by Steffen Frederiksen | May 28, 2018 | Blog
A few years ago, Steffen Frederiksen gave an interview about structured writing to a Swedish journalist. He talked about consistency, modularity, content reuse and all the other goodies of structured writing. The journalist asked, “But what about the writer? Isn’t it terribly boring, being all modular and consistent?” the answer was – and still is – the following: “When I am trying to make my new cable TV box work, manual in hand, desperately looking for the information I need – in that situation, nothing in the entire World concerns me less than how the writer felt when creating this manual!” And that actually captures my message rather nicely: We create business content to help readers or content consumers – human as well as bots – getting their job doneAs authors of technical content, we do not create content just to allow ourselves to have funRemember that normally you have a lot more readers than writers, sometimes thousands more Not saying that writers having fun is bad, or that the content creation process should be ignored – not at all. We have to make it fun to write good content. We have to make it as painless as possible to review and approve content and we have to dramatically improve our content processes. But if a writer thinks it is more interesting to write a manual if he can use sophisticated words and sentences, thereby making life miserable for the reader (me, with the cable box manual in my hand), then we are missing the point. And if internal efficiencies make the resulting content less relevant and less useable for the reader, then we are heading in the wrong...
by Steffen Frederiksen | May 18, 2018 | Blog
But that is not all, there are even more options! You can use the same topics and information described above in various other formats, for example by feeding content directly to your mobile apps or chatbot. You are automating your processes though machine-to-machine communication and in this way, error proofing them! Conclusion Using a modern, well-functioning content management service and a proper content automation hub that responds to the demands of modern technologies has a lot of benefits. It will enable your organization to deliver accurate, consistent and compliant content, which reduces risk and saves you time and money. Do you have Office 365 in your organization? You may not realize it, but you already have the perfect solution for delivering the right information to the right people, at the right time, in the right format and language–and on the device of their choosing. Watch the full recording of my webinar “Office 365 As A Content Services Hub?...
by Steffen Frederiksen | Sep 21, 2017 | Blog
Who cares about XML editors in the first place? Well, there are many different answers to that question. Ever since XML 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation on February 10, 1998, a lot of people realized that this new standard could be used for cross-platform publishing. The fact that an XML file could be processed by computers, and even transformed into other formats using XSLT stylesheets, was great news. Today, this XML characteristic of being machine-readable and processable is becoming even more important for new technologies. These include content automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and chatbots or other software robots. Even though these new technologies are very smart and clever, they still need a lot of help to figure out what a text is about and what the relevant context might be. XML tagging with elements and attributes is providing this help. What is an XML Editor? Being entirely character-based, you can write perfectly valid and useful XML using Notepad. In fact, I have worked with people who preferred Notepad to any other tool, but fortunately you do not meet many people who do. Most people prefer using tools that provide a lot more assistance, making it as easy as possible to write a valid XML file following a particular XML model (schema or DTD). Some XML editors will provide more sophisticated features, but these features are more developer-oriented than the basic editor features. For this blog, let us stick with this definition: an XML editor is a software application that makes it as easy as possible to create a valid XML file, using a particular Schema...
by Steffen Frederiksen | Aug 8, 2017 | Blog
Pharma is undergoing tectonic shifts regarding regulations, affecting both costs and processes across the board. Millions are spent every year by organizations seeking to achieve and retain compliance, one of the biggest challenges facing the life sciences industry. As the sheer number of regulatory requirements grows worldwide, the challenge of not only meeting the requirements, but also maintaining consistency and integrity across all submissions becomes ever greater. As a consequence, as stated in Deloitte’s regulatory outlook for 2017, life sciences organizations are under pressure to add more business value by embedding compliance into business processes. Quality, consistency and compliance issues should no longer be addressed after the fact, but instead in real time before they trickle downstream. How can life sciences organizations keep up and comply with the numerous regulations that are constantly updated or reevaluated, all while keeping consumer health and safety at the forefront? The answer lies in how information is created and used. Traditional methods of creating and storing entire documents for submission won’t help when a regulation is changed or when the same information has to be part of multiple submissions using different formats. Organizations can only stay nimble if their information has been created in an agile and highly organized environment. Structured content helps organize information in an efficient, streamlined manner, making it simpler and more efficient to maintain compliance with changing standards. Let’s take a look at how it can be used to help companies meet regulatory requirements in a specific space – labeling. The value of structure in organizing labeling content Information required to label a certain product will come from many different sources, which can...
by Steffen Frederiksen | Dec 14, 2016 | Blog
December 14, 2016 This year at the LavaCon conference in Las Vegas, I followed some very exciting presentations about the very near future role of bots (software robot/intelligent agent) in our efforts to bring exactly the right piece of content to the right person, at the right time. Current prominent bot examples are Microsoft’s Azure Bot Service and IBM’s Watson Virtual Agent. Some excellent presentations also talked about the fact that bots need to have access to enormous amounts of rich, structured, modular content that is tagged with metadata. In other words, bots feed on rich structured content and they just cannot get enough of it. So, if you want to have bots help your users, you had better get started improving your content by making it modular (one question >> one answer << one topic), taggable with rich structured metadata and machine-readable. The more structure and metadata you add to your content, the further away from the wastebasket it gets. In many companies, the intranet is the wastebasket or the final resting place for content with no structure and no metadata – not even the author can find it again. Adding metadata and structure can transform the content, making it searchable, findable and eventually “bottable.” Good luck bot-enabling your content! Steffen Frederiksen, Founder &...
