they can, over time, lead to an improved user experience, but may not seem to have many, if any, immediate financial returns. You NEED to get approval for this project, so prepare for the presentation to maximize your chances of approval: know your audience, evaluate whether they’re “ideas” or “data” people, and tailor your presentation to that audience.
LavaCon 2017 - Drawing the Line on Content Localization: How Much is Too Much?Jack Molisani
So much content, so many languages. When adding support for a new geography or language, how deep do you go? Localize every last help file, marketing page, tutorial video…or something less than that? Who gets to decide and what’s their process for doing so? I’ll share best practices and frameworks for making these decisions, collected from a number of content strategists at leading companies. I asked the tough questions of a number of your colleagues, so you don’t have to.
LavaCon 2017 - Static Site Generators are the Game ChangersJack Molisani
The best-known static site generator, Jekyll, was created eight years ago. That was a long time ago in tech years, yet many documentation specialists still don’t know about it. This established technology is a game changer for building documentation portals. Thanks to Jekyll, only the sky is the limit.
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 3DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 3. In this session, we will cover desktop automation along with UI automation.
Topics covered:
UI automation Introduction,
UI automation Sample
Desktop automation flow
Pradeep Chinnala, Senior Consultant Automation Developer @WonderBotz and UiPath MVP
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
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8. 1. Give birth - Apsu and Tiamat
2. Plot murder – Apsu
3. Tip off children Tiamat
4. Plan preemptive strike – Enki
5. Declare war children – Tiamat
6. Send Marduk – Enki
7. Slay Tiamat create heaven and
earth - Marduk
9. 1. Make light - Adonai
2. Separate water and make
heaven - Adonai
3. Make dry land - Adonai
4. Grow plants - Adonai
5. Create animals - Adonai
6. Create humans - Adonai
7. Take a break - Adonai
11. 1. Give spurious advice -
Snake
2. Follow spurious advice -
Woman
3. Do that thing – Adam
4. Make new clothes - Adam
and Woman
5. Hide in the bushes – Adam
and Woman
6. Show them the door –
Adonai
13. 1. Tick off Persians - Athenians
2. Send army to punish Athens –
King Darius
3. Lure the Persian army –
General Miltiades
4. Spring trap – General Miltiades
5. Send messenger - General
Miltiades
6. Deliver message and drop
dead – Pheidippides
Good morning! Welcome to this session, Countering the Chaos: the power of narrative in process analysis and workflow design.
I’ll start this morning by defining what we mean by workflow.
Then I’m going to do sort of a narrative analysis of some ancient events to show how workflow is really a narrative, a story if you will, of how things get done.
We’ll talk a bit about modeling processes—that is, that is, how to pin down the discrete steps of your process.
We’ll go on safari to find workflows in the wild, and finally, we’ll talk about workflow aids and automation.
My name is Bill Burns, and I am a content architect at Healthwise, Inc., a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help people make better health decisions. We do this by providing content through our products and services to all kinds of companies and organizations, from WebMD to Kaiser Permanente. If you frequently go to hospital web sites or online medical databases, it is very likely that you have read content produced at Healthwise.
Until just fairly recently, we produced all of our content out of a CMS based on Documentum using a homegrown DTD and all kinds of in-house technology to produce our various information products. Within the last few years, we’ve retooled and converted our content from a proprietary schema to DITA with a whole lot of specializations.
Our process in general requires a lot of cross-departmental communication and hand-offs from one team to another.
Aside from my life at Healthwise, I have worked as an applications engineer and consultant in the XML and component content management space for 15 years and as a publishing consultant and technical communicator for 24 years.
So why do I think you should care about process analysis and workflow?
Well, if you’re self-employed or work in complete isolation from others in an organization, perhaps you don’t need to care. But if your work impacts the work of others, if you contribute to a group effort to produce goods or services, then you need to understand the process that your team follows to deliver those goods or services, even if only to understand your part in it. Yes, you could just be a cog in the workings of the machine, but being ignorant of process is what will keep you there. If you want to progress and want your company to prosper, you need to understand your role in the process and its interplay with other roles in the workflow.
If you are in a senior role in your organization, process improvement is just part of the game. If you want efficiency, if you want to do more with less, if you want lower cost and faster time to market, you reform your processes constantly—and to do that, you need to know your processes and establish workflows to gain those efficiencies.
What is a workflow?
This seems like a fairly elementary question. It’s a process by which something happens, right? But let’s be a bit more precise. Workflow is just not a random set events that occur during the process of something happening—like genetic mutation or photosynthesis. It’s not merely a series of sequential events, like the progression of a car accident or the changes in light and shadow that take place during the passage of time.
So if we define workflow in a general sense, it is instead a series of sequential, willful acts that cause an end result to happen.
And if we flesh this out more, we can say it is a business, industrial, technical, or other process in which a sequence of tasks leads to a desired end result and is repeatable.
Repeatability is key, but we’re going to set that aspect aside for a moment to focus on the more basic description of workflow as a series of actions that cause an end result to happen. So we’re going to turn to a tool that many of us have in our toolbox but overlook when it comes to business process—and that tool is narrative analysis.
Perhaps a bit of my background might help to illustrate what I mean.
Although I work in a technical field and have even held the title “applications engineer,” I have no engineering credentials whatsoever. I have two Mas: one in English literature and another in theology with an emphasis in scripture. But I have been working in publications consulting for 20 years, and have been an XML and CCMS consultant for the last 15. How is it that I started largely as a writer and wound up doing content analysis, XML modeling, and tool integration? Well, quite simply, the tools I use to do rhetorical analysis of a literary text or a passage in scripture are the same tools I use to do a content analysis for XML. And the same tools can be put to use to analyze the action that takes place during an industrial or technical process. Narrative analysis, which is a specific type of rhetorical analysis, is essentially the assessment of action in a story, in the development of plot, and process analysis is essentially the assessment of action in a process, the development of product or service offering. So thinking of process in terms of story can be very useful for identifying the movement or action that takes place during that process.
So that’s very simple view of what a workflow is—a narrative about how something happens, how a process takes place. You can apply narrative analysis to just about any series of actions taken during an event to define a “workflow” in this sense.
What that means is that many of us who got our start in high tech after earning a liberal-arts degree very likely have the tools we need to do process analysis and workflow development. You can perform a narrative analysis and write the story of your process. You don’t need a business or engineering degree. You just need to be able to look at the story of how your products and services get from inception to delivery and describe that movement—every event that happens, every change of state, every climax and denouement—and then distinguish the critical and necessary from the things that waste time and sap resources.
So that’s what we’re going to do now. We’re going to apply narrative analysis to a few historical or mythical narratives and show how they map out as workflows.
Our first workflow is how to create the world out of chaos. But let’s tell the story first. This is from the Enuma Elish—the Babylonian Creation myth.
“In the beginning there was only undifferentiated water swirling in chaos. Out of this swirl, the waters divided into sweet, fresh water, known as the god Apsu, and salty bitter water, the goddess Tiamat. Once differentiated, the union of these two entities gave birth to the younger gods.
“These young gods, however, were extremely loud, troubling the sleep of Apsu at night and distracting him from his work by day.… Apsu decides to kill the younger gods. Tiamat, hearing of their plan, warns her eldest son, Enki… and he puts Apsu to sleep and kills him... Tiamat, once the supporter of the younger gods, now is enraged that they have killed her mate…
“…Enki and the younger gods fight against Tiamat futilely until, from among them, emerges the champion Marduk who swears he will defeat Tiamat. Marduk… kills Tiamat by shooting her with an arrow which splits her in two; from her eyes flow the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Out of Tiamat's corpse, Marduk creates the heavens and the earth…”
Mark, Joshua. “Enuma Elish—The Babylonian Epic of Creation.” Accessed 10/20/2017. Ancient History Encyclopedia. https://www.ancient.eu/article/225/enuma-elish---the-babylonian-epic-of-creation. March 2, 2011.
Give birth to the young gods. - Apsu and Tiamat
Plot to rid yourself of these noisy young gods. – Apsu
Tip off your children that “Dad” is really tired of the noise and plans to kill you off. - Tiamat
Plan a preemptive strike against Dad with your sibling gods – Enki
Declare war on your children for killing your mate. – Tiamat
Send Marduk after Tiamat. – Enki
Slay Tiamat and create heaven and earth from her corpse. - Marduk
Now, there is a variant on this theme from the book of Genesis. Adonai Elohim creates light and darkness, day and night; He separates waters above and below with a firmament; He gathered the waters together and made the dry land appear; He brought forth vegetation, seed-bearing plants, and fruit trees; He made large and small light objects in the heavens; He brings forth fauna to add to the flora; and finally He makes humankind, and then He rests.
You can go right through those stories, pick out the verbs, and you’ve got the start of your process.
1. Make light.
2. Separate water and make heaven.
3. Make dry land.
4. Grow plants.
5. Create animals.
6. Create humans.
7. Take a break!
Determine who does what, and you’ve got a workflow.
Okay, narrative number two, the fall of humanity and the loss of paradise.
Adonai Elohim puts man in the Garden of Eden to tend. He tells him, “Eat whatever you like, except don’t eat from that tree because you’ll die.” He creates the woman from the side of Adam. And this is where things get interesting. We don’t know what Adam has told the woman, but she doesn’t quite get the story right. She thinks it’s death even to touch the tree, which isn’t what Adam was told. So there’s your first instance of marital miscommunication. Or perhaps you could call it a game of prelapsarian telephone. Anyway, the serpent says to the woman—she doesn’t become Eve until after the fall—the serpent says, “Hey, how do you like them apples?” The woman says, “not even going there or we’ll die.” The serpent says, “Oh no, you’ll be wise like Adonai and know what’s good and what’s bad. Go ahead!” So the woman follows the serpent’s advice and takes a bite and she hands Adam the fruit. He does the same. They become aware of what they’ve just done, and now they know they’ve really stepped in it. So they try to cover themselves up with fig leaves, and they hide from Adonai when he comes looking for them. Adonai is aware that leaving them in the garden is no longer an option and expels them.
So here’s our workflow
Give spurious advice to the woman. - Snake
Follow spurious advice, and invite significant other to follow spurious advice. - Woman
Do that thing that Adonai Elohim specific told you not to do! – Adam
Make new clothes out of fig leaves. Adam and Woman
Hide in the bushes and act like nothing happened. – Adam and Woman
Show Adam and the woman the door out of the garden. – Adonai.
Okay, so this works with mythic narratives. How about historic events? Let’s try one.
Okay, final example is the Battle of Marathon and the aftermath.
So the Athenians helped neighboring Greeks in Ionia, which is in what would now be Turkey, to revolt against the Persians. This didn’t sit well with King Darius, who sent a massive army to conquer Greece, and in particular, to raze Athens. He sent a naval force to establish bases from which he could launch an attack on Athens. They landed at Marathon, which is where the Athenians made their stand. They were far fewer than the Persians, but they planned well and forced the Persians to rely solely on their infantry-bowmen without supporting cavalry. General Miltiades weakened the center of his force to draw the Persians in, but he strengthened the flanks. When the Persians came into attack the center, Miltiades ordered his flanks to wheel inward around the Persians and completely envelop them. After the battle, Miltiades sent the runner Pheidippides to Athens with the news. Pheidippides ran roughly 25 miles from Marathon back to Athens, announced the good news, and promptly dropped dead from exhaustion. And so the long-distance foot race that we now call the marathon was inspired by the battle and Pheidippides’ subsequent run.
“The Battle of Marathon.” Wikipedia. Accessed 20 October 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marathon. 11 October 2017.
So the process of initiating the first long-distance Olympian foot race:
Tick off Persians by aiding a revolt in their colony in Ionia. - Athenians
Send massive army to punish Athens and raze it to the ground. – King Darius
Lure the Persian army into a plain near Marathon. – General Miltiades
Spring trap and wipe out Persian infantry. – General Miltiades
Send messenger back to Athens with all due speed. - General Miltiades
Deliver message of victory and drop dead. – Pheidippides
Very literally a terminal event.
Now, I fudged my original description a bit for purpose of illustrating the narrative nature of a workflow. Clearly, a historical or mythic event fits the narrative structure, but it is not what we would call, strictly speaking, repeatable. But you can see how narrative is in essence process and mimics production process. Inverting that relationship, we could assert that production process mimics narrative.
So while these mythic and historic events are not when we would call repeatable, they do fit the structure of process and can be described in the same terms.
This gives is a very useful tool for modeling purposes. We have analysis of the “narrative structure,” so to speak, of your process—the story of how you do the thing you do. Every task, every event, every change of state that takes place to produce a good or service can be identified, as well as the individual or team responsible for performing each step of that process. While you analyze that story, you can identify those places where unnecessary things happen, where your process triggers other processes, where bottlenecks and dependencies exist, and where you might need outlets and values to redirect a process in exceptional circumstances.
So what’s your process story? How does product get from concept to delivery?
So time to pull out your rhetorical tool box. Start telling your story. Write it down, each step required to get from beginning to end.
Once upon a time, a project manager wrote a documentation plan…
Who initiates work? Will individuals be assigned work by some controller, or will they initiate their own work?
If you’re looking at documentation processes, do you start by writing a documentation plan? Do you review product specifications? Do you wait until you are contacted by engineering or marketing? How does the ball get rolling? How do you set the schedule? Who sets it?
Sometimes it helps to identify the milestones first: what are the major stages of your process? Review? Editing phases? Product beta release? Do your documentation process milestones coincide with phases in the product development process? At what points does the state of an item change? A milestone might be the first complete draft or the first SME review.
Once you set the milestones, you can back up and look at your story again? How does it progress from beginning to the first milestone? What’s the first action that takes place, and who performs it? Identify each action and each performer, each movement from one performer to another. Where do individuals or teams engage with each other? Where are the hand-off points, where the work you’ve done now moves into someone else’s role?
Analysis also gives you a great opportunity to clean up a bit. You might find that some tasks are being performed out of a misguided sense of tradition. This is the way we’ve always done this. The assumption, of course, is that you should continue to do it like this just because of precedence . Question your assumptions. If you can't explain why you do something for any better reason than tradition, maybe you should stop.
Another thing this process analysis gives you is the opportunity to identify your dependencies. When you’re aware of your dependencies, you can design into your workflow outlets or “valves” to allow process interventions.
Finally, it’s also important to assess whether there is too much rigidity in your process. Are there acceptable variations in personal work style? Can there be some flexibility in the tasks that are being performed?
Up until now, we’ve discussed mostly single process workflows, but don’t stop there! Where are the subplots in your end-to-end process story?
You need to identify processes that bridge departments to allow greater communication across organizations. Your process analysis, then, doesn’t stop with your own department. It needs to be broad enough to include related processes. You need to account for all of the intersections.
Having cross-departmental workflows helps to overcome the silo mentality that is so prevalent in many companies. They enable more effective and efficient collaboration.
So who intersects with your process? Who are the stakeholders elsewhere in the organization who have an interest or dependencies on your process? What processes inform yours?
If you produce documentation, how does that documentation get into the product? Do you have a product fulfillment function that needs to be notified when the documentation deliverables are complete?
How does your documentation get translated? Do you need to notify a localization or translation team when content is ready to be sent to translation, or if you have a tiered hand-off process, how do you work that factor into your development process? If you have an automated production process—for example, using XML transforms to produce your deliverables—how are you notified that translation is complete and production can begin?
And there are many other types of review processes that might have an impact. For example, for many of the healthcare and medical device clients with whom I worked at Vasont, regulatory and legal reviews were critical processes that branched off of the document development process.
It’s also good to assess the technical dependencies in your processes? Where would integration and automation benefit your process?
Now along with all this analysis, you’ll need to determine what kind of administration is going to be necessary for establishing and maintaining your workflows. You’ll also need some kind of governance to enable you to align your strategy with other departments in your organization.
Now, this is a fairly significant piece, because misalignment with other groups will just perpetuate the silos in your organization. If you don’t align with other organizations, you can wind up selecting different workflow tools, and develop overlapping or conflicting vocabularies for similar process tasks.
Think of this role as the master storyteller or narrator. This role is for determining not just the story of your current process but the story of the process you could have.
By the way, if you’re still not sold on the idea of using narrative analysis, I’ll let you in on a secret. Software developers do this all the time. I’ve known a few who put themselves into their code and ask questions like, “What do I want do with this piece of data? What values do I want to store in memory?”
Even Agile work tasks are defined as stories, so the narrative approach speaks to techies as well as liberal-arts types.
Now we’re going to look at a few workflows in the wild just to see how much variability we can find across industries even in simple processes.
Okay, here’s a typical document development in more of a traditional computer software or hardware environment.
You start with a project manager and a documentation plan, who hands off to the writer.
Writer creates chapter files or perhaps creates just a single document file from a template.
Writer develops content. Now, you notice that we’re not getting that granular. We could get into SME interviews, reading specs, working with product prototypes, and reviews. So a decision you have to make is the granularity of your task tracking. One of the benefits of breaking tasks down further is that you can assess where your resources are spending their time. If you’re using a good workflow tool, you can use that data to generate productivity reports. If you’re a small shop with just a few writers, who mostly manage their own work, too much granularity could be overkill.
Okay, next step is to send the document to the editor. Again, if you’re a small group, you might edit your own work, but there still has to be a step at which editing takes place—where you focus not on generating text but refining it. If this step is performed by someone else, then it’s very likely that you will also have some iteration at this point—that is, repetition of tasks in your workflow. An editor recommends changes, and the writer determines which changes to implement. If you employ a three- or four-level editing scheme in your process—where the first round is for developmental, a second round for stylistic matter, and a third round for copy editing, you’ll have more iteration here.
Finally, someone has to publish the document, and produce print file or whatever your target output is. Here too you might have some iteration. What if the line breaks come out badly or you find display anomalies. So even this simple process can have interventions and repetition.
Okay, how does workflow change when you switch to a modular content-development process? If you switch from traditional nonstructured document development, how will a topic-based approach impact your development workflow?
Well, the initial planning might look pretty similar. You might have to address more actors—perhaps a more diverse group of writers, each focused on a different area of the product: software drivers, wiring, consumable supplies. In our industry, we have some people describing medical tests, others writing behavioral change tips. The composition of these different types of information has to be part of that documentation plan, especially now that each topic might be written by a different writer.
Now, as the writers begin creating new topics, is there any concern about whether they are using the right templates? If you’re using DITA, do you want everyone create plain vanilla topics, or do you have multiple content types that you need to use and enforce? Do you need to introduce a technical editor to make sure the proper topic templates are used or the proper semantics? This is the happy place where we are right now with our DITA implementation. It can be a challenge to make sure everyone is on the same page.
And then we get to editing. Before you were handling off a single file or multiple chapter files. Now you could be handing off hundreds of topics. Introduce some iteration in that process, and things could get really messy fast. This is where workflow tools can make work much easier to track and manage. We’ll talk more about that in a few minutes.
But something we’ve also introduced here is a really big set of dependencies. Before we can publish, all the topics have to make it through the content-development and editorial process. Along the way, writers might need to see how the different pieces play together. They might want to preview the content. They are trying to write context-free content, but that doesn’t mean context doesn’t matter. So you might need to add additional places in your process where writers can do visual proofs of their content in development.
Now, in the industry in which my company works, we have a substantial concern for the accuracy of the information we develop and deliver. We have regular medical reviews, extensive plain-language editing, and so on. Companies that develop medical devices have extensive review processes to ensure the content is accurate, ensures safety, and protects against liability.
So on top of editorial processes, subject-matter experts need to comb through the material to ensure accuracy. Regulators need to review to ensure that the documentation meets industry standards. Legal counsel needs to review to address liability. I’ve seen unbelievably complex workflows designed accounting for every step of each subprocess along the way.
Each of these is like a digression or independent story in the middle of your process-development story line. Throw localization into the mix, and you have an epic on your hands. The more complex your process is and the more intersections you have with other processes, the more the complexity is expanded when you bring other locales into the mix.
So once you’ve captured the story of your process and all of its glory, you have to model it and make it a reality.
You could manage the process with Excel spreadsheets and Sharepoint sites, lots of face-to-face interactions, phone calls, emails, and such, but these methods are prone to error, hard to do collaboratively, and too porous. The details can slip too easily through the gaps. And in this age, it makes no sense to handle workflow this way. There are various technologies that can help you arrange and manage your work and the work of your teams.
The simplest are individual task managers, designed around the Kanban approach to organizing tasks. These are set up as boards with lanes that represent tasks in a development process.
Trello
Smartsheet
JIRA (Kanban)
These use a board and cards for arranging work tasks. As tasks are completed, they are moved to a different lane, and follow-on tasks in later processes can then begin.
There are also all kinds of project management and support-ticketing applications. These can show interrelated tasks in a process, sometimes in the form of a Gannt chart or some other kind of useful visual display of the relationship of tasks to each other. These are great for representing dependencies.
JIRA has a workflow display showing the order of states that can be assigned to a task
Wrike displays projects as a series of tasks in a Gannt chart.
Zendesk provides great support ticket tracking
Some process-lifecycle and content management systems have full-blown workflow integrations.
Sharepoint with Nintext
Vasont workflow and project management
Documentum
The difference between these systems and simple project management is that they can be used to automate processing: they kick off production processes, change metadata states, control work initiation and completion. Tools like Nintext can integrate with other Office 365 applications for notification and reporting. . Vasont’s workflow allows many kinds of business logic to be assigned to tasks to allow greater process and data control.
Interestingly enough, a lot of applications are now available for fiction writers that offer similar tools for developing novels and short stories—with outlining functions, drag-and-drop storyboarding, and plot development tools.
If you’re still managing your workflows using interoffice mail and Excel spreadsheets, know that novel writers and tax collectors are entering workflow heaven before you!
Human beings are story makers, and everything we do has a story. Likewise, every product and every service begins with a story: a story about someone’s need, a story about someone’s dream, a story about someone’s adventure.
Tell us your story.
Thank you for your attention today.