Structured authoring for business-critical content

Editor's Notes

• #2: In attending the many great presentations at this unique location, I wanted to talk Enterprise and I want to get a discussion going What are some major themes you think about when you hear the word Enterprise? As Dr. Ann Rockley highlighted yesterday, talking Enterprise means we can’t talk techie We need to do more with the same We need to also speak as ambassadors for the United Nations of Content We’ll take time to explore culture, change management and go small into some highly relevant details and cover the learning concepts which brought you here
• #3: There are four main points for the body of this presentation First, we’ll do some introductions and then we’ll take a look at some recent research Next we’ll talk briefly about culture and change management Then I’m going to talk about an important concept called Smart Content We’ll wrap up with some key findings and recommendations, allowing time for Q&A
• #4: My experience is unified by one simple theme: Simplify everyday work for user communities Started out with biomedical devices, then worked in aerospace Let’s highlight transformation, a journey that can educational and rewarding.
• #5: If you encounter me on a weekend in Colorado, I might look more like this.
• #6: This is what I like to do
• #7: This is what I like to see
• #8: Enough about me, let’s talk about you
• #9: Still on the topic of introductions While we still have the design-rich page layout software QuarkXPress for desktop, We have heavily invested in Enterprise technology for the last 8 years
• #10: This is the Quark Publishing Platform Few people today realize that Quark does all of this We provide content automation, enabling our customer/partners to succeed across the Enterprise Platform assets leverage the design-rich power of QuarkXPress Server, including the ability to generate a preview while an asset is in the editorial process. Upon completion, assets can be published to the App Studio SaaS Portal for delivery in a customer’s app or distributed in all the other ways we have mentioned. You can even deliver QuarkXPress as an output format, in case last minute touch-ups are required immediately before delivery.
• #12: Quark partnered with InfoTrends to conduct an industry survey late last year This survey was designed to better understand current technology spend in the industry While it includes technical communications, it also seeks to define technical content as related to non-technical content
• #13: Here you can see the make-up of participating organizations We are interested in Enterprise organizations of larger size Individuals from smaller organizations were exited out of the survey immediately
• #14: Despite best efforts to encourage global participation, our results are heavily represented by North American respondents
• #15: Participants mostly consist of contributors and management, with some representation of Consultants And creative/academic professionals
• #16: Respondents from manufacturing were heavily represented We also saw significant participation from government and public services, financial services, and healthcare
• #17: In terms of technology spend, enterprise organizations surveyed spent $800,000 in 2015 on content-related technology This is growing by as much as 13% in some industries We will come back to the InfoTrends research For now, let’s turn our attention to structured authoring
• #19: We can’t talk about structured authoring without first recognizing our audience The world is mostly unstructured
• #20: When it comes to changes in behavior, I wanted to use the iceberg model to describe how values influence human behavior People value simplicity and for good reason We don’t ask people to change their values, whatever they are We celebrate differences And we understand that changing behavior is difficult The waterline signifies what we see
• #21: David Weinberger, Ph.D.Senior ResearcherHarvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society Keynote at the Content Management/DITA strategies conference in April of this year Explained that conversations are mostly echo chambers with nuances of difference There’s link between the cultural diversity of our collective populations and biology In order for any species to survive, it must have differences We can say the same about our United Nations of Content
• #22: Any value can be reflected on a continuum Some values imply a judgment call: customers over products, for example Other values are taught by our culture, part of who we are, where we are born, and not a choice: for example, do we identify more with individuality vs. a group, how do we use physical space, how do we communicate non-verbally, how do we make eye contact, etc. the focus of this is not to apply judgment to different cultural styles, but to Recognize they exist Celebrate our differences Also think about how difficult it can be to communicate across opposing extremes This is important when it comes to change management For example ”I know ROI is important for the company, but how is this better for me?” Successful adoption of technology requires a focus on the people
• #23: In the context of structured content for the Enterprise Let’s look at the steps to extend content automation to non-technical users The art and science of applying structure to begin with is deeply satisfying The automation and what you can do with structured content that provides the business value The requirement is structured input Authoring usability is the last remaining hurdle to fully unlock the potential of your content That’s important for other purposes, such as analytics
• #24: Technical Author’s Best Available Solution: Turn Tag View On - Minimize Surprises Write in XML Every Day - Know the Schema Inside-Out
• #26: Resolving multiple user choices costs additional development time
• #27: XML purists will talk about the separation of style from content, which is partly the value of going to structure in the first place After 20 years, I no longer care about the separation of style from semantics. We can make more people more productive with both.
• #28: Smart Content takes the telescope and turns it around, making distant stars visible and complex problems possible But what is Smart Content really? We’re going to take a few slides to dive a little bit deeper into the methodology and the data model. Business-critical content is defined as content you sell, content that helps you sell, or content that helps you run your business (for example, due to regulatory reasons) You can go even deeper by looking up Dave White’s 2015 Balisage paper or by reaching out to us to get involved in open standardization
• #29: Based on archetypes, proven patterns for representing content in XML Archetypes provide simplified semantic processing for automation A simple entry point for configuration and extension Uses syntax that makes sense to almost everyone It’s not constrained. How many people here know The Doors? Great. How many people here know who played bass for The Doors? That’s a trick question. The Doors had no bass. Borrowing from the Kids in the Hall, the gypsies had no homes. Don’t let that scare you, let that free you. So there’s very limited controls for order and occurrence of blocks and inlines. This is good. It removes many of the hidden rules and improves the authoring experience by design. Sadly, still no silver bullets Some hidden rules for cut/copy/paste Some semantics have rigid, meaningful sub-assemblies: figure for example has a formal title associated with the image and an optional description.
• #30: Here’s how the Smart Content data model compares to other popular content models. It’s very similar, but it does have some very intentional, key differences.
• #31: One such key difference is metadata The key takeaway: metadata drives the power and business value of content automation; it should be easy to capture and broadly accessible Attributes are commonly used to define metadata for structured content Rich metadata expression requires Automation Usability Rich structure for capturing highly complex taxonomies Groupings are organized logically in the UI for authoring usability
• #32: Here’s what it looks like in more detail As you can see, nested elements and multiple value elements on attribute, we can easily repeat common structures using simple UI widgets And we can also handle common challenges associated with multi-value attributes As shown here in a simple example, we can also handle a value for name where the first and last name are expressed as a single, human-readable value consisting of firstname, space, lastname
• #33: Maybe you’re thinking about a particular use case and struggling to see how it might fit in a simplified data model Maybe it doesn’t fit; that’s certainly one option We encourage you to return to the goal: broader adoption, simple usability How easily can your most distracted and infrequent users make use of that complex feature? I have observed 1 year olds using iPads; that’s a possible test for an approachable interface Our users are experts in something else; they can spell XML but they don’t want to; even if they do want to, they simply don’t have time An interesting quote from Dr. Weinberger: expertise doesn’t scale We can’t expect to generate or maintain power users; tools experts won’t scale And so we choose simple designs that are rich and approachable, but we will always find some cases pushing us toward the complexity of a more fully defined structure Information architects struggle with these problems every day, SMEs don’t but they sure notice when the tool gets in the way of their job
• #34: Success stories have their own momentum, in terms of paradigm shifts sometimes new concepts are framed by old concepts Here are some examples (talk to examples) To anyone outside a particular concept, the differences aren’t well understood Take Quark: the leadership is different, the business focus is different, the company is very different. It’s time for XML to shed its skin; we don’t always have to abide by the old maxims and we can change If you don’t believe me, try this at your next cocktail party: tell someone about the best XML mark-up you ever read.
• #35: Within XML, another well-defined context is DITA Wildly successful and still thriving quite nicely: 80% usage in Tech Comm in 2012 and 2016 As the spec matures, some of the complex requirements may fade away Heavy expectation and complex requirements have presented challenges for some vendors At Quark, our Enterprise focus since 2008 is set to accomplish a very different mission Dave White, our CTO, consciously made a choice about how we would measure our success We will not have our success or failure determined by how well we do or do not support DITA Benefits: we avoid the RFP check-box style requirements about whether or not we support a particular DITA feature, so we can focus on actual business requirements We also avoid the social hammering some vendors receive for not supporting every dark corner of the spec XML professionals know this, writers know this, we merely put the stake in the ground Our authors will never think like programmers, so let’s set them free. DITA is just a single data model and there are real advantages to choosing a new, simple data model. Again, don’t let that scare you, let that free you. Much like the Doors had wild success and no bass.
• #36: Here’s what Smart Content looks like in action. This is our web-based authoring interface we call Quark Author.
• #37: Smart Content is mature, and it’s still a work in progress Targeting highly specialized experts that don’t talk techie and that has worked very well for us We have had significant success in the financial services market, focused on key document types supporting investment research Financial services organizations are highly regulated and keenly interested in better managing their procedural content, which also has broad applicability to many industry verticals For example, the SOP documents are a common model for customers in Government, Health Care, Manufacturing, and more In the end, the success which truly matters to me comes unsolicited from the voices of our customers When efficiency is replicated, it makes business sense. It also makes good professional and personal sense because Successful Enterprise champions are remembered widely and well-rewarded
• #38: Let’s return to the data coming from the InfoTrends survey
• #39: Two significant findings stem from the Quark-InfoTrends survey on Content Automation: (1) Businesses are investing in content automation to improve customer satisfaction (2) Mobile content automation solutions are truly increasing in terms of business needs. While mobile solutions have generated significant amounts of buzz for years, that was largely in the consumer market and not in the business world. In our own industry, we know that trend is changing.
• #40: We’ve talked a lot about business critical content. Here’s the different content types which make up business critical content according to survey respondents. As you can see, technical communication enjoys a very high ranking, followed closely by training material and product data sheets.
• #41: Overall, technical documentation is business-critical, particularly in manufacturing, government, and healthcare Financial services rank financial reports, policies & procedures as business-critical
• #42: We’ve heard that customer satisfaction is key to driving future investment. Here we can see that 98% of respondents associate outstanding customer experience with content. Business critical content matters.
• #43: Here we can see how many people are typically involved in developing new content. This shows us that highly regulated industries tend to involve more people collaborating on new content.
• #44: Inclusion is the key to managing change for successful Enterprise solutions Include early, include often Celebrate your differences Iterate and improve incrementally