by Søren Weimann | Mar 2, 2019 | Blog
This blog post is about your business processes, particularly those surrounding the ways your content is authored, managed, approved, and published. Think about the way those processes look today: the people involved, the tools you use, and finally the workflow, whether that’s an ad-hoc peer review or a highly formalized set of approval gates and feedback loops. What are some words that you might use to describe those processes today? If you’re like a lot of your peers, chances are you came up with something like the following: InflexibleTime-consumingNon-collaborativeSiloed Sound familiar? We’ll talk in a moment about how some of those challenges can be addressed. But first, I want to tell you a story. The Industrial Revolution During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, factories sprung up throughout Great Britain. These were most notably involved in the production of textiles to feed the British global trade empire. Gains in productivity (and eventually standards of living) were enormous, as machines were used to weave fabrics much faster than any human hand could. All of these machines were powered by a recent and wondrous invention: the steam engine. To deliver power to the individual machines, the factory had to be configured in a very specific way. There would generally be a centrally-located steam engine, which would turn crankshafts that ran then length of the factory floor. Then, leather straps were used to power each machine. It was a bit dangerous – many workers lost one of more fingers to these contraptions – and it looked something like this: Factories were frequently multi-floor facilities, built that way to accommodate as many rows of...
by Søren Weimann | Jan 5, 2019 | Blog
One of the main drivers in Open DITA is allowing writers with little or no XML skills to benefit from the most important reuse capabilities of the DITA standard. So let’s cherry pick from the rules of the Open DITA manifest and explain how they achieve reuse of your content. But before we get to that, let’s take a step back and consider WHY we want to reuse. Let’s be honest. Reusing content creates a certain amount of complexity. For that reason we had better make sure that this complexity is worth our while. Oh, and by the way – very often that level of complexity is already there, it’s just not always technical. Very often writers know that if they update a section describing a feature in one product, they must also update the documentation for variations of that product. If a legal note is rephrased, they need to find all the places it is used and copy/paste. The complexity is already there, and at the end of the day, the technical dependencies can actually help you manage these dependencies and ensure that none are missed. This leads us to one of the main benefits of reuse: consistency. Let’s keep it simple and stick with the most important benefits: Consistency across your documentation – When you reuse a topic, a piece of text, or an illustration, this minimizes ambiguous interpretations of the content. Honestly, if people are looking to enjoy variety in language, they will pick up a novel rather than my documentation.Less content to maintain and update – The second benefit is also the most popular among business cases for structured writing projects....
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...
