Content Operations

There are five levels of maturity for AI-driven content operations. Which level are you in? In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow walk through the AI content ops maturity model, from ad hoc experimentation to fully autonomous workflows. Sarah O’Keefe: We want this automation, right? We want the ability to go in and extract release notes and do something with them. We have to have a certain level of maturity on the software development process so that we can grab the appropriate information. The same thing is true on the content side. You have to have a certain level of maturity in your content development processes, in your content management, so that you can identify the right things to process and the right things to access. Related links: Want to know more about Sarah’s nifty little side project? Register for our upcoming webinar. AI in the content lifecycle Enterprise content strategy maturity model LinkedIn: Sarah O’Keefe Bill Swallow Transcript: Introduction with ambient background music Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations. Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it. Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky; you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change. Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and processes that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off. End of introduction Bill Swallow: I am Bill Swallow. Sarah O’Keefe: And I’m Sarah O’Keefe. BS: And today we’re going to talk about AI in content operations, or more specifically, a maturity model for AI. SO: Everything needs a maturity model, even AI. BS: Even me. SO: I have no comment. BS: My maturity model is written in crayon, what can I say? So okay, so we need a maturity model for AI as far as content operations are concerned, and probably in you know, many different degrees, but we’ll focus on content operations. So what might that look like? SO: I’ve been thinking about this and what it looks like to employ AI as a tool to help you with content. And as I was thinking about what this looks like, you know, you always fall back on that standard five-step model where one is basically mass chaos, and five is the perfect world, generally. also, one is nearly always cheap, and five is nearly always expensive enterprise things. But, you know, let’s go a little beyond mass chaos versus governed, regulated, etc., and sort of sort of back up a little bit and talk about what this might look like. So level one in every maturity model typically is ad hoc. And what that means is that in this case, AI is being used sporadically by some people. It’s inconsistent. And I would say that when we look at AI and content specifically, BS: Mm-hmm. SO: This is going to be things like reprocessing your content using public-facing models. So I wrote a draft of something, I shove it into ChatGPT and I ask it to shorten it or tighten it up or identify areas that are problematic. Or I just say, hey, you know, write my article for me. The outcome that you’re gonna get on an ad hoc model is going to depend on an ad hoc level one. BS: Mm-hmm. SO: AI thing is going to depend on how good you are on the individual’s expertise and their level of interest. So if you want to just go in there and say, hey, I have a bio and it’s too long, and I’ve been asked to produce one that’s only 50 words for a particular conference, for example, then, you know, this is this is actually a really good example of ad hoc, right? BS: Mm-hmm. SO: We have these long multi-paragraph bios and every conference I’ve been to has a different requirement for how that bio needs to be shaped. And the fastest way to success is to just shove it into a chatbot and say, give me a 50-word version. And and then read it and make sure it didn’t invent things or give you a PhD or anything like that, and then ship it off to the conference organizer. But this is much, much faster than rewriting it from scratch by hand. And also I think, it’s a good example of something where I have the extended version and I’m going to summarize down. And that usually works pretty well. So level one is ad hoc. It’s kind of sporadic. There’s no standard across the organization. It’s just me saying, this looks useful, or you’ve probably got some use cases in this space as well. BS: Right. So it it kind of aligns with I guess level one of the the content maturity model that we talked about a while back, where level one is is simply content exists. Could be, you know, someone typing stuff up in Word or, you know, using a myriad of different tools, no style guide, just kind of getting content out there because people need it. SO: Yep. So level two is tactical. And tactical is sort of like we’re using this tool to solve some specific problems. And what you’re going to see here is something like that Bill has invented some nifty time saving tool and he has shared it with other people. Or in a larger organization, maybe somebody invented a nifty validate or or something like that and they’ve rolled it out across maybe the department, probably not the entire organization. Aomething like AI support is being rolled out. Maybe the organization has created a chatbot internally for customers, right? So there’s a chatbot, it’s sitting on the company website, people can use it to get answers, but it’s really bad. And the reason it’s really bad is because nobody thought too carefully about the content going into the chatbot, because again, we’re tactical. So probably this looked like the AI team just raided the local SharePoint, grabbed a bunch of content, did not pay a whole lot of attention to the question of whether this content was up to date in release status. Those things don’t exist, right? It’s just, look, a bucket of PDFs. Cool. Let’s dump them into the AI and go for it. BS: Mm-hmm. SO: And tragically, in many cases, the techcomm team is sitting on rigorous, structured, vetted, approved content, and nobody remembered to go ask them, can we have your content? Or where is your official content source? Or how do I know what version belongs with which document? BS: Right, because you know, in in their point of view there’s a PDF of it, so I don’t need to ask them. SO: Yeah, it’s it’s just PDF. How hard could it be? So something like AI was support was rolled out, but nobody really thought about it. Maybe it’s at a departmental level, probably it’s not enterprise-wide. And nobody has really thought about connecting this AI thing to the assets inside the organization in a reasonable, rigorous, governed, organized kind of manner. BS: And I suppose that’s where you get to the next tier. SO: Right. So the next tier after tactical comes strategic, right? So we have an actual strategy. Now, one of the difficulties in talking about AI is that AI is a tool and it’s kind of like talking about electricity. You can apply it to lots of places and it’s more sensible in some places than others. But when we say what’s your AI strategy, like how do you use water? I mean, come on, and the answer is of course to drive the AI and you know destroy the environment. But there are things that you can do with AI that are useful for content. There are also things that you can do that are not. So if you have a strategic approach to this, a strategic approach to use of AI, backing up to the authors again rather than the delivery side, maybe this looks like a collection of prompts that have been built that are shared. BS: Not with electricity. SO: Maybe this looks like saying this is the workflow that you employ. These are the kinds of things that we do to actually test whether this thing is working. these are the metrics that we’re following. So there’s an actual overarching bigger picture that somebody’s thinking about that goes beyond, let me go shove this into chatbot of the day. BS: Mm-hmm. Right, right. SO: So there’s an actual strategy for the public-facing chatbots. Somebody has thought about the back end. The authors have useful AI tools that add to their you know their productivity. One of the things that I’m hearing a lot now, you know, low-hanging fruit, release notes. Nobody wants to write release notes. It’s a terrible drudge task. It’s and it needs to be done. Well, BS: Mm-hmm. SO: There’s now there are now a lot of solutions that look like look at the diff in the code, look at the delta from you know version one to version one dot one, find the diff in the code, find the changes that have been made, look at the JIRA tickets that have been addressed, that have been solved in release one dot one, and then consolidate that all into a set of release notes that say, here’s what’s been done. And that’s probably 90% of the work, and the last 10% of the work is read that and make sure it’s accurate. Right? Don’t please don’t skip that step. Like actually look at what the thing is generating. Now, what’s interesting to me about level three, this sort of more strategic approach, is that what you’re gonna start to see is that you have prerequisites for this. You can’t do this. BS: Yes. SO: So release notes are good example. Let’s say that hypothetically, and this is gonna sound insane, but let’s say that hypothetically, you have software development and you have no source control. BS: Hmm. SO: Everybody’s screaming, right? Because this is nuts, and why would you ever do this? Okay. But hypothetically, you have no source control. Okay. How do you know what’s changed between version one and version one point one? BS: It’s up here in my head. SO: Excellent, great. Ha okay, cool. so I’m gonna need to connect the AI to your head so that we can pull those changes out of your head. BS: That sounds fun. SO: Yeah. Amazing. Right. So all of a sudden, because we want this automation, right? We want the ability to go in and extract release notes and do something with them. We have to have a certain level of maturity on the software development process so that we can grab the appropriate information. Now, the same thing is of course true on the content side. You have to have a certain level of maturity in your content development processes, in your content management, so that you can identify, you know, the right things to process and the right things to access. And why it is that, you know, we know that software has to be governed, but we’re not so sure about content is a mystery to me. BS: I had never understood that. SO: Yeah. So there we are. Okay, so that’s kind of like a level three. With there’s some sort of strategy emerging across the enterprise. There are some useful tools and they’re shared. This is kind of like in content when you start thinking about templates. We’re gonna have some templates and we’re gonna give them to people and they’re gonna use them and it’s gonna be great. All right, so level four is governed, managed. And so now good understanding of AI. BS: Mm-hmm. SO: It is being applied in a useful, intelligent manner, by which I mean don’t apply it to the wrong problem sets, right? Apply it to the things where it makes sense to apply it. Thinking about governance, thinking about metrics, thinking about success. And then your data sources and your content sources are being managed in such a way that the AI gets good input and can actually generate good output. So I’m actually not a big fan of the term human in the loop because human in the loop implies that the AI is doing all the work and then like the human eventually gets around to QAing it. You know what? We’re terrible at QA. You know who’s good at QA? BS: Mm-hmm. AI. SO: No, computers, not AI. AI is all about probability and whatever. It is actually not very good at QA. What’s good at QA is traditional software, right? One plus one is always two. In an AI, one plus one, sometimes it’s not two. So you manage that stuff and you put those guardrails up and you start putting up the guardrails that say, okay, when the AI kind of wanders off into the wilderness, we’re gonna like bring it back to reality. We’re gonna have, we’re gonna put it in a box, right? Make the AI think inside the box, and we’re gonna govern what that box is. AI is great at thinking outside the box. Unfortunately, that’s usually not what we want from technical content. So it needs to be in in the box and it needs to be consistent and needs to be managed and all the rest of it. BS: Mm-hmm. SO: So we govern it, right? We go in there and we make sure that the processes and the tooling that’s being put in place and the automation that’s being put in place where we’re leveraging or using AI to do things is managed. And so the human in the loop thing. I don’t want the human in the loop to fix things on the back end. I want the human in the loop to fix things on the front end so that what goes in is better, so that there’s less work to do when it comes out. You know, fix it beforehand. Don’t remediate it afterwards. That’s a boatload of work and it is not fun. So fix it ahead of time. BS: Right. Yeah. And likewise you probably wanna have, you know, some guardrails in there so that, you know, your AI, whatever it is, doesn’t go playing around with content that has been approved and released and is not slated for updating. SO: Yeah, you know, don’t fix that. That one’s done. That one’s and you know, we’re not even talking here about what it means to be in a regulated industry or in a regulatory environment. there if you are shipping or sorry, if you are a large organization and you are doing things in Europe, then you are likely subject to the European, the EU AI Act. BS: That’s a completely different beast. SO: And you have to think about what that means for what you’re doing, because the fun gold rush wild, wild west strategy of just throw AI at everything is not gonna fly in Europe. Okay, so that’s governed, you know, hypothetically. And then level five is agentic, which is basically that everything, everything or a lot of it is running autonomously. BS: Mm-hmm. SO: You know, the layman’s explanation of what is agentic AI, the difference is that instead of saying I need to put a prompt into the chatbot, it does it itself because you’ve built out the systems that drive all of that happening. BS: It understands what needs to happen at what point in time. SO: Well, let’s not say understands, but yes. I’m trying so hard. BS: Well, yeah, not understands, but there’s a workflow in place that the AI is following. SO: And it’s so difficult. I think that, you know, there’s, as a side note, the why do we think, why do we impose personality on the chatbots? And the answer is I think that psychologically it’s very, very difficult to interact with something that play acts at human interaction. What a great idea! Good for you. I love your thinking, blah, blah, blah. So it makes you think you’re interacting with a human. And I don’t think that our brains are equipped to say, no, actually, this is a machine. BS: It’s like a scary version of Teddy Ruxpin. SO: It, well, it passes the Turing test. And so we just can’t separate if it feels like you’re interacting with a person, you know you’re not, but it feels as though you are, and feeling is always gonna win over knowledge. So BS: Mm-hmm. Well yeah, the interaction is a lot more organic than you get from, you know, traditional tools. SO: Or, you know, yeah. I mean, think about the difference between a search, typing in a search string, and you know, a conversational search, a conversational interface. It’s quite, quite troubling, actually. Yeah, so this is kind of the five-level model, right? From big mess ad hoc, some things are happening, th some things aren’t, up to it’s completely autonomous. Now, if it’s going to be the more autonomy you want, the better your inputs have to be, which circles us right back to, and therefore, you have to do the work on the content side, because if you don’t do the work on the content side, the AI is going to go off the rails in interesting, unexpected, and potentially disastrous ways. BS: It will play with the mess you leave it. SO: Yep. So that’s where we’re going with this. That’s the AI content ops maturity model as it stands today. I reserve the right to change it tomorrow. BS: Today. Of course.So this model came out of I guess some little nifty side project you’ve been working on recently. SO: I am working on a nifty little side project. We’re not quite ready to announce it. but I’ve got a a co-author and we’re working on a thing. BS: Fair. SO: I could say more but then I’d, you know, be in trouble. BS: When might you be able to say more? SO: I believe that we have a webinar coming July 22nd, where we will say some more things. BS: Alrighty. Well we will learn more things then. SO: I too will learn more things and probably we’ll have to we’ll probably we’ll have to change everything we’ve done up until this point because everything will change by then. BS: Of course. Guess that’s a good place to leave this podcast. Thank you, Sarah. SO: Thank you. Want to know more about Sarah’s nifty little side project? Register for our upcoming webinar. The post From ad hoc to autonomous: The AI content ops maturity model appeared first on Scriptorium.

AI, self-paced courses, and shifting demand for instructor-led classes—what’s next for the future of training content? In this podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Kevin Siegel unpack the challenges, opportunities, and what it takes to adapt. There’s probably a training company out there that’d be happy to teach me how to use WordPress. I didn’t have the time, I didn’t have the resources, nothing. So I just did it on my own. That’s one example of how you can use AI to replace some training. And when I don’t know how to do something these days, I go right to YouTube and look for a video to teach me how to do it. But given that, there are some industries where you can’t get away with that. Healthcare is an example—you’re not going to learn how to do brain surgery that someone could rely on with AI or through a YouTube video. — Kevin Siegel Related links: Is live, instructor-led training dying? (Kevin’s LinkedIn post) AI in the content lifecycle (white paper) Overview of structured learning content IconLogic LinkedIn: Kevin Siegel Sarah O’Keefe Transcript: Introduction with ambient background music Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations. Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it. SO: Change is perceived as being risky; you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change. Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and processes that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off. End of introduction SO: Hi, everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe. I’m here today with Kevin Siegel. Hey, Kevin. KS: Hey, Sarah. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. SO: Yeah, it’s great to see you. Kevin and I, for those of you that don’t know, go way back and have some epic stories about a conference in India that we went to together where we had some adventures in shopping and haggling and bartering in the middle of downtown Bangalore, as I recall. KS: I can only tell you that if you want to go shopping in Bangalore, take Sarah. She’s far better at negotiating than I am. I’m absolutely horrible at it. SO: And my advice is to take Alyssa Fox, who was the one that was really doing all the bartering. KS: Really good. Yes, yes. SO: So anyway, we are here today to talk about challenges in instructor-led training, and this came out of a LinkedIn post that Kevin put up a little while ago, which will include in the show notes. So Kevin, tell us a little bit about yourself and IconLogic, your company and what you do over there. KS: So IconLogic, we’ve always considered ourselves to be a three-headed dragon, three-headed beast, where we do computer training, software training, so vendor-specific. We do e-learning development, and I write books for a living as well. So if you go to Amazon, you’ll find me well-represented there. Actually, one of the original micro-publishers on this new platform called Amazon with my very first book posted there called, “All This PageMaker, the Essentials.” Yeah, did I date myself for that reference? Which led to a book on QuarkXPress, which led to Microsoft Office books. But my bread and butter books on Amazon even today are books on Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, and TechSmith Camtasia. I still keep those books updated. So publishing, training, and development. And the post you’re talking about, which got a lot of feedback, I really loved it, was about training and specifically what I see as the demise of our training portion of our business. And it’s pretty terrifying. I thought it was just us, but I spoke with other organizations similar to mine in training, and we’re not talking about a small fall-off of training. 15, 20% could be manageable. You’re talking 90% training fall off, which led me to think originally, “Is it me?” Because I hadn’t talked to the other training companies. “Is it us? I mean, we’re dinosaurs at this point. Is it the consumer? Is it the industry?” But then I talked to a bunch of companies that are similar to mine and they’re all showing the same thing, 90% down. And just as an example of how horrifying that is, some of our classes, we’d expect a decent-sized class, 10, a large class, 15 to 18. Those were the glory days. Now we’re twos and threes, if anyone signs up at all. And what I saw as the demise of training for both training companies and trainers, if you’re a training company and you’re hiring a trainer, one or two people in the room isn’t going to pay the bills. Got to keep the lights on with your overhead running 50%, 60%, you know this as a business person, but you’ve got to have five or six minimum to pay those bills and pay your trainer any kind of a rate. SO: So we’re talking specifically about live instructor-led, in-person or online? KS: Both, but we went more virtual long before the pandemic. So we’ve been teaching more virtual than on-site for 30 years. Well, not virtual 30 years, virtual wasn’t really viable until about 20 years ago. So we’ve been teaching virtual for 20 years. The pandemic made it all the more important. But you would think that training would improve with the pandemic, it actually got even worse and it never recovered. So the pandemic was the genesis of that spiral down. AI has hastened the demise. But this is instructor-led training in both forms, virtual and on-site. I think even worse for on-site. SO: So let’s start with pandemic. You’re already doing virtual classes, along comes COVID and lockdowns and everything goes virtual. And you would think you’d be well-positioned for that, in that you’re good to go. What happened with training during the pandemic era when that first hit? KS: When that pandemic first hit, people panicked and went home and just hugged their families. They weren’t getting trained on anything. So it wasn’t a question of, were we well-positioned to offer training? Nobody wanted training, period. And this was, I think if you pull all training companies, well, there are certain markets where you need training no matter what. Healthcare as an example, they need training. Security, needed training. But for the day-to-day operations of a business, people went home and they didn’t work for a long time. They were just like, “The world is ending.” And then, oh, the world didn’t end. So now they’ve got to go back to work, but they didn’t go back to work for a long time. Eventually people got back to work. Now, are you on-site back to work or are you at home? That’s a whole nother thing to think about. But just from a training perspective, when panic sets in, when the economy goes bad, training is one of the first things, you get rid of it. Go teach yourself. And the teaching yourself part is what has led to the further demise of training, because you realize I can teach myself on YouTube. At least I think I can. And I think when you start teaching yourself on your own and you think you can, it becomes, the training was good enough. So if you said, “Let’s focus on the pandemic.” That’s what started it, the downward spiral. But we even saw the downward spiral before the pandemic, and it was the vendors that started to offer the training that we were offering themselves. SO: So instead of a third-party, certainly a third-party, mostly independent organization offering training on a specific software application, the vendors said, “We’re going to offer official training.” KS: Correct. And it started with some of these vendors rolling out their training at conferences. And I attended these conferences as a speaker. I won’t name the software, I won’t name the vendor, but I would just tell you I would go there and I would say, “Well, what’s this certificate thing you’re running there?” It’s a certificate of participation. But as I saw people walking around, they would say, “I’m now certified.” And I go, “You’re not certified after a three-hour program. You now have some knowledge.” They thought they were certified and experts, but they wouldn’t know they weren’t qualified until told to do a job. And then they would find out, “I’m not qualified to do this job.” But that certificate course, which was just a couple of hours by this particular vendor, morphed into a full day certificate. They were charging now a lot of money for it, which morphed into a multi-day thing, which now has destroyed any opportunity for training that we have. And that’s when I started noticing a downward spiral. Tracking finances, it would be your investments going down, down, down, down this thing. It’s like a plane, head and nose down. SO: And we’ve seen something similar. I mean, back in the day, and I do actually… So for those of you listening at home that are not in this generation, PageMaker was the sort of grandparent of InDesign. I am also familiar with PageMaker and I think my first work in computer stuff was in that space. So now we’ve all dated ourselves. But back in the day we did a decent amount of in-person training. We had a training classroom in one of our offices at one point. Now, we were never as focused on it as you are and were, but we did a decent business of public-facing, scheduled two-day, three-day, “Come to our office and we’ll train you on the things.” And then over time, that kind of dropped off and we got away from doing training because it was so difficult. And this is longer ago than you’re talking about. So the pattern that you’re describing where instructor-led in-person training, a classroom training with everybody in the same room kind of got disrupted a while back. We made a decent living doing that for a long time and there was- KS: Made a great living doing that. Oh, my God. That was the thing. SO: But we got away from it, because it got harder and harder to put the right people in the right classes and get people to travel and come to us. So then there’s online training, which we kind of got rid of training. You sort of pivoted to online/ virtual. And then ultimately, the pandemic has made it such, from my point of view, that the vast majority of what we do in this space is custom. We’re doing a big implementation project. We do some custom training that might be in-person, on-site, but much more often it is online, live online instructor-led, but custom. Because all of the companies that we’re dealing with, even if people did return to office, very much they’re fragmented, right? It’s two people here and five people there, and four people there and one in every state. And so, bringing them all together into a classroom is not just bring the instructor in, but bring everybody in and it costs a fortune. And that’s before we get into the question of, can they get across the borders and can they travel? There’s visa issues, there’s admin issues, people have caregiving responsibilities, they can’t travel. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that goes into actually relocating from point A to point B to do a class at point B. So fine. Okay. So along comes the pandemic that really pushes on the virtualization, right? The virtual stuff. And then you’re saying the vendors get into it and they are clawing back some of this revenue for themselves. They’re basically saying, “We’re going to do official vendor-approved stuff, which then makes it very difficult as a third-party, because you have to walk that line, and I’ve been there, you have to walk that line between, we are delivering training on this product which belongs to somebody else, and we can be maybe a little more forthright about the issues in the product because it’s not our product. So we’re just going to say, “Hey, there’s an issue over here. It doesn’t really work. Do it this other way.” Not toeing the official party line. Okay, so we have all of that going on and all of those challenges already. And now along comes AI. So what does AI do to this environment that you’re describing? KS: It further destroys it. I’ll give you an example. My blog, Typepad, we received an email September 1st, 2025, and we’re recording this September 4th, 2025, okay? So three days ago I got an email saying, “Hello, we’re shutting down. Sorry.” And I’m like, “What? Yeah, you’ve got 30 days to get your stuff out of here.” Basically being kicked out of your apartment or your house. So I’m like, “All right, well, go to AI and I asked AI, what is the top blog software?” They said, “WordPress.” Love it or hate it, okay. So I went to WordPress. I had no idea how to use WordPress. I had no staff available to help me. So I had to get my stuff out of Typepad and on and on it went. I went to AI, ChatGPT specifically, and I said, “Teach me how to use WordPress,” and specifically how to get my crap out of TypePad. I say crap, my stuff out of TypePad. In a matter of what? Two days I had everything transferred over. So, didn’t need training, otherwise I would’ve had to go to training to learn how to do that and I didn’t have to. So that’s an example of there’s probably a training company out there that’d be happy to teach me how to use WordPress. I didn’t have the time, I didn’t have the resources, nothing. So I just did it on my own. That’s one example of how you can use AI to replace the training. There’s other examples of training that is not just good enough, it’s fine. It’s good. It’s good. It’s not lacking. When I don’t know how to do something these days, I go right to YouTube and look for a video to teach me how to do it. So given that, some industries where you can’t get away with that. Healthcare as an example, you’re not going to learn how to do brain surgery that you could rely on with AI or video through YouTube. SO: We hope. KS: We hope. “Hey, relax. I know this is your first time, Sarah, I’m your surgeon. I watched a video yesterday, I feel pretty good about it as I grab that saw.” I don’t believe you’re going to be comfortable with that. So listen, it’s bad enough. And you mentioned the vendor that is now offering training. So vendor pullback, they want that for a revenue source. This particular vendor is using it as a revenue tool, but there’s also vendors out there that are actively stopping you from offering training classes, and on it goes. SO: Yeah, I do want to talk about that one a little bit. I know nothing about the specifics of your situation, but this is a losing battle. Because you were just talking about YouTube, I was doing some research for a very, very, very large company that makes farm equipment and I went looking for their content. And they had content on their website, it was like type in your product name or product number and it would give you the official user manual, which was of course ugly and terrible. But I discovered that if you typed in something like, “How do I fix the breaks on my X, Y, Z product?” It would take you to YouTube. And it would take you to this YouTube channel that had a lot of subscribers and was in fact not at all the official company YouTube channel. KS: It was a dude who was working on it? SO: It was a dude in Warsaw, North Carolina, which is not the same as Warsaw, Poland. It is a tiny, tiny, tiny little place, mostly known for me as being halfway between where I am and the beach. It’s where we stop to get gas and summer peaches and corn from the farm stand and fried chicken on our way to the beach, because that’s the thing we do. That’s where Warsaw is. It has a population of, I don’t know, 3,000 maybe. KS: Okay, yeah. SO: I have no idea. But there’s some guy who works for the dealership there who’s making these videos explaining how to do maintenance on these, in this case tractors, and he has got the audience. Not the official website, which by the way does not have a YouTube channel that I’m aware of, or at least that I could find now. This was five, 10 years ago. It has been a while. But so, there’s all this third-party content out there and there’s this ecosystem of content because it’s digital. You can’t really control that unless, we were talking about this earlier, unless you’re doing something like nuclear weapons, intelligence work, or maybe brain surgery. You can probably control those things. That’s about it. Clearly things are changing and not for the better. If your revenue is built on instructor-led, whether in-person or online, it sounds as though things are changing and not for the better in that space specifically, unless we’re training on brain surgery, which most of us are not. So what’s the path forward? KS: I’m thinking about it, actually. SO: I am not signing up for you to do my brain surgery. KS: I need someone to practice on. Sarah, let me know if you’re available. SO: Oh, I’m so sorry, you’re breaking up. I can’t hear you. Okay, so what does the path forward look like? I mean, what does it mean to be inside this disruption and where do you go from here? KS: Okay, so every training company that I have contacts in, they’re all down significantly. The ones that are surviving have government contracts. SO: Mm-hmm. KS: And that is to develop training in all of its guises, that primarily they’re seeing a call for virtual reality training. That’s really, really hot right now. But not the virtual reality training that you can create with the Captivates and the Storylines of the world. That’s too lowbrow. They’re talking about immersive, almost gamification, where you build a world. So if that’s your expertise, you can create training in that. That’s what people want. It looks like augmented reality and virtual reality. I can’t see it. Maybe I’m of a certain age that I’m like, “I’m not putting goggles on to take my training.” But that is pretty popular with other generations. So you can’t ignore it, I think, embrace it. So government contracts, if you can get that, you’ll be okay in the training business. Several of my colleagues have actually done that. So that’s a leg up. The other is to embrace asynchronous training and put your materials out there that live now forever. So I ignored for years these providers of asynchronous training where you put your content there and they sell it for you. I’ve got five classes on Udemy now, and each of them sells pretty well. Matter of fact, my Captivate Udemy is one of their bestsellers. That does not translate into offsetting the revenue lost from your training gigs when you were bringing in six, seven, $800 a person for a training class. Our prices were between $695 and $895 per person to take a public class, but it certainly does bring in some revenue. So if you have the ability to create the asynchronous training, the video training, and make it really, really good training, really impactful, then that’s going to help you stay in the game as long as you can. I also think embracing AI versus getting under the covers and just, “I don’t want to see it,” is not the way to go. I now use AI as a tool. I don’t think it replaces me, I think that I have more to offer in guiding the course than AI, but it gives me a nice, “Get me started here.” Maybe you’ve got a little writer’s block, maybe just getting started. It’s a beautiful day out, I can’t get started. Have AI start, you’ve started up. But if you’re going to go that route and you have AI make suggestions, you better fact check it. And just as an example, I was just curious, I asked ChatGPT to create an exam for Articulate Storyline. That is a tool I know really well, I’ve written exams for Storyline and Captivate and Camtasia. I said, “Write an exam. I want to see what you come up with.” And some of the questions were actually worded better than what I had done. They were very similar questions. And I go, “I kind of like the way you, AI, did that.” Which was kind of a bummer. But I would say a good 30% of what I read, while it was well-written, was completely wrong. SO: Yes, confidently wrong. KS: Yes, it was confidently wrong. Asking questions, “When you do this on storyline, what is the correct thing? What do you do?” And Storyline doesn’t do that thing. They were talking about Rise as an example. I’m like, “You’ve gone and combined Rise with Storyline.” So if you’re going to use AI, it’s the way you ask the question, your prompts. So get some training on engineering your prompts and fact-checking what you get from those prompts. But I use AI every day in my writing to make sure I don’t have grammar issues. So I’ll tell AI, “Check this for clarity and grammar.” So it’s my words, but it now is saying, “Well, there’s a couple typos, I fix that. And a couple of dangling modifiers, I fix that.” So it makes me feel like I’m writing better. But do keep in mind, if you put your stuff into ChatGPT, it’s now part of this mass of stuff that other people are going to get access to. So you can’t copyright anything that you put in AI. I wrote a book about copyright and training materials and things to think about, because we have a lot of people finding an image of a nice puppy on Google and using it in their training, and that puppy was copyrighted. So anything you do on AI, any photos that get created, any artwork, anything, any writing can’t be copyrighted because only a human can get a copyright. So that’s something to think about. If you have something really, really good, you really didn’t create that, so you can’t copyright it. You’re going to have to adapt. You’re going to have to adapt or you’re going to fail in the training industry, again, unless it’s very specific niche markets, or as you mentioned, custom training. If you don’t adapt, you’re going to fail. And that adaptation is going to be, embrace AI asynchronous training to put your training out there, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week when you can’t do it. And that’ll offset getting these onesies and twosies in your class. SO: And it removes the time-bound, I have to set aside these two hours or these four hours of this day to be in the classroom, whether virtual or not if it’s live. I do think that this idea that we’re going to see a split between things that go higher and higher end that people are willing to pay nearly anything for versus the low-end where the price is going… There’s going to be downward pressure on the price for all the low-end stuff, because the barrier to entry to producing asynchronous training is pretty minimal and it gets lower every single day because there’s so many people out there that can potentially do that. KS: Anybody can hang out a shingle and say that they’re an expert. So I mean, it’s the credentials of the trainer too, I think. Who is the person that’s teaching this? Is it what we call it, Chuck with a truck? Is it Chuck with a truck? Or is it someone who has actually done this? I wouldn’t want to get trained on handling my content by someone who hadn’t done it. I’d want you to handle that, right? So a content strategy. “I mean, who came up with that strategy? Oh, Bob. Has Bob ever done it? No, but he feels good about it. No, I want to get a Sarah who’s done it for years and years and years.” SO: Yeah, I mean that’s an interesting point though, because at the end of the day, if you commoditize/ productized training, you’re going to have a product as the asynchronous training that’s a package, and you get what you get. When it’s live with an instructor, you’re going to get that instructor on that day in that context. They’re feeling good, they’re feeling bad. The classroom dynamics are good or bad or weird. Every experience is going to be different. Whereas with async, it’s always going to be the same. I mean, barring internet connectivity or something, as the learner, you’re going to get a consistent experience. Now, it’s not going to be the best possible experience, right? Because the best possible experience is you’re in a group with some other people in a room with an amazing instructor. KS: That is the best. SO: That is the best. KS: There’s good too- SO: It costs the earth. KS: Yeah, there’s good too, the asynchronous training, because it’s always the same, it’s going to be consistent. How many times have you read a live class and the attendees, one of the attendees just spoiled the sauce? And you’re reminding me now, a colleague of mine, they were doing their certification as a certified technical trainer, CTT, and back in those days, you actually had to record yourself teaching. SO: Oh, yes, there was a VHS tape of me and kids. That is video, pre-digital video. KS: That is correct. VHS tape. And I had to do the same thing, but I remember for this one colleague of mine, and the students in this classroom, fake classroom, were other trainers that were also getting the recording done. And I remember she was being recorded and it was over her shoulder looking at the students, because she had to show the students. And one of these students, she made a comment that she knew was correct, and the student shook her head, “Nope, nope. That’s not right. Nope.” And the trainer is now, “What are you doing? Why are you shaking your head no and contradicting one of us? How about just nod?” And so, at some point God had turned around where the students started shaking their head, but realize, “Oh my God, you’re defeating all of us in this room.” So yes, that was to your point, that the training can vary wildly in a live class, whether it’s virtual or on-site, based on the attendees. Because listen, I’ve been teaching Captivate since it was called RoboDemo, so years and years and years and years, and no class has ever been the same. No two classes are the same and it’s all based on the dynamics of the students in my live class. And you get one person in there who is stuck, can’t move forward, file open is a mystery. Go to the file menu, choose open. How do you do that? Okay, mouse skills. All of that can either derail or can help your class. Funny moments, whatever they may be. But asynchronous training, if you do it right, is always consistently good. The problem is there’s no live interaction. So you can’t ask that instructor, “Well, what do you think about this? What do you think about that?” So yeah, you made me laugh when you mentioned that, that the dynamics of your live class, you better be fast on your feet to be a live trainer. So I am not saying, if you’re going to teach virtually, you shouldn’t know how to do it. Because listen, I think you’ll agree, there is a vast difference between teaching a class live on-site versus live online, or God forbid, live online and live on-site, where you’re doing both at the same time. Or if you’re going to do blended learning, you’ve got to mix all three, you better know what you’re doing as a facilitator and a trainer to do that or you’ll fall flat on your feet. You’ll hear all kinds of complaints that people who teach these live classes on-site that now incorporate virtual, and they ignore the virtual audience completely. So the virtual audience is not included in the training, they feel like they’re watching a recording. So you’ve got to know how to engage this audience. I’m actually really stunned, Sarah, that conferences still survive on-site. We mentioned a couple of times before we turned on this recording, why are those conferences live on-site? People are going there to network face-to-face. I guess that’s the big one, but not the content that you’re learning. That content could have been taught virtually. SO: Yeah, I’ve had the position for a long time that the most important part of a conference is the hallway track, right? The conversations at lunch, in the hallway, and in the exhibit hall and everywhere else. There’s a couple that are doing online in addition to in-person, and typically the- KS: ATD does that. Yeah, does a good job at that. Yeah. SO: Yeah, LavaCon is doing that, they’re coming up. But yeah, they have an online track with a chat, a pretty lively chat, and then they also have the in-person version if you can get there in-person. KS: Which is successful only if the facilitator addresses the online chat, if the facilitator addresses someone who’s virtual. Yeah. SO: And fun fact, Phylise Banner has been running that for years and years and years and has done a fantastic job of exactly that, of making sure that the online people get into the conversation, even when there’s 200 people in the room and another couple hundred on the chat, and she’s making sure that they get their questions into the discussion. Okay, so that was cheerful, and that made me feel better, because the first half hour of this was super not encouraging. So I think I’m going to close us out there because I’m pretty sure we could go on forever, but let’s leave it there. Kevin, thank you for coming and for giving us the inside information on what’s happening in training land. And hopefully I’ll see you again somewhere in-person at a conference. KS: Or virtual, with the camera is fine. So yeah, great working with you, Sarah. Thanks for having me. SO: Great to see you. Bye. Conclusion with ambient background music CC: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit Scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links. Questions about this episode? Let’s talk! <&console.warn&n&t> "*" indicates required fields LinkedInThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.Your name (required)*Your email (required)* Your companySubject (required)*Consulting requestSchedule a meetingLearningDITA.comStoreTrainingOtherYour message*Data collection (required)* I consent to my submitted data being collected and stored. <> The post From classrooms to clicks: the future of training content appeared first on Scriptorium.

Every time someone views your product content, it’s a purposeful engagement with direct business value. Are you making the most of that interaction? In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, special guest Patrick Bosek, co-founder and CEO of Heretto, and Sarah O’Keefe, founder and CEO of Scriptorium, explore how your techcomm traffic reduces support costs, improves customer retention, and creates a cohesive user experience. Patrick Bosek: Nobody reads a page in your documentation site for no reason. Everybody that is there has a purpose, and that purpose always has an economic impact on your business. People who are on the documentation site are not using your support, which means they’re saving you a ton of money. It means that they’re learning about your product, either because they’ve just purchased it and they want to utilize it, so they’re onboarding, and we all know that utilization turns into retention and retention is good because people who retain pay us more money, or they’re trying to figure out how to use other aspects of the system and get more value out of it. There’s nobody who goes to a doc site who’s like, “I’m bored. I’m just going to go and see what’s on the doc site today.” Every person, every session on your documentation site is there with a purpose, and it’s a purpose that matters to your business. Related links: Heretto Contact Heretto to walk through their support evaluation sheet with an expert! The business case for content operations (white paper) Curious about the value of structured content operations in your organization? Use our content ops ROI calculator. Get monthly insights on structured content, futureproof content operations, and more with our Illuminations newsletter LinkedIn: Patrick Bosek Sarah O’Keefe Transcript: Introduction with ambient background music Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations. Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it. Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change. Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off. End of introduction Sarah O’Keefe: Hi, everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe and I’m here today with our guest, Patrick Bosek, who is one of the founders and the CEO of Heretto. Welcome. Patrick Bosek: Thanks, Sarah. It’s lovely to be here. I think this is may be my third or fourth time getting to chat with you on the Scriptorium podcast. SO: Well, we talk all the time. This is talking and then we’re going to publi- no, let’s not go down that road. Of all the things that happen when we’re not being recorded. Okay. Well we’re glad to have you again and looking forward to productive discussion here. The theme that we had for today was actually traffic and I think web traffic and why you want traffic and where this is going to go with your business case for technical documentation. So, Patrick, for those of you that have not heard from you before, give us a little bit of background on who you are and what Heretto is and then just jump right in and tell us about web traffic. PB: No small requests from you, Sarah. SO: Nope. PB: So I’m Patrick Bosek. I am the CEO and one of the co-founders of Heretto. Heretto is a CCMS based on DITA. It’s a full stack that goes from the management and authoring layer all the way up to actually producing help sites. So as you’re moving around the internet and working with technology companies, primarily help_your_product.com or help_your_company.com, it might be powered by Heretto. That’s what we set out to do. We set out to do it as efficiently as possible, and that gives me some insight into traffic, which is what we’re talking about today, and how that can become a really important and powerful point when teams are looking to make a case for better content operations, showing up more, producing more for their customers, and being able to get the funding that allows them to do all those great things that they set out to do every day. SO: So here we are as content ops, CCMS people, and we’re basically saying you should put your content on the internet, which is a fairly unsurprising kind of priority to have. But why specifically are you saying that web traffic and putting that content out there and getting people to use the content helps you with your sort of overall business and your overall business case for tech docs? PB: Yeah. So I want to answer that in a fairly roundabout way because I think it’s more fun to get there by beating around the bush. But I want to start with something that seems really obvious, but for some reason it isn’t in tech pubs. So first of all, if you went to an executive and you said, I can double the traffic to your website, and then you put a number in front of them, probably say a hundred thousand dollars, almost like any executive at any major organization is like a hundred thousand dollars, of course, I’ll double my web traffic. That’s a no-brainer. Right? And when they’re thinking of website, they’re thinking of the marketing site and how important traffic is to it. So intrinsically, everybody pays quite a bit of money and by transference puts a lot of value on the traffic that goes to the website and, as they should. It’s the primary way we interact with organizations asynchronously today. Digital experience is really important. But if you went to an executive and you said, I can double your traffic to your doc site, they would probably be like, wait a second. But that makes no sense because nobody reads the docs for no reason. I want to repeat that because I think that’s a really important thing for us, as technical content creators to not only understand, I think we understand it, but to internalize it and start to represent it more in the marketplace and to our businesses and to the other stakeholders. People might show up at your marketing site, because they misclick an advertisement. They might show up in your marketing site because they Googled something and your market and a blog like caught them and they looked at it. So there’s probably a lot of traffic where people are just curious. They’re just window shopping. Maybe they’re there by mistake. But nobody shows up at your documentation site. Nobody reads a page in your documentation site for no reason. Everybody that is there has a purpose and that purpose always has an economic impact on your business. People who are on the documentation site are either not utilizing your support, which means that they’re saving you a ton of money. It means that they’re learning about your product, either because they’ve just purchased it and they want to utilize it, so they’re onboarding, and we all know that utilization turns into retention and retention is good because people who retain pay us more money, or they’re trying to figure out how to use other aspects of the system and get more value out of it. There’s nobody who goes to a doc site who’s like, I’m bored. I’m just going to go and see what’s on the doc site today. So every person, every session on your documentation site is there with a purpose and it’s a purpose that matters to your business. So that’s why I want to start. That’s why it matters. That’s why I think traffic is important, but you look like you want to contribute here, so. SO: We talk about enabling content. Right? Tech docs are enabling content. They enable people to do a thing, and this is what you’re saying. People don’t read tech docs for fun. I know of, actually, I do know one person. One person I have met in my life who thought it was fun to read tech docs. One. PB: Okay. So to be fair, I also know somebody who loves reading release notes. SO: Okay. So two in the world. PB: But hang on, hang on. But this person, part of the thing is this person is an absolute, can I say fanboy, is that, they’re a huge fan of this product and they talk about this product in the context of the release notes. So even though this person loves the release notes, the release notes are a way that they go and generate word-of-mouth and they’re promoting your product because of the thing they saw in the release notes. The release notes are a marketing piece that goes through this person. All the people who are your biggest fans are going to tell people about that little thing they found in your release notes. Sorry. Anyways. SO: So again, they’re trying to learn. Okay. But, so two people in the universe that we know of read docs for fun. Cool. Everybody else is reading them, as you said, for a purpose. They’re reading them because they are blocked on something or they need information, usually it’s they need information. And then you slid in that when they do this, this is producing, providing value to the organization or saving the organization money. So what’s that all about? PB: Well, I mean there’s a number of ways to look at this. You want to start with the hard numbers, the accounting stuff, the stuff you can take the CFO. That stuff is actually, it’s pretty easy to do. You can do it in just a couple of lines. So every support ticket costs a certain amount of money. Somebody in your organization knows that number, if your organization is sufficiently large and sufficiently large is like 20 people probably. Maybe that’s not that small, but if you’re a couple hundred people, everybody knows what that number is. So it’s very easy to figure out how much it costs when somebody actually goes to the support. SO: Somewhere between $20 and $50 is kind of the industry average per call. You may have better numbers internally in your organization, but if you don’t or you don’t know where to start there. Every call is $25. PB: Yeah. $20, $25. A little more, if you’re in a complex industry. The reality is that when you start comparing it to how much you spend answering a question with content, it’s kind of like, oh, is it a thousand times cheaper or is it 2,000 times cheaper? So it’s not really that big of a difference. The cost of answering a question with content is also pretty straightforward. So all you really need to know is how much are you spending on your content, which is typically speaking just the combination of the people and tools, so people in content operations stack that you’re using to get that content out in front of people. And then the page views. I mean, fundamentally if you exclude search, so take search out of your page views, take home page out of your page views, if you can filter section pages, so just look at actual content pages and then you have to pick a resolution rate. Obviously, if you want to say 100%, if you don’t have any better metrics, that’s probably too high. Maybe it’s unreasonable, but it’s very simple. It makes the equation easier. If you want to say that 50% percent of people who read what you’ve considered to be like a content page, resolve their issue, that’s probably too low. So pick a number between those two things and you run the multiplication on that and you’re going to find out that it’s going to cost you, in most situations, less than a penny to answer a question, typically way less than a penny to answer a question with content as opposed to the $25. That’s the pure economic math of it. There’s more though. SO: Okay. So yeah, we did some math and we’re basically saying, looking at this in a tech support centric way, usually we talk about call deflection. Right? So the idea is that every time somebody does not call tech support, you save $25 and spend a penny, a fraction of a penny instead, which seems good. Now interestingly to me, I think, you can look at this as the first time somebody hits that site and hits a content page, costs really a lot of money. Right? Because the people and the tools and the setup and the publishing, but then the next one is zero. So you’re replacing sort of an upfront planned cost with a recurring cost because every time somebody calls, it’s another 25 or 50 or whatever dollars. So there’s a huge scalability argument here, and I can make a decent case for if you are a startup, a day one startup, you have no content, you have nothing, you have no infrastructure, cool. Hire a tech support person. Let them do their thing for maybe a year, and then look at the top 10 queries that they had and write some docs and deflect off those top 10 queries and handle it that way. But most of our customers, speaking for both of us, are medium to large to incredibly large organizations that have content. We’re not talking about the you have nothing start from scratch scenario. PB: A hundred percent. When you’re really thinking about where you get the value, both on the accounting side, like saving money, so bottom line stuff, and then also the customer experience, which I think is worth getting into in a minute, that’s really going to take place when you start scaling up. I agree with you that a startup style organization should write content. Even small organizations benefit from it. I think they, small organizations actually benefit in a slightly different way than the deflection, which is the word you’re using. And I’m going to come back to that because I have a pet peeve with that word, but I’ll use it right now for the purposes because we’ve been using it. I think that what, the value that a smaller organization gets is not in the deflection, but it’s actually in the presence. So if you’re trying to show up and you’re trying to compete with larger organizations and you’re doing something, which is technical or considered to be highly important, so you’re in a high technology industry, your buyer is going to go look at your documentation. They’re going to look at your competitor’s documentation as well. And if your documentation appears to be not that great, it’s very thin, there’s not a lot there, that’s going to be a factor in a buying decision. And I know everybody kind of like, yeah, but it really is, and I can tell you because we’re not a huge organization, that we’ve won deals because our docs were better. We invest in it, as we should. We’re a documentation tool. You know? So it does matter at the smaller end, even if you can’t build a really scalable content operation stack that you probably don’t need. SO: Now, personally, I’m okay with deflection, and I’ll also say that the key thing here is that if you’re doing additional research on this as a listener, call deflection is sort of the industry term that will help you in your Google/AI searches. But tell us about why call deflection is bad and evil. PB: Okay. So that is true. If you are talking to executives, you should probably say deflection, but maybe forward-thinking executives would appreciate why I think deflection is a bad term. I think we should use, you’re shaking your head at me. Fine. I think we should be talking about call avoidance. And the reason that I think this is because when most people think about deflection, they’re thinking about it as being very reactive, and it’s that box that pops up when you’re trying to put a support ticket in that’s like, well, have you already looked at this? And by the time someone has arrived at your support site and they have decided that they want to interact with a human, they are annoyed. They don’t want to be there. Nobody visits the support site because they want to. They have made the emotional commitment that they’re going to go and deal with one of your human beings to solve their problem, which is not something they planned on doing today. Nobody wanted to do this when they got up in the morning. So you’ve already failed. And at that point in time, the best thing you can do is get them to a human efficiently without sticking things in front of them and trying to deflect them. So that’s why I don’t like deflection. Avoidance is that that never happened. They Googled it because Google is tier zero support for everybody, even if yours is bad. They got an answer or they ChatGPT-ed it, different topic, there’s problems there. But probably they Googled it. They got an answer very quickly. They solved their issue. You never heard about it. It cost you a fraction of a penny. They had a great experience. It’s how they prefer to get their information, and you avoided the support rather than trying to deflect them to save yourself a couple of bucks when they were annoyed and broke their customer experience. SO: Yeah. I’m on board with that. It’s just that terminology-wise, we’ve got to work with what we’ve got. But I would agree that avoiding the call in the first place, and I talk about how when people call tech support, they’re mad. If you think about the emotional state of your customer, the tech support person is angry. There’s also the issue that they asked ChatGPT and it said something wrong, and then they call up tech support and yell at you because ChatGPT was wrong, which is, that’s a whole other podcast. So let’s just set that aside for a moment, but okay. PB: Maybe you’ll invite me back. We can talk about that. SO: Yeah. So the, it’d be a long podcast and we’ll have to lift our no profanity rule for that one just to get through the topic. PB: Oh. Special edition. SO: Special edition. Okay. So you were talking about the value though of a documentation site and we’ve sort of paired it with tech support and with this avoidance, deflection, get them the answers that they need before they get angry at the product. Right? PB: Yeah. For sure. SO: How does the customer experience tie into that? And what is the value of the customer experience? PB: So the value of the customer experience is subjective, but every organization already has an opinion on it. Some organizations place a lot of value in customer experience, have done a lot of work to tie customer experience to the metrics and analytics and things like that they use to track financial performance. Other organizations less. So the first thing I would say is go and see where your organization is relative to their thinking on customer experience. But, as you’re talking about customer experience, other than the support, which I think we’ve covered that quite a bit, for someone who’s showing up your documentation site, really what it’s touching on is a couple of things, what they’re trying to get to. So there’s the discovery aspect of it. And this can be very, very simple or it can be very, very complex. The simple one I like is like let’s say you sell gym equipment and that gym equipment goes out to people who own gyms, as it would make sense, and they’re going to go and they’re thinking of buying a new treadmill or something from you. They’re going to want to know, is this going to fit in my gym? Can the power I have set up work with it? What are the other details of this product? And then how much information is there to service it? So somebody, once they get past the whole like, okay, I kind of like this brand, maybe this is a good thing, it’s kind of cool, they’re going to go into the documentation because they’re making a purchase that matters to them. And having confidence and trust in the product based on the depth of information that they get prior to purchasing it is a major factor. And this only increases as the economic value and the end implementation, like how critical it is, how system critical it is, increases. So there’s a discovery, evaluation, and confidence, those are the three things I think of, aspect to your documentation or your help site that is there, even if you’re not thinking about it, even if it’s not coming up directly in sales conversations. I promise you, because I have the data that people are doing this during the process of deciding if they want to work with your organization. And that’s the kind of pre-customer experience that’s really, really critical that most organizations are just not thinking about and they’re probably leaving a lot on the table relative to their competitors that either could be advantage or they’re behind. SO: There was a study. It was a while back, maybe five or 10 years ago that came out from, I always have trouble finding it. It was either PwC or IBM. The gist of it was that 80% of people that were buying consumer products were doing pre-buying research, the technical research. So they were looking at specs and they were looking at how do I install this thing and various other things that we consider to be not marketing information. They were looking at what is traditionally labeled post-sales documentation. PB: Yeah. Because people care. And the other thing too is like as we move into an economic environment where people are more careful about what they’re spending on, they’re only going to do more research to make sure the things they’re buying are things that are going to last and be supported. I bought a pair of headphones a year ago, and I have an issue with one of them. They’re like the ones that go in your ears, one of them’s not working. I ended up going to the documentation to try to figure it out, and the documentation was so bad I could not make heads or tails of it. And I just gave up and I was like, okay, if I had spent hundreds of dollars on these, I’d go through the process, but they were like 30 bucks or whatever. But I’m never going to do business with that company again. Ever. If I see another one of the products, I will never buy it. So they don’t know about that experience. But if you have, not even just bad content operations, because frankly their site was, it was kind of nice, it wasn’t bad. I think it could have been better, but you know, funny that I would have that opinion, but it was really the information architecture, so it was kind of the stuff that Scriptorium, Sarah, you guys would help them with. It wasn’t so much they had bad tools. They had terrible organization, and the content was, I’m not allowed to swear, which I wouldn’t anyways… SO: Sorry. PB: … but the content was, think of your word, it was bad. It was completely unhelpful. So you can have the best content operations in the world, but without the right information architecture, who cares? SO: Yeah. This is the infamous if a tree falls in the forest. You know, and to your point, A, the company doesn’t know that your headphones are broken and you’re unhappy, but you just told me, and the next time I’m in the market to buy a pair of headphones, I’m going to remember this story and I’m going to call you, I won’t call you. I’ll send a text and say, hey, what brand was that? Right? And you’re going to tell me and then I’m going to not buy them. So the impact of this failure of documenting, well, actually it’s a product fail, right, but also of support. Because if they had come back with, oh, we’re so sorry, send them in or we’ll send you a new pair, whatever, they could have rescued this encounter, but they didn’t. So the next thing that’s going to happen is that you and every single one of your friends that hears the story will never buy that brand. PB: Right. SO: So as we talk about this, the really critical point here though is, I think, there are a bunch of really critical points, but the one that I really want to zoom in on is that the content has to be there. Right? You have to have helpful content that solves the problem that a person is on the website for. And, in your case, it might have been, oh, sometimes this happens and you have to repair them, or you have to this or you have to that, you know, press all these weird buttons in this weird sequence and sacrifice the chicken and stand on your head. Cool. PB: Right. Which I would’ve done. SO: Which you would’ve done. But the bigger problem is that you went to their website and we don’t actually know whether or not this problem is fixable because you didn’t find it. Right? You didn’t find the answer. And that means that it’s sort of like a last mile problem. I can write all these really good procedures, they can be super accurate, they can be amazing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You come onto my website, you can’t find the answer your question, it exists, but you can’t find it, right, you, the customer, and so it fails, and now you either, A, tell all your friends that company XYZ is terrible, or, B, you call tech support and you’re mad. Right? PB: Yeah. SO: That’s actually the best outcome. PB: It is. Yeah. SO: Yeah. And interestingly, we’ve got some, I’ll be very non-specific, but we have a project right now where one of the top tech support topics, you know how you look at what are the top 10 things that people call and ask about, and it’s like, my headphones aren’t working, or how do I return this or whatever. One of the most common reasons that people call their tech support is to ask, where is the documentation? I can’t find it. PB: Do you have any idea how common that is? I mean, you probably do, but it’s so common. SO: Yeah. PB: And we’ve started doing this thing in the process of helping people think through this where we have a very simple tool that we use. It’s a sheet, happy to share it with anybody, and a process where you effectively go through and you just do a very simple 15 to 30 minute interview with X number of support people. You know, we recommend three to five. Some people do more. And you just go through the last 10 support cases, the ones that they worked on, and there’s a few things you mark off, but the idea is to do lightning round, very, very quick. And could this be solved by documentation? And the amount of it that is just looking for documentation, I can’t find it, is so funny. And you’re like, I think that’s a problem. And people are like, wow. But you can’t blame them because people don’t think about these things and it doesn’t make sense that you would because it’s non-obvious, and I think that’s one of the really critical things I want to leave people with. And I have one other thing that I, you know, we’ve been talking for a while that I want to let people go soon, but this one, I want to zoom in on this for a second. People shouldn’t feel bad that they haven’t thought about this. They shouldn’t feel bad that they haven’t thought about the value of the traffic, the impact of the traffic, the customer experience side of it, the cost ratio of the traffic relative to support people. It really isn’t that obvious. And there’s so much momentum around the way that we’ve done business in having people solve problems for other people in direct communications that even if that isn’t ideal, that’s just the way it’s done and that’s what feels obvious. So don’t feel bad about not having thought about this if you haven’t. Your colleagues shouldn’t either. But it is the way the world is moving, and I think it’s critical to start thinking about it now. SO: Yeah. And you started this by talking about customer experience needing to be asynchronous. People can get the stuff, self-service when they want it and digital as opposed to call somebody on the phone. So let’s sort of wrap this up and say, what’s your advice to people that know that they’re struggling with this? They know that they have huge tech support volumes and nobody’s happy. And I mean, we know we have a problem. So where should they start? What’s the first step that they can take to begin attacking this thing in a way that will lead to forward progress within a large organization that has as their informal motto, oh, they can just call tech support. PB: Yeah. So I would say buy-in is always step one, and that means that there’s going to be some selling that has to happen at the organization. You have to get people to recognize the value, the potential, and also the ability to achieve it. So it’s those things when they come together, there can be a ground swell where people are going to actually support these projects and fund them and get involved, and then you’ll have really successful projects. One of the big challenges with getting that buy-in historically has been that there’s no precedent. So when you’re looking for a better website, you already have a website. What if you increase traffic by 10%? You know, people can start to draw some lines between that and sales or the bottom line or value, those types of things. And oftentimes, even organizations that I would say are somewhat up to maturity curve in terms of tech pubs, they don’t have any metrics about their site, like how many people come to it? I don’t know. They just don’t track it. So there’s not this historical precedent of metrics that can be back to results, and that can create some issues. So the advice that I give organizations that are in that situation is if you are in a technology field and you have a relatively complex product, so something where it breaks, it’s not always obvious how to use it, there’s a reason that people would need to learn about your product for some reason, what our data shows from having done this many times with organizations that fit that profile is that a well-implemented documentation help site, whatever you want to call it, gets about as much traffic as the dot com, the primary marketing site. It tends to be plus or minus 15%. We’ve actually seen as high as 65% of the total traffic between the two sites being on documentation. That’s a bit of an outlier, but so is 30%. You know, we’ve seen that too. So if you’re want to be conservative, say you’ll get 40% of the total traffic. So four sessions for every six on a marketing site. If you want to be, what we tend to see on an average, just say it’s one for one. If it’s one for one and you don’t have metrics, that’s a target. And you have to ask the internal question, what’s the value of that? If we get a hundred thousand sessions per month or per year or whatever on the marketing site, what if we had a hundred thousand sessions on the help content? Well, those people are there for a reason. Remember? They’re there because they’re not calling support. They’re there because they’re onboarding and using our system better, or they’re there because they’re trying to figure out if our stuff’s going to work for them. So like how valuable would that be? And once you get the organization to a place where they’re like, oh, that would actually be quite valuable, could we get that, I think 80% of the work is done and well, 80% of the work of getting started is done. And then you probably call somebody like Scriptorium or Scriptorium specifically, if you’re not familiar with this, and you start the process of actually thinking through of how to do it. But I do think the organizational buy-in and giving people in the right head space to think about the value of this is step one, and that’s the process I use for it. SO: Yeah. I think I would agree with all of that, especially the part where they should call us. PB: Go figure. SO: But the key thing in here is, and you said this a different way, but changing the momentum, right, getting organizational buy-in, getting people on board with this concept. The other thing I’ll say is that ultimately one of the biggest problems we face in content ops is that so much of it is invisible in the sense that we’re going to refactor this and we’re going to do it better, and we’re going to produce it faster and we’re going to automate, okay, great, but you’re still producing the same thing. One of the most powerful things we can do early in the process is say to people, look at this portal that we can deliver. Look at this experience that we can deliver. It’s not the first thing or the only thing or even necessarily the most important thing we need to do, because the portal has to have content. Right? PB: Yeah. SO: I mean, it’s kind of a chicken and egg thing, but showing people the vision of what can be works typically much, much better than saying we should do structured content because it will help automate things and speed up time to market. That’s all behind the scenes, and it’s not visual and nobody cares. I mean, people care, but it’s hard to visualize. So, okay, I think we’ve promised people a whole bunch of resources. We will put those in the show notes. I’m quite certain that we could go on for a very long time about this topic, but I am going to wrap it up there ’cause I feel like we hit a good starting point for people. PB: Yeah. SO: So if there are other questions, I would say reach out to me or to Patrick, because I know we’ve only scratched the surface on this thing. Patrick, thank you for being here. PB: Of course. Always a blast. SO: Always good to see you. And we will wrap this thing up, and thanks for being here. Feel free to reach out if you have any other questions. The post Every click counts: Uncovering the business value of your product content appeared first on Scriptorium.

Is AI really ready to generate your training materials? In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle tackle the trends around AI in learning content. They explore where generative AI adds value—like creating assessments and streamlining translation—and where it falls short. If you’re exploring how AI can fit into your learning content strategy, this episode is for you. Sarah O’Keefe: But what’s actually being said is AI will generate your presentation for you. If your presentation is so not new, if the information in it is so basic that generative AI can successfully generate your presentation for you, that implies to me that you don’t have anything interesting to say. So then, we get to this question of how do we use AI in learning content to make good choices, to make better learning content? How do we advance the cause? Related links: Synthetic audio example: Strategies for AI in technical documentation (podcast, English version) LearningDITA: DITA-based structured learning content in action (podcast) How CompTIA rebuilt its content ecosystem for greater agility and efficiency (webinar) Transform L&D experiences at scale with structured learning content (podcast) Overview of structured learning content Get monthly insights on structured content, futureproof content operations, and more with our Illuminations newsletter LinkedIn: Sarah O’Keefe Alan Pringle Transcript: Introduction with ambient background music Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations. Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it. Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change. Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off. End of introduction Alan Pringle: Hey everybody, I am Alan Pringle, and today I’m talking to Sarah O’Keefe. Sarah O’Keefe: Hey everybody, how’s it going? AP: And today, Sarah and I want to discuss artificial intelligence and learning content. How can you apply artificial intelligence to learning content? We’ve talked a whole lot, Sarah, about AI and technical communication and product content, let’s talk more about learning and development and how AI can help or maybe not help putting together learning content. So how is it being used right now? Let’s start with that. Do you know of cases? I know of one or two, and I’m sure you do too. SO: Yeah. So the big news, the big push, is AI in presentations. So how can I use AI to generate my presentation? How can it help me put together my slides? Now, the problem with that from our point of view, for those of you that have been listening to what we’re saying about AI, this will be no surprise whatsoever, I think this is all wrong. It’s the wrong strategy, it’s the wrong approach. If you want to take AI and generate an outline of your presentation and then fill in that outline with your knowledge, that’s great, I think that’s a great idea. Also, if you have existing really good content and you want to take that content and generate slides from it, I don’t have a problem with that. But what’s actually being said is AI will generate your presentation for you. If your presentation is so not new, if the information in it is so basic that generative AI can successfully generate your presentation for you, that implies to me that you don’t have anything interesting to say. AP: And you’re going to say it with very pretty generated images and a level of authority that makes it sound like there’s something that’s actually there when it’s not. SO: Oh, yeah. It’ll look very plausible and authoritative and it will be wrong, because that’s how this generative stuff- AP: Or not even wrong, surface-skimmy, just nothing of any real value there. SO: Yeah. So then, we go into this question of, how do we use AI in learning content to make good choices, to make better learning content, how do we advance the cause? AP: Well, there’s that one case where we have done it, because we have our own learning site, LearningDITA.com, and we were trying to think about ways to apply AI to our efforts to create courses, to tell people how to use the DITA standard for content. And I think you and I both agree, one of the strengths of artificial intelligence is its ability to summarize and synthesize things, I don’t think that’s controversial. So if you think about writing assessments from existing content in a way that’s summarizing, so one of us suggested to our team, why don’t y’all try that and see what these AI engines can do to generate questions from our existing lesson content. And then, of course, we suggested that they—the people who were creating the courses—review them. So our folks reviewed them, and I think some of the questions were actually quite usable, decent. SO: And some of them were not. AP: True, this is true. SO: But the net of it was they saved a bunch of time, because they said, “Generate a bunch of assessment questions,” they went through them, they fixed the ones that were wrong, they improved the ones that were maybe not the greatest, they got a couple that were actually pretty usable. And so, it took less time to write the assessments than it would’ve taken to do that process by hand, to slowly go through the entire corpus to say, “Okay, what are the key objectives and how do I map that to the assessments?” So that’s a pretty good example, I think, of using generative AI, as you said, to summarize down, to synthesize existing content. On the LMS side, so when we start looking at learning management systems and how the learning content goes into the LMS and then is given or delivered to the learner, there are some big opportunities there, because if you think about what it means for me as a learner, as a person taking the course, to work my way through course material, maybe the assumptions that the course developer made about my expertise were too optimistic. I’m really struggling with this content, it’s trying to teach me how to use Photoshop and I am just not good at Photoshop. There’s this idea of adaptive learning, this is not an AI concept, the idea behind adaptive learning is that if you’re doing really well, it goes faster. If you’re struggling, it goes deeper, or maybe you do better with videos than you do with text, or vice versa. It’s that adapt to the learner and to the learner’s needs in order to make the learning more effective. Now, if you think about that, that is a matter of uncovering patterns in how the learner learns and then delivering a better fit for those patterns. Well, that’s AI. AI and machine learning do a great job of saying, “Oh, you seem to be preferring video, so I’m going to feed you more video.” Now, we can do this by hand or we can build it in with personalization logic, but you can also do this at scale with AI and machine learning. So there are definitely some opportunities to improve adaptive learning with an AI backbone. AP: I think it’s worth noting at this point, when you’re talking about gathering the data to make, I hate to, I’m going to personalize AI, so it can make these decisions or do the synthesis, there’s got to be intelligence that’s built into your content, and that goes all the way back to the content creation, going back from the presentation layer, back to how you’re creating your content. And again, this loops back, in my mind, to the idea of building in that intelligence with structured content, that is your baseline. SO: Yeah. I know we’re just relentless on this drum of you need structured content for learning content, but it’s because of all these use cases, because as you try to scale this stuff, this is what you’re going to run into. I also see a huge opportunity for translation workflows specifically for learning content. So if you look at translation and multilingual delivery, there’s a lot of AI and machine learning going on in machine translation. So now, we think a little bit about what that means for learning content, and of course, all of the benefits that you get just in general from machine translation still apply, but the one that I’m looking at that I think would be really, really interesting to apply to learning is learning has a lot of audio in it, audio and video, but specifically audio, and audio typically is going to be bound to a language. You’re going to have a voiceover, you’re going to have a person saying, “Here’s what you need to know, and I’m going to show you this screenshot,” or, “I’m going to show you how to operate this machine.” And so, you’ve got audio and potentially captions that are giving you the text or the audio that goes with that video. Okay, well, we can translate the captions, that’s relatively easy, but what about the voiceover? And the answer could be that you do synthetic voiceovers. So you take your original, let’s say, English audio and you turn it into French, Italian, German, Spanish or whatever else you need, but you synthesize the voice instead of re-recording. Now, is it going to be as good as a human, an actual human person who has expression and emotion in their delivery? No. Is it better than the alternative where you don’t provide it in the target language at all? Probably, yes. And when we start talking about machines, “Here is how to safely operate this machine,” the pretty good synthetic voice in target language is probably better than, “Here it is in English, deal with it,” or, “Here it is in English with a translated caption in German, but no audio.” I think that’s what we’re looking at is, is the synthetic audio good enough that it will improve the learner experience, and I think the answer is yes. AP: I’m turning this over in my mind, and there’s part of me that’s very resistant to the idea of these synthesized voices. For example, and this is bias on my part, when I am downloading audiobooks from the library, they now, in the app that I use that’s connected to the local library, a lot of the narration, it will say, “This is an AI-generated voice.” I tend to avoid those, I do, because sometimes the inflection’s a little odd, there’s no personality there. However, I can buy that having that slightly robotic-esque voice in another language is better than not having it at all, I can buy that. SO: Right. And I think the audiobooks that we listen to for fun are different than I need to figure out how to use this machine without hurting myself, those are different, and I don’t need a… It wouldn’t hurt. I don’t need a personable obviously human voice to voiceover the video that helps me figure out how to use this thing on the factory floor. I wouldn’t object, but I would prefer to get something in my language. That’s really the key, because when we start asking the question, the question is less, would you prefer a really good artistic performance voiceover versus a robotic voice… That’s what you’re getting from the library, you’re saying, I am not going to consume entertainment content that is like this, and I think a lot of people are onboard with that. But what about technical product and learning content that you need? You’re not making a choice that this is something I want to do in my downtime, but rather, if I can’t figure out how to do this, bad things will happen. AP: Yeah. There is a legitimate use case there, and they’re two different things, and I do think, based on some of the synthetic voices I’ve heard, they are getting better, quite better, and sounding a little more realistic as well. SO: Right. We’ve already experimented with this. We have a podcast where we actually generated, it was a synthetic voice, but it was based on a person’s voice print. So it wasn’t fake AI, it was fake AI voice, but it was fake AI voice generated off of a specific person. The audio is quite good. Every once in a while between paragraphs, it shifts weirdly as you’re listening, as a new thought is introduced, and it shifts in ways that a human would not, but all in all, I thought it was pretty acceptable. So I think that what I’m trying to say in an extremely long-winded way is that when you have scalability issues in your content production, learning content or otherwise, AI has the potential to help you with productivity across multichannel workflows with repurposing content from it’s the learning content versus it’s the assessments, it’s in language A versus language B, it’s audio, it’s video. There are things that we can do there to use the AI tools for productivity to support these workflows and scale them, and to your point, and therefore, we need underlying structured content. We can’t do this with slapped-together one-off formatted mess. AP: Yeah. The intelligence has to be built in at the very foundation, and that is when you are creating the content. That intelligence really can’t be a layer that’s put on when you transform things or you connect to an LMS, it’s not a presentation layer thing. The presentation layer needs to pull that intelligence from your source content. Again, this is why you need structured content, the metadata built in, to help drive the way you transform and distribute your learning content. SO: Yeah. I’m, again, very skeptical of GenAI in the process of generating net-new content, new information, nobody’s ever written it before, it’s a new product, it needs to be explained, taught, whatever. Maybe an outline, this is what a typical intro course looks like, now go fill in the details, okay, maybe even a first draft, especially if product A is based on product B, or I guess the other way around. But our world is structured content, obviously, but also our world is content where it matters that the content is accurate, because when the content is wrong, bad, bad things happen, people get hurt, people die, companies get shut down for compliance reasons, that type of thing. So the content has to be accurate, and at the end of the day, it’s actually quite difficult to get GenAI to gen accurate content. That’s not what it does; that’s not its function. So I’m very interested in applying AI to various product and content roadmaps to enable productivity, to enable new deliverables, to enable new synthesis summaries, et cetera, but I’m very, very worried about what happens if you apply it on top of bad content or you apply it to the wrong use case in an effort to just get your stuff for free, essentially. AP: So what I’m hearing in summary is that content creation for learning, AI is probably not a good fit now. To support you and help you possibly develop on the edges of that content or give you outlines and ideas, and also to augment and support delivery channels, it could be helpful. So it’s a support mechanism for the development of the content, distribution of the content, but not necessarily for the direct creation of that content. SO: Yeah, I think that’s fair, and I think that’s where we land. I’d be quite curious to hear from our listeners, what they’re doing with this and where they’re going with it. AP: And I’m sure people are having the same struggles right now over the best way to apply it. But I think right now, as of the moment that we’re recording this, AI is in no way ready for prime time to basically take the place of a learning content person. It should be there to support them, not to replace them. SO: Yeah, for meaningful content. AP: Exactly. SO: And if it’s not meaningful, what are you even doing? AP: Right. SO: Well, that’s cheery, okay. AP: And on that very cheerful note, we’re going to wrap up. So thank you, Sarah. And folks, do get in contact with us to let us know how you’re using AI, because that is of great interest to us. So thank you. Thanks, Sarah. SO: Thank you. And maybe let us know how you’re being made to use AI. AP: That too. Thanks, everyone. Conclusion with ambient background music CC: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit Scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links. Questions about this podcast? Let’s talk! "*" indicates required fields CommentsThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.Your name (required)*Your email (required)* Your companySubject (required)*Consulting requestSchedule a meetingLearningDITA.comStoreTrainingOtherYour message*Data collection (required)* I consent to my submitted data being collected and stored. <> The post Help or hype? AI in learning content appeared first on Scriptorium.

Struggling to get the right content to the right people, exactly when and where they need it? In this podcast, Scriptorium CEO Sarah O’Keefe and Fluid Topics CEO Fabrice Lacroix explore dynamic content delivery—pushing content beyond static PDFs into flexible platforms that power search, personalization, and multi-channel distribution. When we deliver the content, whether it’s through the APIs or the portal that you’ve built that is served by the platform, we render the content in a way that we can dynamically remove or hide parts of the content that would not apply to the context, the profile of the user. That’s the magic of a CDP. It’s delivering that content dynamically. — Fabrice Lacroix Related links: Scriptorium: Personalized content: Steps to success (white paper) Scriptorium: AI in the content lifecycle (white paper) Fluid Topics, an AI-powered content delivery platform Fluid Topics: What is Content Operations and Why is it Important? Get monthly insights on structured content, futureproof content operations, and more with our Illuminations newsletter LinkedIn: Sarah O’Keefe Fabrice Lacroix Transcript: Introduction with ambient background music Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations. Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it. Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change. Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off. End of introduction Sarah O’Keefe: Hi everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe and I’m here today with the CEO of Fluid Topics. Fabrice, Lacroix. Fabrice, welcome. Fabrice Lacroix: Hey. Hi Sarah. Nice being with you today. Thanks for welcoming me. SO: It’s nice to see you. So as many of you probably know, Fluid Topics is a content delivery portal or possibly a content delivery platform. And we’re going to talk about the difference between those two things as we get into this. So Fabrice, tell us a little bit about Fluid Topics and what that content delivery portal or maybe platform. Which one is it? What do you prefer? FL: For us, it’s platform definitely. But you’re right, depends on where people are in this evolution process, on how they deliver content. And for many, many customers, the piece stands for a portal. You’re right, because that is the first need. That’s how they come to us, because they need a portal. SO: Okay, so in your view, the portal is a front end, an access point for content, and then what makes it a platform rather than a portal? FL: Probably because the goal that many companies have to achieve is delivering that content where it’s needed. It’s many places most of the time. So it’s not just the portal itself, and that’s where solving the problem of being able to disseminate this content to many touch points, you need a platform for that. The portal is one touch point only, but when you start having multiple touch points like doing in-product help or you want to feed your helpdesk tool or field service application or whatever sort of chatbot somewhere else, whatever use case you have that is not just the portal itself, then that becomes a platform thing. SO: So looking at this from our point of view, so many of our projects start with component content management systems, CCMSs, which are the back end. This is where you’re authoring and managing and taking care of all your information, and then you have to deliver it. And one of the ways that you could solve your delivery front-end would be with a content delivery platform such as Fluid Topics. Okay. So then, what are the prerequisites, when you start thinking about this? So our hypothetical customer has content obviously, and they have, we’re going to say probably a back-end content management system of some sort, probably. FL: Most of the time. SO: Most of the time. FL: Depends where you go, depends on the maturity and the industry. If you go to some manufacturing somewhere, they mostly still are maybe on the word and FrameMaker or something like that in design, and then they generate PDFs. SO: So maybe we have a backend authoring, well, we have an authoring environment of some sort on the back-end. Maybe it’s a CCMS, maybe it’s something not like that. And now we’re going to say, all right, we’re going to take all this content that we’ve created and we’re going to put it into the CDP, the content delivery platform. Now, what does success look like? What do you need from that content or from the project to make sure that your CDP can succeed in doing what it needs to do? FL: The first answer to that question that comes to my mind is no PDFs. I mean, if you look at it, don’t laugh at me. If you look at it from an evolutionary perspective, it’s like regardless how people were writing before, it was not CCMS, mostly unstructured. And at the end of the day, people were pressing a button and generating PDFs and putting the PDF somewhere, CRM, USB key, website for download. But managing the content unstructured was painful. That’s where you start working with the CCMS, because you have multiple versions, variants, you want to work in parallel, you want to avoid copy paste, translation, so the story around that. So then companies start and they start moving their content into CCMS. All of the content, part of the content, but they start investing in a modern way of managing, creating their content. But again, if you look at it once they have made that move, most of those companies 10, 15 years ago probably were still pressing a button and still generating PDFs. And then they realized that they had solved one problem for themselves, which is streamlining the production capability and managing the content in a better way. But from a conception perspective, regardless whether you work with word FrameMaker or in DITA with the most advanced CCMS of the market, if you still deliver PDF, you are not improving the life of your customers. And then people started realizing that, oh yeah, so we should do better. So let’s try to output that content in another way than PDFs. And then say, “What else than PDF, do we have? HTML.” And was like, okay, and let’s output HTML. But HTML that is pretty much the same as the PDF. You see what I mean? It’s like static document. Each document was a set of HTML pages. And then they started realizing that they need to reassemble the set of HTML pages into a website, which is even more painful than just putting PDFs on the website is reassembling zip files of HTML pages on the website, and then it’s like static HTML. And then you have to put a search on top and have to create consistency. And that’s why CDP have emerged. That’s solving this need, which is, how do we transition from PDF to static HTML to something that is easier, that ingest all this content, comes with search capabilities, comes with configuration capabilities, and as well at the same time as API, so that back to the platform thing, it’s not just a portal, but can serve other touch points. So that’s really because we are in the detail world, DITA is the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. So that’s a very Darwinian process that led to this creation of the CDP and the need of a CDP is the next step in the process. And many companies really follow that process of, I have to go from my old ways of writing, which are not working painful, move to a CCMS, but in fact realize that they don’t solve the real problem of the company, which is how can I help my customer, my support agent, my field technicians better find the content better use my content? And that’s where this T, oh, okay. That’s where we need a CDP. SO: Yeah, and I think, I mean, we’ve talked for 20 years about PDFs and all the issues around them, but it’s probably worth remembering that PDF in the beginning was a replacement for a shelf of books, paper books that went out the door. And the improvement was that, instead of shipping 10 pounds, or I’m sorry, what four kilos of books you were shipping as you said, a CD-ROM or this was before USB, a zip drive. Remember those? FL: Zip drive. SO: A zip drive. But you were shipping electronic copies of your books and all you were really doing was shifting the process of printing from the creator, the software, hardware, the product company to the consumer. So the consumer gets a PDF, they print it, and then that’s what they use. Then we evolved into, oh, we can use the PDF online, we can do full-text search, that’s kind of cool, that was a big step forward. But now to your point, the way that we consume that information is not printed and it’s for the most part, and it’s not big PDFs, but rather small chunks of information like a website. So how do we evolve our content into those websites? So then what does it look like to have a, and I think here we’re talking about the portal specifically, but what does it look like to have a portal for the end user that allows them to get a really good experience in accessing and using and consuming the content that they need to use the product, whatever it may be. What are some of the key things that you need to do or that you can do? FL: Yeah. I would say that the main thing that a CDP is achieving compared to static HTML, because now we have to compare not with PDFs that are probably still needed if you want to print as well, I’m not saying that PDF is dead and we should get rid of all PDFs. Just said that it’s just when you need to print, then you can get the PDF version of a document. But if we compare static HTML with what a CDP brings, we’re trying to make content personalized and contextual. If you pre-generate static HTML pages, it’s one size fits all. It’s the same HTML pages for everyone. And if you have two versions of your product and one variant, and then you translate the same zip file exists in 20 versions, so to say, and you have to assemble that and let people understand how to navigate that and that should become super complex. What a CDP solves is like, give me everything, and I will sort out this notion of I understand the fact that the same document can exist in 20 variants, whether it’s product version, document version, capabilities of the product version A, version, B, Asian market, European market, American market. And then you have subtilities and some paragraphs are here, some paragraphs are removed, added. And so we are adapting the content so that it fits the profile of the user. And if you ask me what’s needed to make a CDP work, it’s mostly metadata, metadata, metadata. And I can tell you a story, what was fun? It’s like, few years ago, some years ago, more than few, we had customers reaching out or expecting customers to reach out and say, “Oh, show me three topics.” And then we’re showing the capability and say, “Oh my God, it’s exactly what we need.” And then those guys disappeared for two years. And in fact, what they did during these two years is like adding metadata to the content. It was not about the product, but through this discussion we had with them and showing that you can put facets for the search and then varianting content and let people switch between variants and versions of the content through metadata and all that, and they realized that, oh my God, that’s exactly what we need. And then through their questions, they understood that they needed to have those metadata on the content and those metadata were not existing and still they were working with the CCMS. But if your output channel are PDFs, if you don’t put PDFs, you don’t care about putting this metadata on the content inside the CCMS. That’s a lot of work to do to maintain those metadata. But if at the end of the day you print a button and you generate a PDF, those metadata are lost, they are not used, they’re not leveraged by the PDF. So that becomes flat pages of content. So they had transitioned to a CCMS but never made this investment of tagging content. And when I mean tagging content, it’s not just the map, it’s like the section, the chapter, this is for installing, this is for removing, this is for configuring, this is for troubleshooting, this chapter is about this, this topic is about that for this version of the products. You know what I mean? Fine-grained tagging at different level of the documents. And because they were generating PDFs, they didn’t see the need of making that tagging at the right level, and they realized that suddenly the sheer value they could get from PDF is when the content is tagged because that’s using those tags and those metadata schemes that the CDP can adapt the content to the context profile of the user. So I would say, what’s needed to leverage the capabilities of a CDP? It’s mostly granularity of content and tags, metadata that let people, and you can design your metadata from a user perspective. As an end user, how would I like to filter the content? What are the tags I need for filtering the content? It’s like, if I run a search, I have these facets on the left side of the search result page, what would I like to click on to refine my search and spot the content that fits my needs? SO: And I think, going back to our flat file PDF or static HTML, if we need to do this kind of thing, if you need context in a flat file, what you have to do is say something like, if you have product variant A, do this. And if you have product variant B, do this. Or if you are installing and the temperature, the ambient local temperature is greater than X, then do these extra steps. If you are baking and you are at high altitude, you have to adjust your recipe in these ways. So you end up with all these sort of if statements that are, hey, if this is you do these things, but it’s all in the text, because I have no way, maybe I can do two variants of the PDF like variant A for regular altitude and variant B for high altitude. But I can’t do one per country, right? I mean, I guess I could, but ultimately, what you’re describing is that instead of putting it into the text explicitly, “Hey Fabrice, if you meet these conditions, do these things or don’t do these things or do these extra things,” the delivery portal, platform is going to say, “Okay, what do I know about this end user? What do I know about Fabrice? I know he is in a certain location with a certain preferred language and a certain product. I know which products you bought.” So therefore you don’t get an if, if, if, if, you just get, here’s what you need to do in your context with your product. FL: Exactly. When we deliver the content, whether it’s through the APIs or the portal that you’ve built and that is served by the platform, we render the content in a way that we can remove or hide dynamically parts of the content that would not apply to the context, the profile of the user. And that’s the magic of CDP. It’s making that content dynamically. It’s also called dynamic content delivery. You remember we had this concept, the dynamic part is, how can I dynamically leverage the metadata on the content side or the conditions that I adapted, read through metadata schemes and make that applicable to the situation and the user profile? So that’s the magic part of it, and that’s a huge improvement compared to a static document that lists all the conditions and then you put the burden on the reader to figure out, sort out inside the document what should be skipped and what to do depending on the product configuration. SO: Which can of course get very complicated. Now you mentioned product help, in-app help, context sensitive help. So what does it look like to use a Fluid Topics or this class of tool to deliver context sensitive help or in-app help? FL: We are back again to this granularity and the metadata. So imagine you are a software vendor, you design a web application that you have created and you want to do the inline help for your application, your web product. What would you do? You would say in that page, when people click on that question mark or help button, we should open a pane and display that information. That information needs to be a topic, it needs to be written, and the granularity should be a topic because that’s what you pull from the system. So that’s where we need the granularity that’s matching what you want to display inside your app, whether it’s a tool tip, maybe a small tool tip when you move something in the app and then that becomes some fragment of content you need to get from the CDP dynamically. That can be one page of explanation that you display in a pane that opens in your app, but you need to pull that content. So the same way that that’s how you would do it, you were embedding the content inside the application itself. You would write each part of the explanation, the help that you want to display as fragments of information. If you are doing it statically inside the application, but the problem is that if you want to fix something or enhance the content, you have to edit the application, change the… So it’s part of the development. Here, you want the app to pull the content dynamically because the same content can be not only used to be displayed live in the screen, real time. But can be the same content that is used on the doc portal or then you print a PDF on how to do this. That’s the same. You don’t want to maintain the same explanation, in the application, in the portal, in PDFs. So one source. So it’s exactly that. And then you’re pulling through metadata. The app will say, “Oh, give me what goes into that page.” So it’s metadata-driven as well. SO: Right? So there’s an ID on the software or something like that, and it says, “Give me the content that belongs with this unique label.” FL: Exactly. Behind each button you give an ID to that button, which is the question mark in that page. When people click pull content, inline content help, ID number 1, 2, 3, 4. And on your CCMS, you have a metadata, which is called content ID for inline help, whatever. And then you tag that piece of content, 1, 2, 3, 4, and then that’s it. Magic is done. So it’s that simple. SO: So what I’m hearing, and this is in fairness, exactly what you started with is, you have to have metadata, right? On the content. FL: You have to have metadata. SO: And without the metadata there is, well, let’s talk about magic. So if you have a front end that is some sort of a large language model that bought something, what does that mean in terms of this content delivery platform? I mean, can’t you just use ChatGPT and call today? FL: Yes, that’s a good one. I think most of the project AI project we’ve seen in large companies when they started to do, oh, let’s build a chatbot. That’s the magic dream of any company like building the chatbot that replies to any question. Okay, so how does the project start usually? You have the IT, some people in the IT team or the IT team is hiring external people specialized in AI and they realize that they need content. So the first thing they do is they come usually to the TechDoc team and say, “Give me all the content that you have.” And the TechDoc team says, “Okay, we have all these DITA contents.” You say, “No, I don’t want DITA, I want PDFs.” That’s huge to see that. Why? Because they use technology like something from Microsoft, you can build your chatbot in five minutes, but then the only content types you can fit this ready to use platform is with PDFs and Word. So all the magic you’ve put in your content and the tags are lost and you see people getting PDFs out of you wanting PDFs from your content, which is the exact opposite of the investment you’ve made. Putting PDFs somewhere on the storage place and say to Microsoft Chatbot, blah, blah, this is the content, this is the knowledge of the company. And then when you have 20 variants of the same product, then no metadata anymore. Then the chatbot is always mixing all the content. And when you start asking real questions about how to do this, how to do that with this version of the product, everything is lost. And then the chatbot start hallucinating, not because the LLM is hallucinating, because the LLM just the system, the chatbot does not know what PDF to use because it’s implicit to know that this PDF applies to that version of the product or that version. It’s even worse if you say, “If you have product A, do this, if you have product B, do that and start mixing conditions and then just the knowledge becomes barely readable by humans that make mistake reading it. So can you imagine how an LLM can make sure that it’s putting the right information from that complex text structure? SO: Okay, so make PDFs out of DITA, dumb it down, send it to the chatbot, that’s bad. FL: And then it’s guaranteed failure. SO: So what’s the good version of this? FL: But that’s how it works. I guess, I write that you’ve seen this sort of projects where people were asking for the content, thinking that the more they have, the better it’s going to be. And suddenly they realize that, that chatbot is not working and doing many mistakes. And they call that hallucination, because if the LLM was hallucinating, but it’s not, it’s just able to feed the LLM dynamically with the right retrieval, augmented generation scheme to dynamically provide the information for replying to the question because it’s difficult to pull from the PDF the right information that applies to the context. And we are back to, what is the context? What is the machine? What is the profile of the user? What is the variant, the version, the whatever you have in front of you? So that’s the complex part. So what’s the relationship? What is the successful AI? What’s the relationship between CDP and AI? All AI projects I’ve seen start regardless of us, regardless of Fluid Topics, start with we need to gather content. We need to take the content that we have, put it in one place, create this sort of unified repository of content. The promise that usually, as I said, they do it using static document, PDFs, to analyze blah blah. If you look at what a CDP is, that’s exactly what it is. It’s already your repository of content. At least everything around the product, because we’ve been talking about CCMS published to CDP. What also makes a CDP very special is that, not only can we ingest this DITA content, but also this legacy PDF and markdown content, API documentation knowledge bases. So the CDP is here to ingest all the knowledge that you have around your product, not just necessarily the formal techdoc, the proper techdoc that has been well written and validated. So we have already, well, the CDP is exactly that. It’s building, that’s the purpose of it. It’s building that unified repository and that’s where you should start from. And it’s fine grained, and we have the metadata and we have everything, so we know how to feed the LLM. So there are two things in an AI project. One is the LLM, but now people use generic LLM, you don’t fine tune, train an LLM anymore for this sort of use case that is just a chatbot for replying to questions and solving cases automatically. You use a generic LLM and you feed the LLM dynamically with the fragments of content of knowledge that you have in your repository. And that’s where just as a human, when you run a search, you look for content, you know what part of content, what are the fragments, the topics, the chapters that contain the knowledge for replying to that question? The tough part is, extracting that from the repository. Am I extracting the 2, 3, 4 pages around the question that are matching the version, the situation that I’m in? So that I can then feed the LLM and say, “This is the 10 pages of knowledge that we have, or 20 or 50 pages of knowledge. This is the question replied to the question using that knowledge.” That’s exactly what a chatbot does. You’re giving the question of the user, you give 5, 10, 20, whatever number of pages of knowledge that you have in your repository and you ask the LLM say, “This is the question, this is the knowledge, please reply.” So the test part is extracting the 5, 10, 20 pages that are really adapted to the situation, to the context. SO: And the metadata helps you do that. FL: And the metadata. Nothing else than metadata for doing that. SO: Right. Okay. So we’ve talked a lot about metadata as I guess a precondition, right? A prerequisite. Yeah, it is. If you don’t have metadata, none of these other things are going to work. And I wanted to ask you about other, maybe, challenges or prerequisites. So other than people coming in and saying, oh, right, we need metadata, and then they go away for two years and then they come back and they have some metadata, what are the other issues that you run into when you’re trying to build out a CDP like this? What are some of the other… What are the top challenges that you run into other than clearly metadata? So we’ll put that one at number one. FL: Oh yeah, clearly number one. I would say the second one now is the UX UI people want to design. Because modern platform have unlimited capabilities in designing the front end, the UI that you want. It’s like what do you want? What makes sense for regarding, based on your product types, the user that you have, the content that you have, what is the UX you want to build? That’s interesting, because probably five, no, let’s say 10 years ago, we were providing default interfaces out of the box with the product, with three topics to build your portal. And you could just brand that, put your colors, logo, tweak it a bit, and everybody was happy with that. And then we’ve seen a big evolution because now for many companies, marketing everywhere to say on UX, you have now UX director of VP of user experience that were not existing five years ago, 10 years ago. See what I mean, everybody was working is on swim lane. The techdoc department was in charge of writing the content and probably generating the PDFs and then setting up a doc portal. But many companies have realized that this tech doc portal is instrumental to the performance of the company. And now it says, “Oh, we need to have a look at that.” So it becomes a shared place. See, you’ve seen that I guess in your project. SO: Yeah. Yeah. FL: Five years ago, 10 years ago, the only people you had to work with and educate and discuss with were probably the tech dog team. And now you’ve got marketing and you’ve got customer support, and you’ve got customer experience people. And because they’ve realized the value there is in this content, but as well as how important it is to design the writer’s experience that fits with the other touch points of the company to create a seamless journey when you go from the corporate website to the documentation website to the help desk tool to the LMS. And you need some consistency around that, not only in terms of just branding colors and logos, but you go beyond that. And we see this as a new place where people struggle a bit. Our customers struggle is what do we want? In fact, they know that marketing says we need something that is more modern, more like this, more like that. But we start opening the discussion, what is it really that you want? Some companies are very mature, they got the Figma mockups and they come to us, “This is what we need to implement. We’ve spent two years with UX designer crafting the UX of our portal.” And some come and say, “Oh my God, you’re right. We don’t know what you need. Give us a default, something to start with and we’ll see.” SO: Well, you’ll appreciate this. I had a call not too long ago with a very, very, very, very large company, very large. And they said, “We need a front end for our content, this tech content that needs to go out into the world, we need a design for it.” And because it’s a very large company, I said, “Great, where’s your UX team? And do you have a design system?” Because, I mean presumably they do. And the person I was talking to said, “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” And so I consulted the almighty search engine and discovered that not only did this particular company have a design system, they had something that is publicly available, that is their design system that you can go get all the pieces and parts and all the logos and all the behaviors and everything. It is all out there in the world. And yet, the people that work at this organization and in their defense, there are many, many tens of thousands of them did not know that this thing existed. And so all of their requirements in terms of what they had to do for their portal design were right out there in the world accessible to me. FL: They didn’t even know about it. SO: And they had no idea that it existed. And so we had to be the ones to make that connection and say, okay, we have to talk to the people or at least download all these assets and then figure out what to do with them and then make sure that we’re following the rules and all the rest of it. So to your point, the enterprise issues, and we also run out into this with metadata and taxonomy, that that is typically an enterprise problem, not a departmental problem. And actually making those connections across the departments for the first time is a task that very often falls to us as the consultants on the outside who are asking, “Do you have a taxonomy project? Do you have design systems? Do you have these enterprise assets that we need to align with and be consistent with?” And they’re not ready for that question, because it was until recently, put a pile of PDFs somewhere. FL: That’s just a known and you don’t know what you don’t know. And when they start moving up to more capable tools, they discover that it comes with more capabilities, but they have to make choices, they have to invest in metadata, UX design and all that. And it’s probably some of those companies are not ready yet. I mean, they didn’t foresee that coming. And that’s where the project lag a bit in terms of complexity as well, because they realize that it’s not just buying the tool as well, making the investment on their content, their UX strategy, their design system and all that. That may be missing in some cases. SO: And I think that probably saying it’s not just about buying the tool is really a good summary of this whole situation. Because we started with you’re really going to need metadata, and if you don’t have metadata, that’s a huge problem. And we’ve landed on, and there are all these other connections and pieces and parts that you have to think about. So Fabrice, thank you very much. This was a great discussion and I appreciate all your information and we will wrap this up there. Are there any parting thoughts that you want to leave people with? FL: It was an absolute pleasure having this discussion with you, Sarah. I think it could have last another hour easily, so we need to stop somewhere. Maybe we’ll have another opportunities to keep on chatting about some of the subjects. SO: Yep. Sounds good. And thank you again, and we will see you soon. Christine Cuellar: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links. The post Deliver content dynamically with a content delivery platform appeared first on Scriptorium.

In this episode, Alan Pringle, Bill Swallow, and Christine Cuellar explore how structured learning content supports the learning experience. They also discuss the similarities and differences between structured content for learning content and technical (techcomm) content. Even if you are significantly reusing your learning content, you’re not just putting the same text everywhere. You can add personalization layers to the content and tailor certain parts of the content that are specific to your audience’s needs. If you were in a copy-and-paste scenario, you’d have to manually update it every single time you want to make a change. That scenario also makes it a lot more difficult to update content as you modify it for specific audiences over time, because you may not find everywhere a piece of information has been used and modified when you need to update it. — Bill Swallow Related links: Structured authoring and XML (white paper), which is also included in our book, Content Transformation Confronting the horror of modernizing content The challenges of structured learning content (podcast) Self-paced, online DITA training with LearningDITA.com Get monthly insights on structured learning content, content operations, and more with our Illuminations newsletter LinkedIn: Alan Pringle Bill Swallow Christine Cuellar Transcript: Introduction with ambient background music Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations. Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it. Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change. Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off. End of introduction Christine Cuellar: Hey, everybody, and welcome to today’s show. I’m Christine Cuellar, and with me today I have Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow. Alan and Bill, thanks for being here. Alan Pringle: Sure. Hello, everybody. Bill Swallow: Hey, there. CC: Today, Alan, Bill, and I are going to be talking about structured content for learning content. Before we get too far in the weeds, let’s kick it off with a intro question. Alan, what is structured content? AP: Structured content is a content workflow that lets you define and enforce consistent organization of your information. Let’s give a quick example in the learning space. For example, you could say that all learning overviews contain information about the audience for that content, the duration, prerequisites, and the learning objectives for that lesson or learning module. And by the way, that structure that I just mentioned … It actually comes from a structured content standard called the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, DITA for short. That is an open-source standard that has a set of elements that are expressly for learning content, including lessons and assessments. And I think it’s also worth noting, another big part of the whole idea of structured content is that you are creating content in a format agnostic way. You are not formatting your content specifically for, let’s say, a study guide, a lesson that’s in a learning management system, or even a slide deck. Instead, what a content creator instructional designer does … They are going to develop content that follows the predefined structure, and then an automated publishing process is going to apply the correct kind of formatting depending on how you’re delivering the content. That way, as a content creator and instructional designer, you’re not having to copy and paste your learning content into a bunch of different tools. And I know for a fact a lot of instructional designers are doing that right now. Instead of doing all that copying and pasting, you write it one time, and then you say, “I want to deliver it for these different delivery targets, whether it’s for online purposes, whether it’s for in-person training or maybe a combination of both.” You set up publishing processes to apply the formatting for whatever your delivery targets are so you, as a human being, don’t have to mess with that. CC: Which is awesome. Part of the reason that we’re talking about this today is that structured content has been a part of the techcomm world for over 30 years, for a really long time, and now we’re starting to see it make inroads in the learning and development space. We’ve been doing a lot of work for structured content in the learning space, but how is it different from the techcomm space? And Bill, I’m going to kick this over to you for that. BS: I think I’m going to take a higher-level view on this because there is a lot of overlap between techcomm and learning content. Where they really start to diverge is in delivery. Techcomm is pretty uniform in how it delivers content to people. There’s personalization involved and so forth, but essentially everyone’s getting the same thing. The experience is going to be the same. Everyone’s going to get a manual. Everyone’s going to get online help. Everyone’s going to get a web resource, what have you. It might be tailored to their specific needs, but it’s a pretty candid delivery experience. For training, the focus is on the learning experience itself, and it’s usually tailored to a very specific need, whether it’s a very specific type of audience that needs information, or it’s very specific information that needs to be delivered in a very specific way for those people. Beyond that, we start looking at the content itself under the hood, and the information starts to, I would say, broaden with learning content because it can consume all the different types of information you have with technical content. And generally in a structured world, we think of that as conceptual information, how-to information, and reference information, for the most part. With learning content, now you have a completely new set of content in addition to that where you have learning objectives. You have assessments. You have overviews, reviews, all sorts of different content that essentially expands on the wealth of information you have from your technical resources. CC: That’s great. Typically, the arguments for structured content, and the reason it’s really valuable for organizations, is it introduces consistency in your content, consistency for your brand across wherever you’re delivering content. It also helps you build some scalable content processes, that kind of thing. What are some of the arguments for structured content for the learning environment specifically, if there are any other new ones? AP: Some of the reasons that you want to do structured content for learning content are really similar to other types of content. We’ve already talked about one of them. I touched on this earlier in regard to automated formatting. You are not having to do all of the work as a human being, applying formatting to ever how many delivery formats that you have. That is a huge win that you’re not having to do that. And especially in the training space, I have seen so many organizations copying content from one platform to another because the platforms don’t play well together, so you’ve got multiple versions of what should be the same exact content to maintain. That is another huge reason to consider structure. You want a single source of truth for your content regardless of where that information is being delivered because if you’re looking at the overall learning experience and the excellence and quality of that learning experience, if you were telling learners slightly different things in different places in your content, you are not providing an optimal learning experience. Therefore, having that single source of truth for a particular bit of information gives your learners a consistent piece of information regardless of what channel they consume it for. That’s a really important win for a solid, dependable learning experience. CC: Gotcha. No, that definitely makes sense. It sounds like it would take some of the effort off of the subject-matter experts who are creating these trainings so that they can … They, I’m assuming, would rather focus on the work of helping train people. Getting some of the manual formatting and copy and pasting off of their workload sounds pretty nice. What are the complications that it might introduce or the change management issues that might need to be tackled when you’re bringing structured content into a learning environment? AP: It’s true anytime you bring in structure. When people are used to working in an environment where you are doing manual formatting, and you’re seeing what things look like as you kind of develop the content, the idea of developing content in a format agnostic way where you’re not thinking about what does this slide look like, or how is this assessment going to work in the learning management system, it’s very easy to get focused on the delivery angle because you want it to be good, and you want it to be done in a way that makes that learning experience useful for the people who are trying to learn whatever it is they’re trying to learn. You don’t want those impediments of bad formatting or a not great way that your assessments behave in your learning management system, but you kind of get to offload all of those concerns, which are very valid. I’m not saying they’re not valid. They are, but you want an automated process. Basically, you want computers to do that work for you. You want programming to apply that formatting so you can really focus on getting that information as solid as it can be, and you let technology handle the rest. You do set up the standards for how you deliver that content, whether it’s in print, online, in person, whatever. However you’re delivering your learning and training content, you set the standards. “This is how I need this to behave. This is how I need it to look. This is how I need it to interact.” Once you set those standards, then you turn around and have someone who has this programmatic skill set, like we do at Scriptorium, to come in and develop the transformations that take your content and deliver it in the ways you need it delivered so you, as, like you were saying, the subject-matter expert, the instruction designer, or whatever content creator we’re talking about here … You are not doing that for every single delivery type that you are putting out for your learners. BS: And it’s not to say that the experience isn’t tailored because it still can be tailored. Even if you are significantly reusing your content, you’re not just taking the same text everywhere. You can add personalization layers to that content and tailor certain parts of the content specific to what that specific audience needs rather than having to retype it all every single time you want to make a change if you were in a copy-paste scenario. And that also would make it a lot more difficult to update all that content as you modify it for specific audiences over time because you may not find everywhere where a piece of information has been used and modified if you need to update it. It does take a little bit of … Well, it takes a lot of the work off of those developing the content because they don’t have to worry about exactly what it looks like for every single target that they’re producing. It does require a little bit of, I would say, faith in the system that it will work. It really comes down to how you’re architecting this in the first place to make sure you understand who your varied audiences are, what the look and feel needs to be, what the delivery points are, and making sure that you are authoring within the scope of those things. And once you get that down, as Alan mentioned, it becomes a push-button operation to produce all of your various outputs. AP: I think, too, from a change management point of view, one thing that I have heard from lots of content creators in the learning space is the burden they have, for example, if a program or the company changes names, changes logos, changes branding, if you have that built in to the formatting in a way where you’re having to go into, say, a bunch of Microsoft Word or PowerPoint files and manually change those out, and I am sure I am talking to people out there in the ether who know exactly what I’m talking about, it is extremely painful. And when you have automated the application of formatting, what you can do is change those processes to update them to include the latest corporate colors, the latest taglines, the latest fonts, the latest logos, whatever has changed so you, as a human being, again, do not have to go in there and touch all of those files yourselves because that is a burden you don’t need when you were trying to quote do your real work, which is help people learn, not apply formatting to a zillion Microsoft Word documents. Nobody wants to do that, at least nobody I know anyway. CC: No. That’s a very good example of how the structure can just take that part of the workload off of you so you can get to focus on what you want to do. But I like, Bill, how you put it that you have to trust the process because it is an adjustment to go from authoring your content in a specific PowerPoint or in a specific Word doc to authoring it in a way that it can be reused. But ultimately what I’m hearing both of you say is that, even though it’s a valid concern that you might worry about your ability to personalize and your ability to control the user experience, once structured content is implemented correctly, and everyone is adjusted to the system, it sounds to me like you’re saying that your opportunities for personalizing at scale are actually going to be bigger than when everyone’s doing it individually, and at least it introduces consistency across those personalized experiences. Do you think that’s fair to say, either of you? Do you think that’s a fair statement, or is that too optimistic- AP: That is an incredibly loaded question the only answer to which is … No, you were correct. That is, structure does enable all the things that you just ask in that very leading, but good, question. CC: It is very leading. BS: It removes the visual context of where the content is going, but it doesn’t remove … In fact, it enhances the context of what the content is about. AP: Right. CC: That’s a good way to say it. I like that. Looking at structured content within the learning space itself, how does it … I know, Bill, you had mentioned that, within the techcomm space, it’s fairly uniform in how content is delivered and who it’s delivered to. Not that it’s always the same. How about in the learning space? How does that vary? And how does the structure approach vary? BS: Well, this might contradict what I said before, but it’s a slightly different look on it in that, really, the learning clients that we’ve had … They kind of mirror a lot of the techcomm clients we had in that everyone is producing roughly … If you look at it from a high enough altitude, it all looks the same. They’re all producing manuals. They’re all producing e-learning. They’re all producing whatever. When you get down into the nuts and bolts, that’s when you start finding that every single implementation is going to look a little bit different. In techcomm, you might have completely different types of content that you need to be able to handle. The same thing is with the learning space. Every single group is going to have different needs, and they’re going to have very specialized needs based on the content that they’re producing and who they’re producing it for. The learning space, unlike techcomm where they’ve basically been going down the structured path for 20, 30 years … The learning space has really been a sea of black boxes where every single system has its own way of doing things. It does about 90%, 95% of the same stuff that every other system out there does, but there is something special, something canned, something within the system that allows it to do the one thing that no other system does. And all of these technologies historically have really been locked down tight where your content goes in, and it lives and thrives in that box that you’re developing it in. But if you need to take that content out and change systems and put it somewhere else, there’s a lot of rework that potentially needs to be done depending on how customized that system you were using was. And let’s face it. You can structure content. You can centralize it. You can componentize it all you want. It’s not going to change the fact that learning content is going to have these many varied endpoints for how it’s being delivered. Even though you are consolidating and structuring in a central repository to maximize your reuse, to not worry about the formatting, you may still have three or four different learning management systems that you are pushing that content into. Each one of those systems has different requirements. The type of content that gets consumed. What it does. How it reacts. What it expects. The order it needs that information in per lesson, per page. E-page. It gets a little more complicated in the delivery of the learning content because we need to be able to tailor to not only the needs of the particular client in the content that they’re producing but the needs of the systems that need to ingest it. AP: One other thing I would mention here is the level of interactivity, I think, is higher with learning and training content than the techcomm world. Now, I realize there are documentation portals and things like that that do provide some levels of interactivity. However, I think you are going to see much more of that kind of thing on the learning and training side, especially in regard to assessments when you are trying to have people do little, basically, mini exercises to prove that they have learned what they need to learn and that they are graded, and then those scores are recorded. That is the kind of thing you don’t see in techcomm. That is a whole, very specific thing to the learning and training world. Therefore, the structure that you choose needs to accommodate that, and your delivery targets in particular need to accommodate that very high level of interactivity with, for example, like Bill was saying, a learning management system. BS: You have quite a variety of needs out there from basic, true/false, multiple choice, or matching all the way down to simulations, doing interactive exercises, and so forth all within a learning management system. And you need to be able to account for that. And as I mentioned, not all of those systems function in the exact same way, so it needs to be tailored. CC: For any listeners that are listening to this episode right now, and they are in the learning content space, and they’re interested in getting started with structured content, Alan, where would you recommend they start? AP: Well, our website, scriptorium.com, has lots–very self-serving. Very self-serving. We have a lot of resources, and we will put them in the show notes so you can get to them. We also are the creator and maintainer of a site called learningdita.com that teaches people about one way to do structured content, which is DITA, which I mentioned earlier in the show. And there is a free Introduction to DITA course that you can take. Between some links that we’ll include in the show notes in regard to what is structured content, how it applies to the learning and training space, and learning DITA, those are all good starting points for people who are considering going on the structured content journey for their learning content. CC: That’s great. And the only thing I’ll add to that is that, if you’re interested in learning more about learning content and structured content, this is something that we talk about a lot. I would recommend also subscribing to our Illuminations newsletter which, like Alan said, that’s also going to be linked in the show notes. But every month, we send out a recap of the topics we talked about, and learning content is very often in there because we talk about it a lot. This final question is for both of you. Is there anything else that you want to leave our listeners with about structured content in the learning content space before we wrap up today? BS: I’d say, if you’re looking at structured content, it’s not going to on its face be a savior solution. But if with enough thought, it can really make a difference in your content development workflow, and it can save you a lot of time in producing content that is targeted to very specific people and delivery points. AP: For me, my final suggestion here is think about your pain points. What are the things that are keeping you up at night as you develop your learning and training content? What are the continual issues you are battling, especially your content creators? What are they battling? Is it they’re having to format for umpteen different platforms? Is it that they’re needing to personalize things for different locations? For different levels of service that you were training people about? What are the things that are causing you problems? Basically, compile a list of those. And then from there, figure out, could structured content, solve any of these problems? Don’t put the cart before the horse, is the best way to put it, really. Think about your pain points in your processes and then see if structure might be the thing to solve them. CC: That’s great. And on that, Alan, Bill, thank you very much for being here and recording this with me today. BS: Thank you. AP: Absolutely. We like to talk about this stuff probably too much. CC: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links. Get monthly insights on structured learning content, content operations, and more with our Illuminations newsletter. 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In our last episode, you learned how a taxonomy helps you simplify search, create consistency, and deliver personalized learning experiences at scale. In part two of this two-part series, Gretyl Kinsey and Allison Beatty discuss how to start developing your futureproof taxonomy from assessing your content needs to lessons learned from past projects. Gretyl Kinsey: The ultimate end goal of a taxonomy is to make information easier to find, particularly for your user base because that’s who you’re creating this content for. With learning material, the learner is who you’re creating your courses for. Make sure to keep that end goal in mind when you’re building your taxonomy. Related links: Taxonomy: Simplify search, create consistency, and more (podcast, part 1) The challenges of structured learning content (podcast) DITA and learning content Metadata and taxonomy in your spice rack Transform L&D experiences at scale with structured learning content LinkedIn: Gretyl Kinsey Allison Beatty Transcript: Introduction with ambient background music Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations. Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it. Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change. Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off. End of introduction Allison Beatty: I am Allison Beatty. Gretyl Kinsey: I’m Gretyl Kinsey. AB: And in this episode, Gretyl and I continue our discussion about taxonomy. GK: This is part two of a two-part podcast. AB: So if you don’t have a taxonomy for your learning content, but you know need one, what are some things to keep in mind about developing one? GK: Yeah, so there are all kinds of interesting lessons we’ve learned along the way from working with organizations who don’t have a taxonomy and need one. And I want to talk about some of the high-level things to keep in mind, and then we can dive in and think about some examples there. One thing I also want to just say upfront is that it is very common for learning content in particular to be developed in unstructured environments and tools like Microsoft Word or Excel. It’s also really common that if you are working within a learning management system or LMS for there to be a lack of overall consistency because the trade-off there is you want flexibility, right? You want to be able to design your courses in whatever way is best suited for that specific subject or that set of material. But that’s where you do have that trade-off between how consistent is the information and the way it’s organized versus how flexible is it to give your instructional designers that maximum creativity. And so when you’ve got those kinds of considerations, then that can make the information harder for your students to find or to use and even for your content creators. So we’ve seen organizations where they’ve said, “We’ve got all of our learning materials stuck in hundreds of different Word files or spreadsheets or in sometimes different LMS’ or sometimes different areas in the same LMS.” And when they have all of those contributors, like we talked about with multiple authors contributing, or sometimes lots and lots of subject matter experts part-time contributing, that really creates these siloed environments where you’ve got different little pieces of learning material all over the place and no one overarching organizational system. And so that’s typically the driving point that see where that organization will say, “We don’t have a taxonomy. We know that we need one.” But I think that is the first consideration is if you don’t have one and you know you need one, the first question to ask is why? Because so often it is those pain points that I mentioned, that lack of one cohesive system, one cohesive organization for your content, and sometimes also one cohesive repository or storage mechanism. So that’s typically where you’ll have an organization saying, “We don’t have a good way to kind of connect all of our content and have that interoperability that you were talking about earlier, and we need some kind of a taxonomy so that even if we do still have it created in a whole bunch of different ways by a bunch of different people, that when it gets served to the students who are going to be taking these courses, it’s consistent, it’s well-organized, it’s easy for people to find what they need.” So I think that’s the first consideration is that if you’ve got that demand for taxonomy developing, think about where that’s coming from and then use that as the starting point to actually create your taxonomy. And then I think one other thing that can help is to think about how your content is created. So if you do have those disparate environments or you’ve got a lot of unstructured material, then take that into account and think about building a taxonomy in a way that’s going to benefit rather than hinder your creation process. And that is especially important the more people that you have contributing to your learning material. It’s really helpful to try to gather information and metrics from all of your authors and contributors, as well as from your learners. So any kind of a feedback form that, if you’ve got some kind of an e-learning or training website where you can assess information that your learners tell you about, what was good or bad about the experience, what was difficult or what would make their lives easier, that’s really great information for you to have. But also from your contributors, your authors, your subject matter experts, your instructional designers, if they have a way to collect feedback or information on a regular basis that will help enhance the next round of course design, then all of that can contribute to taxonomy creation as well. When you start building a taxonomy from the ground up, you can look at all the metrics that you’ve been collecting and say, “Here’s what people are searching for. We should make sure that we have some categories that reflect that. Here are difficulties that our authors are encountering with being able to find certain information and keep it up to date or with being able to associate things with learning objectives. So let’s build out categories for that.” So really making sure that you use those metrics. And if you’re not collecting them already, it’s never too late to start. I think the biggest thing to keep in mind also is to plan ahead very carefully and to make sure that you’re thinking about the future, that you’re doing futureproofing before you actually build and implement your taxonomy. And I know we both can probably speak to examples of how that’s been done well versus not so well. AB: Yeah, maintenance is so important. GK: Yeah, and I think the more that you think about it upfront before you ever build or put a taxonomy in place, the easier that maintenance is going to be, right? Because we’ve seen a lot of situations where an organization will just start with a taxonomy, but maybe it’s not broad enough. So maybe it only starts in one department. Like they have it for just the technical docs, but they don’t have it for the learning material. And then down the road it’s a lot more difficult to go in and have to rework that taxonomy for new information that came out of the learning department. That if they had had that upfront, it could have served both training and technical docs at the same time. So thinking about that and doing that planning is one of the best ways to avoid having to do rework on a taxonomy. AB: And I’m glad you brought up the gathering of feedback and insight from users before diving into building out a taxonomy. Because at the end of the day, you want it to be usable to the people who need that classification system. That is the most important part. GK: Yeah, that’s absolutely the end goal. AB: Usability. GK: Yeah, and I think a big part of that, like I’ve mentioned, planning ahead carefully and futureproofing, is looking at metrics that you’ve gathered over time because that can help you to see whether something in those metrics or in that feedback is a one-off fluke or whether it’s an ongoing persistent trend or something that you need to always take into consideration from your end users. If you’ve got a lot of people saying the same things, a lot of people using the same search terms over time, that can really help you with your planning. And yeah, like you said, I think the ultimate end goal of a taxonomy is to make information easier to find, and in particular for your user base because that’s who you’re creating this content for. And with learning material, that’s who you’re creating your courses for. So you want to make sure that when you’re building that taxonomy, that that end goal is something you always keep in mind. How can we make this content easier for people to find and to use? AB: Definitely. Something else that I am curious to get your take on is in this planning stage. So in my experience, I feel like there’s never nothing to start with. Even if there’s not any formalized standards or anything around classification of content, there’s like a colloquial system, right? GK: Yes, very much so. AB: Of how content creators or users think about an organized content, even if they’re not necessarily using a taxonomy. GK: Yeah. A lot of times it’s very similar to when we just talked about content structure itself. That if you’re in something like Microsoft Word or Unstructured FrameMaker, even if there’s not an underlying structure, a set of tags under that content, there is still an implied structure. You can still look at something like a Word document and say, “Okay, it’s got headings at these various levels. It’s got paragraphs. It’s got notes,” and you can glean a structure from that even though that structure does not exist in a designated form, right? So taxonomy is the same way. You’ve got people using information and categorizing information, even if they don’t have formal categories or a written down or tagged taxonomy structure. There’s always still some a way that people are organizing that material so that they can find it as authors or so that their end users can find it as the audience. And so that’s also a really good place to draw from. If you don’t have that formal taxonomy in place, you do still have an implied taxonomy somewhere. And so that’s where, going back to what you said about gathering the metrics, that’s a lot of times how you can find it and start to root it out if you are looking for that starting point of here’s how we need to build this formal taxonomy. So I think that’s step one is after you’ve figured out why you need to have that formal taxonomy in place, what’s the driving factor behind it? Then start going and hunting down that information about your existing implied taxonomy and how people are currently finding and categorizing information, because that will help you to at least start drafting something. And then you can further plan and refine it as you take into account the various metrics from your user base, and then gather information across all the different content producing departments in your organization until you finally settle on what that taxonomy structure should look like. AB: I know that the word taxonomy can sound complicated and scary and all that, but you’re never really starting with the fear of a blank page. Taxonomies are everywhere and in everything, even if they’re not formalized. Think about when you go to the grocery store and you know you need ketchup and you’re going to go to the condiment aisle to find that. There’s so much organization and hierarchy just in our day-to-day lives that exist already. That’s never a fear of a blank page with taxonomies. There’s just thinking of the future and being mindful that things may change and maintenance will happen. GK: Exactly. I think that point that you made about even when you go to the grocery store, humans think in taxonomy, right? Humans naturally categorize things. AB: And group things. Yeah. GK: And so I think the main goal of having a taxonomy formalized is to take that out of people’s heads and actually get it into a real form that multiple people can all use together, and then that serves that ultimate end goal we talked about of making things easier for your users to find. AB: Access. Definitely. I want to talk about some lessons learned based on taxonomies that you and I have worked with clients, and I’m thinking of how you’re never starting with a blank page. I’m thinking about one project in particular where we developed a learning content model and used Bloom’s Taxonomy as a jumping-off point for this learning model. That’s another option or another way to go about it is use the implied structure in combination with a structure that already exists and integrating that into your content model. And then on the other hand, I know we’ve also done taxonomies for learning where we’ve specialized a lot. GK: And specialization is always interesting because we see that develop out of… If you are putting out information that is very specific, so for example, if you are putting out learning material or courses around… I’ll go back to the example from earlier. Here’s how to use this specific kind of software. Here’s a class that you can take to get certified for doing this kind of an activity and this kind of software. Then that’s when it makes sense to think about any kind of specialized structures that you might want to have that are specific to that software. And it can be the same in whatever kind of material that you’re presenting. If you’re saying, “Oh, we’re in the healthcare industry. We are in the finance industry. We’re in the technology industry,” whatever your industry is, there’s going to be specific information to that industry that you probably want to capture as part of your taxonomy. Those categories are going to be specific to that industry and to the product or material that you are producing or to the learning material, the courses that you’re creating. So that’s a really good thing to think about when it comes to that taxonomy development is if we are in any very specific industry where we need that industry-specific information in the taxonomy, then it’s going to be really important to specialize. And so if you’re working in DITA XML, specialization is creating custom elements from out of the box or existing ones or standard ones. And so whenever you think about a taxonomy that is driven by metadata in DITA XML, then that’s where you might start creating some custom metadata elements and attributes that can drive your taxonomy. And those custom names for those elements and attributes would be something that you do specialize in and that matches the requirements or the demands of your industry. AB: Yeah, that’s spot on with the example I was talking about a while ago about how the Library of Congress uses Library of Congress subject headings, but the National Library of Medicine has their own classification system for cataloging. But under the hood, they’re both Dublin Core. They’re both specialized Dublin Core. You know what I mean? GK: Yes. AB: There’s different context and then… Yeah, totally. Oh, this was the question I was going to ask you. Is there a trade-off with heavy specialization in your taxonomy? GK: I think the biggest trade-off is maintenance. So we were talking earlier about how when you’re doing that initial planning that you want to think about futureproofing and you want to think about how you can make it as easy to maintain as possible within reason, of course, because nothing is ever easy when it comes to content development. AB: That’s true. GK: But yeah, when it comes to heavy specialization, that’s the biggest thing to consider is that for any kind of specialized tagging, you have to have specialized knowledge, so people who understand the categories, who know how to build that specialization and how to maintain it. So you have to have those resources available, and you also have to think about when you need to inevitably add or change the material, how much more difficult is that going to be if you specialize tags. Maybe it’s going to actually enhance things. And so instead of making things more difficult, it might be a little bit easier if you are specializing because then you already have created custom categories before. And if you need to add one down the road, you’ve got a roadmap for that. But it really depends on your organization and the resources that you have available. And thinking specifically about learning content as well, I think one of the biggest areas where heavy specialization can be challenging is that it is typical to have so many part-time contributors and subject matter experts who are not going to be experts in the tagging system. They’re just going to be experts in the actual material that they’re contributing. And so if they have to learn how to use those tags to a certain extent, then sometimes the more customization or specialization that you do, the more difficult that can be for those contributors, and it can make it sometimes difficult to get them on board with having that taxonomy in the first place. AB: Yeah, change management. GK: So I think that’s the big trade-off. Yes, change management, maintenance, and thinking about the best balance for making sure that things are useful for your organization. That you’ve got the taxonomy in place that you need, but it’s also not going to be so difficult to maintain that it essentially fails and that your authors and contributors don’t want to keep it going. AB: This is a big question, but who’s responsible for maintaining a taxonomy within an organization that develops learning content site. GK: So I think there’s a difference here between who is responsible and who should be responsible. AB: Oh, that’s so true. GK: If we think about best practice, it really should just be I would say generally a small team who is designated for that role, who has an administrative role so that they can be in charge of governance over that taxonomy. Because if you don’t have that, if you don’t have the best practice or the optimal situation, then instead, what can happen is that either no one’s managing the taxonomy, which is obviously bad, because then it can just continue to spiral out of control, or it’s almost like a too many cooks in the kitchen a situation, where if you don’t have that designated leadership or governance role over taxonomy, and anyone can update it or make changes to it, then it loses all of its meaning, all of its consistency. I do think it’s important that it’s a small team and not one single person. Because if that person is sick or something, then you’re left high and dry. So you want to make sure you’ve got it’s a small enough team that it’s not going to have the too many cooks in the kitchen problem, but it’s also not just one person. AB: Another reason that it’s not ideal to have just one person is diversity prevents bias in your taxonomy, right? GK: Absolutely. AB: If one person has a confirmation bias about a specific facet and they document it or build something that way, but no one in the organization… You know what I mean? GK: Yeah. So that’s where that small team can provide checks and balances too. AB: Totally. GK: You can have things set up where maybe every person on that team has to approve changes that are made to the taxonomy, or when they’re initially designing it, they all are giving the final review and final approval on it, so that way you’re not having it just through one person and whatever biases that person might carry. AB: And biases isn’t necessarily a negative connotation, but just that people see the world differently from person to person. And by world, I do mean learning content sometimes. Is there anything else that you wanted to cover? GK: I think I just want to wrap things up by saying the big things to keep in mind, the main points that we talked about when you’re developing a taxonomy, whether it is for learning content or just more broadly, are to plan ahead, think ahead, do all of the planning upfront that you can, rather than just building things, so that that way you can avoid rework. Use the metrics of the information that you’ve gathered from both inside your organization and from your user base. And finally, keep that end goal in mind that this is all about making things easier for people to use, for people to find content and develop your taxonomy with that end goal in mind. AB: Yeah, I agree with all of that. Well, thanks so much for talking with me, Gretyl. GK: Of course. Thank you, Allison, for talking with me. Outro with ambient background music Christine Cuellar: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links. Behind every successful taxonomy stands an enterprise content strategy Building an effective content strategy is no small task. The latest edition of our book, Content Transformation is your guidebook for getting started. The post Building your futureproof taxonomy for learning content (podcast, part 2) appeared first on Scriptorium.

Ready to deliver consistent and personalized learning content at scale for your learners? In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow share how structured content can transform your L&D content processes. They also address challenges and opportunities for creating structured learning content. There are other people in the content creation world who have had problems with content duplication, having to copy from one platform or tool to another. But I will tell you, from what I have seen, the people in the learning development space have it the worst in that regard—the worst. — Alan Pringle Related links: The challenges of structured learning content (podcast) DITA and learning content Rise of the learning content ecosystem with Phylise Banner (podcast) Flexible learning content with the DITA Learning and Training specialization Building an effective content strategy is no small task. The latest edition of our book, Content Transformation is your guidebook for getting started. LinkedIn: Alan Pringle Bill Swallow Transcript: Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits. Introduction with ambient background music Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations. Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it. Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change. Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off. End of introduction AP: Hey, everybody, I’m Alan Pringle. BS: I’m Bill Swallow. AP: And today, Bill and I want to talk about structured content in the learning and development space. I would say, the past two years or so, we have seen a significantly increased demand of organizations who want to apply structured content to their learning and development processes, and we want to share some of the things those organizations have been through and what we’ve learned over the past few months, because I suspect there are other people out there who could benefit from this information. BS: Oh, absolutely. AP: So let’s talk about, really, the drivers, what are the things that people, content creators in the learning development space, what’s driving them to it? One of them off the bat is so much content, so, so very much content, on so many different delivery platforms. That’s one that I know of immediately, what are some of the other ones? BS: Oh, yeah, you have just the core amount of content, the number of deliverables, and the duplication of content across all of them. AP: That is really the huge one, and I know there are other people in the content creation world who have had problems with content duplication, having to copy from one platform or tool to another. But I will tell you, from what I have seen, the people in the learning development space have it the worst in that regard—the worst. BS: Didn’t they applaud you when you showed up at a conference with a banner that said end copy, paste? AP: Pretty much, it’s true. That very succinct message raised a lot of eyebrows, because they are in the position, unfortunately, in learning and development, having to do a lot of copying and pasting, and part of the reason for that copying and pasting is, a lot of times, the different platforms that we’ve mentioned, also, different audiences. I need to create this version for this region, or this particular type of student at this location, so they’re copying and pasting over and over again to create all these variants for different audiences, which becomes unmanageable very quickly. BS: Yeah, copy, pasting, and then, reworking. And then, of course, when they update it, they have to copy, paste, and rework again to all the other places it belongs, and then, they have to handle it in however many languages they’re delivering the training in. AP: So now, everything is just blown up. I mean, how many layers of crap, and I’m just going to say it, do these people have to put up with? And there are many, many, many. BS: Worst parfait ever. AP: Yeah, no, that is not a parfait I want to share, I agree with you on that. So let’s talk about the differences between, say, the techcomm world and the learning and development world and their expectations for content. Let’s talk about that, too, because it is a different focus, and we have to address that. BS: So techcomm really is about efficiency and production, so being able to amass quite a wide mass of content and put it out there as quickly as possible, or put it out there as efficiently as possible. Learning content kind of flips that on its head, and it wants to take quality content and build a quality experience around it, because it’s focused on enabling people to learn something directly. AP: And techcomm people, we’re not saying you’re putting out stuff that is wrong or half ass. That is not what we mean, I want to be real clear here. What we mean is, there is a tendency to focus on efficiency gains, and getting that help set, getting that PDF, getting that wiki, whatever thing that it is that you’re producing, getting that stood up as quickly as possible, whereas on the learning side, speed is not usually the thing that you’re trying to use to sell the idea of structured content. I don’t think that’s going to win a lot of converts in the learning space. I do think, however, you can make the argument, if you create this single source of truth so you can reuse content for different audiences, different locations, different delivery platforms, and you’re using the same consistent information across all of that, you are going to provide better learning outcomes, because everybody’s getting the same information. Regardless of what audience they are or what platform that they’re learning, whether it’s live instructor-led training, something online, whatever else, you’re still getting the correct same information, whereas if you were copying and pasting all that, you might’ve forgot to update it in one place as a content creator, and then, someone ends up getting the wrong information, a student, a learner, and that’s when you’re not in the optimal learning experience situation. BS: Right, and it’s not to say that every single deliverable gets the exact same content, but they get a slice from the same shared centralized repository of content so that they’re not rewriting things over and over and over again. And they’re still able to do a lot of high-quality animations, build their interactives, put together their slide presentations, everything like that, but use the content that’s stored centrally rather than having to copy and paste it again and again and again. AP: Yeah, and let’s talk about, really, the primary goals for moving to structure content for learning and development folks. We’ve already talked about reuse quite a bit, that’s a big one. Write it one time, use it everywhere, and that also leads to creating profiling, different audiences, content for different audiences. BS: Right, I mean, these goals really are no different than what you see in techcomm, and what techcomm has been using for the past 15, 20, 25 years. It is that reuse, that smart reuse, so write it once, use it everywhere, no copy paste, having those profiling attributes and capabilities built in so that you can produce those variants for beginner learners versus expert learners versus people in different regional areas where the procedure might be a little bit different, producing instructor guides as well as learner guides. All of these different ways of mixing and matching, but using the same content set to do that. AP: Yeah, it’s like one of our clients said, and I have to thank them forever for bringing this up, they were bogged down in a world of continuous copying and pasting over and over and over again, and maintaining multiple versions of what should’ve been the same content, and they said, quote, “We want to get off the hamster wheel.” And that is so true and so fitting, and we probably owe them royalties for saying this over and over again, because such a good phrase. But it really did capture, I think, a big frustration that a lot of people in the learning and development space have creating content, because they do have to maintain so many versions of content. BS: And those versions likely are stored in a decentralized manner, so they could be on multiple different servers, they could be on multiple different laptops or PCs, they could be on thumb drives in some random drawer that are updated maybe once every two, three years. So being able to pull everything together into a central repository and structure it so that it can be intelligently reused and remixed, there’s so many benefits to that. AP: Yeah, and in regard to the remixing, the bottom line is, you want the ability to publish to all your different platforms. I believe the term people like to use is omnichannel publishing, so you basically can do push-button publishing to basically any delivery need that you have, whether it’s an instructor versus student guide for training you’re having live, e-learning, even scripts for video. Even when you’re dealing with a lot of multimedia content, there is still text involved, underpinnings of that content, audio and video, there’s still probably bits and pieces of that, that can come from your single source of content, because at the core of it, it’s text-based, even though if the delivery of it is a video or audio. BS: Now, we’ve had structured content for a good couple decades, at least- AP: At least, yeah. BS: … but there really is a reason why the learning world really hasn’t latched onto it completely, and it really comes down to the different types of content that they need to produce versus what traditionally a techcomm group would do. So right off the bat, there are all the different tests, quizzes, and so forth, all the assessments that are built into a learning curriculum. There was never really anything built to handle those in traditional structured authoring platforms in schemas. AP: And there are solutions now that will let you handle assessments and different types of questions, and things like that. BS: But the whole approach to producing learning content, it’s quite similar to techcomm and to other classic content development, but it’s also quite unique in its own right, and we do have to make sure that all of those different needs, whether it be the assessments, any interactives that need to be developed, making sure that you tie in a complete learning plan, and perhaps even business logic to your content, making sure all that can be baked in intelligently so that we’re able to produce the things that we need to produce for trainers. AP: Yeah, and now, especially, you have to be able to create content that integrates easily with the learning management system, which has its own workflows, it’s got tracking, it tracks progress, it scores quizzes, it keeps track of what classes you’ve taken, prerequisites, all of that stuff, that is a whole delivery ecosystem, and structured content can help you communicate with an LMS and create content that is LMS friendly by baking in a lot of the things that you just talked about. BS: And the content really does boil down to a more granular and targeted presentation to the audience rather than techcomm, which is more of a soup to nuts, kind of everything in the kitchen sink approach to offer. AP: Yeah, and then, there’s also the whole live delivery aspect, that is not something that’s really part of techcomm at all. BS: I wouldn’t want someone there reading a manual to me. AP: No, nor would I. Well, it might be a good way to treat insomnia, but that’s not what we’re here for. But you do have to consider, the assessments are a big difference from a lot of other content that is a good fit for the structure world, and then, the possibility of live instruction, that’s also another big difference, which, still, there are structured content solutions that can help you with both of those very distinct learning and development content situations. So I think it’s fair to say, based on talking to a lot of people at conferences focused on learning, and a lot of our clients, that the traditional way of creating learning and development content, it is not scalable. The copy and paste angle in particular is just not sustainable in any way, shape, or form. BS: No, you have so many hours in a day, so if you need to start producing more, you really need to start adding more people. And you add more people, then you have the likelihood that more things could go wrong with the content, or the content could get- AP: Will go wrong. BS: … could get out of sync with itself. AP: Yeah. Well, let’s talk also a little more about some of the challenges. We’ve talked about the interactivity, how that and the assessments, that’s something that’s kind of particular that you have to solve for in the learning space. Let’s talk about the P word, PowerPoint. BS: PowerPoint. Yeah, being able to pull focus slides together, which really would likely have a very small subset of a course’s content built within them, unless you’re producing a wall of text per PowerPoint. Those are quite unique to the space, so you don’t see much in techcomm where things are delivered via PowerPoint, or you hopefully don’t. AP: No, PowerPoint is great because it’s wide open and you can do a lot of things with it, PowerPoint is bad because it’s wide open and you could do a lot of things with it. That’s the problem with PowerPoint. BS: And a template’s only as useful as those who follow it. AP: Exactly. And now, you mentioned templates, structure content is a way to templatize and standardize your content, and I’m sure that can rub people the wrong way. My slides need to be special, this, that, and the other. There’s a continuum here of, I want to do whatever I want to the point of sloppy, or I can do things within this particular set of confines so there is consistency. And again, I think it’s fair to say, providing consistency for different learners with slide decks, that is going to make some better outcomes instead of a free-for-all, I can do whatever I want scenario. And I’m sure there are people out there who are going to kick and scream and disagree with me, but that’s a fight we’re just going to have to have folks. BS: Well, no, it provides us a consistent experience throughout, rather than having some jarring differences from lesson to lesson or course to course. AP: Yeah, yeah, and I think there’s one thing, too, that, in addition to the PowerPoint angle, with the learning and development space, there is this focus on, we need to create, this thing went off, that thing went off, and this other thing went off. There’s still standardization you can do among your different delivery targets that will streamline things, create consistency, and therefore, a better learning experience. I do believe that’s true, even though some people at first in particular can find it very confining. BS: Oh, right, I mean, it just takes the development of the end user experience, I don’t want to say completely out of the learning content developer’s hands, but it kind of frees them up to better frame the content for the lesson rather than worrying about the fit and finish of the product. AP: Yeah, and let’s focus now on some of the options out there in the structure content world for learning and development content. There’s several out there, let’s talk about what’s on the table. BS: It comes down to two different types of systems, one would be a learning component management system, so it’s a system that’s more built for learning content specifically. AP: Yeah, I would say it’s purpose built, I agree, yeah. BS: Yeah, and it functions the same way as a lot of, I guess what we would call the traditional techcomm component content management systems do, where you’re able to develop in fragmented pieces, in a structured way, in a centralized manner, and intelligently reuse and remix all of these different components to produce some type of deliverable. AP: Right, so you can therefore, within this system, set up things for different locations, different audiences, whatever else. And if you were moving into an LCMS or one of the other solutions we’re talking about, you are also going to make localization and translation much more efficient, and you’ll get stuff turned around in other languages for other locales much more quickly. So we’ve got the LCMS’s which are more proprietary, and then, on the flip side of that, let’s talk about DITA. BS: So DITA does provide you with a decent starting point for developing your content, and we’ve helped several clients do this already, but a lot of the tools that are out there on the flip side, where the LCMS is targeted at developing learning content, a lot of the tools for DITA aren’t, so it requires a lot of customization on the tool chain, as well as in the content model, to get things up and running. However, DITA does give you an easier point of integration with any work that is being produced by your techcomm peers. AP: Yeah, I do think it’s fair to say it’s a little more extensible, but the mere fact it is an open standard as an extensible means that it may take some configuring to make it exactly what you need it to be. And like Bill was saying, DITA has some custom structure that is a very good fit, it is specifically for learning and training, and you can further customize those customizations to match what you need. I will say, I think some of the assessment structures are not as robust as they should be, and we’ve had to customize those for some clients. So that’s another thing that you would have to kind of think about when you’re trying to make this decision, do I need to go with an LCMS, or do I want to go with DITA and a component content management system, and understand that I’m going to have to make some adjustments to make it more learning and development friendly? BS: No matter which way you slice it, though, moving to any kind of a structured repository in a structured system really starts to open things up from a back end production point of view, while not necessarily forgoing a lot of the experience-driven design that goes into producing those different learning deliverables. It is a way to kind of become more efficient, and as Alan mentioned, avoid the copy and paste, which can be a nightmare to maintain over time. AP: And at the same time, you do not have to throw out your standards for the quality of the content and the quality of the learning experience. You want to have structure, support, and bolster, and maintain those things, and don’t look at it as something that is going to degrade those things, because when used correctly, it can really help you maintain that level of quality and consistency that you really need for an outstanding learning experience. And with that, Bill, I think we can wrap up. Thank you very much. BS: Thank you. Outro with ambient background music Christine Cuellar: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links. Questions about this podcast? Let’s talk! "*" indicates required fields PhoneThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.Your name (required)*Your email (required)* Your companySubject (required)*Consulting requestSchedule a meetingLearningDITA.comStoreTrainingOtherYour message*Data collection (required)* I consent to my submitted data being collected and stored. <> The post Transform L&D experiences at scale with structured learning content appeared first on Scriptorium.