Archive for Business issues

How your content is a business asset

January 17, 2012 Sharon Burton Best Practices, Business issues, Content strategy

For most companies, the content they create is critical to the running of the business. Consider for a moment:

  • Policies and procedures – state how the business is to be run, who does what and how. In industries with oversight, such as finance or medical, the business also must show auditors how the company has been running since the last audit. Failure to show this content can result in heavy fines or other bad things.
  • Internal product documents – describe how products should work, the thought processes, the solutions, and so on for developing the products sold. Without these documents, a business has no idea how it builds what it builds. It also don’t know why decisions were made to do X rather than Y.
  • External product documents – explain how to use the products to the people who purchase the products. If the external documents are not helpful, the business (at best) incurs an unreasonable support cost or (at worst) has a high return rate. Both impact available capital in the business. If the business functions in a regulated industry, it must keep the history of the external documents to show potential auditors how the product was described to work or potentially face large fines.
  • Customer support documents – help internal support teams and external customers find a solution to their problems. For expensive internal support teams, quickly finding and understanding how to help a customer gets the customer off the phone and able to move forward. External customers who find a solution on the support site and never call is the ideal, as it costs the company less than pennies per customer.
  • Training materials – few staff arrive knowing how the company works, what safety information they need to know, or how the products work. Training is how a company shares it’s tribal knowledge with the new tribe members. Many companies save a great deal of money on their insurance by making sure all new employees are trained in the required safety protocols. If the business needs to train customers on how the products work, the training center is a profit center.
  • Marketing collateral – positions the products to the appropriate sales market. Few companies have a product so needed that no advertising is needed to sell the product. Failure to attract customers to the products negatively impacts the business.

Content as a business asset

The groupings above just touch on the broad types of content a business needs to manage. Even a small mom-and-pop store has some of the types of content listed above. For large international companies, the sheer amount of content assets, just as with hardware assets, for example, can be overwhelming.

Best of Breed companies know their business content is an asset that needs to be managed, just like the other assets in the company. Most companies track the computers and cell phones they use, for example. Annually, all the equipment is inventoried to make sure they have what they think they have.

Many companies never think about the business content as a business asset. The content that’s critical to the business is in Word or PowerPoint files or who knows, saved everywhere: on people’s local computers, somewhere on the network, maybe on a Sharepoint site. No one has any idea how much content they have, much less where it all is or what the most recent version might be.

Modified from the original found here.

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If you don’t have a social media plan, it’s 1994 all over for you

January 11, 2012 Sharon Burton Business issues, Content strategy, Social media

I read once that when TV first showed up as a technology, it was viewed as a way for rooms of people to watch an event as a group. People could perhaps go to a theater and all watch a TV together. And TV shows were thought of as radio shows, but showing people too.

Looks like a radio, looks like a TV

When a new technology shows up, this way of thinking is normal. We map what we know from existing stuff to the new technology and extend what we currently do onto the new thing. It can take years for a new technology to be used in a really new way.

New technology allows new stuff, or not

I was thinking about this as I was looking at how some companies are using social media.

I’m seeing companies using social media to:

  • Send 140 character press releases
  • Ignore what their users are saying
  • Isolate themselves from community
  • and so much more

It’s public relations as social media in 1994. Throw your message over the wall and hope it resonates with someone somewhere. Maybe.

Maybe someone will find our message. Let's hope.

Hope is not a plan.

Social media is, well, new

Social media is a way to:

  • listen to and talk with your users
  • understand what they want
  • build community and understanding
  • position your brand as the place to go
  • And so much more

Social media is a way to understand who your users are and what they need. You can actually talk to them and they can talk back. You can position your brand(s) and company so it has relevance to your users.

This is like a dream, really.

Because hope is not a plan

You need a plan to use social media effectively and get the results you want. You can’t just hand over the social media to each sales person and hope they are communicating what you want.

I recently saw a tweet with vile language creating a disturbing image from someone who identified his employer in his Twitter bio! I have no problems with people using what ever language they wish in their personal accounts. It is a personal account.

But now I know who he works for because he put that information in his bio. That language, the image, and his tweet are now in my head with his employers name. The company brand is tied to the vile profanity and disturbing image.

Not cool, man. Not cool at all. And I doubt that was the plan.

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Cognitive loads are heavy

January 9, 2012 Sharon Burton Best Practices, Business issues, Content strategy

What we do for a living – we being the field of people who develop information for others to consume – is educate people. We may teach them about the proper way to use our products, complete their vacation form, use that machine correctly, why they should buy our products, or many other things. But at the core, we educate people by giving them information they didn’t have before.

Driving on the left

This occurred to me when I was in New Zealand. For me, driving was a constantly attentive activity for me. As with any attentive process, I couldn’t do anything but focus on driving because I was on the wrong side of the car driving on the wrong side of the road. All my instincts, if you will, were completely wrong.

For most of us, by the time we’re 4 or 5, we’ve learned the proper side of the car and the road at such a level that we don’t think about it any more. We know what side of the car to get in, it’s instinct. This is called preattentive. It’s like muscle memory – you don’t think about it, it just happens.

This is very useful to us because it lets us (humans) function in the world. If we had to think about everything – walking, reaching for a cup, etc – then we couldn’t cope. When we’re learning something new, it’s attentive until we’ve mastered it and then it slips into the preattentive areas.

It’s all wrong

So what happens when you move a preattentive activity back to an attentive activity? You put your user under a lot of stress. Our brains want to function at that preattentive level for this activity and we’re forcing it to work at an attentive level.

We’re under a cognitive load. The entire activity has to be thought out at all times while our brain fights us, trying to drop back to the easier preattentive level. Our entire attention is taken with it. Cognitively, it’s really hard. Really hard.

This is where those we educate get cranky. They complain that it’s too hard, they don’t like it, and they don’t want to do it. It’s true for them: it is hard and their brains do hurt.

So how do we help?

Part of our job is to reduce the cognitive load for our users as we educate. We are more successful if our users don’t have the extra effort of trying to find what they’re looking for or if the information they need is right in front of them as they need it. Think of us as carrying the load for our users.

One of the ways we can carry that load is to not make our users stop their task and go find the information they want. I’ve read studies that show up to 30% of the day for knowledge workers is spent just trying to find the right information.

Where’s the metadata?

Metadata is lovely but it means you’re probably putting the burden on your overloaded user to go find what s/he needs. They are already unhappy because they don’t know something–why are you now forcing them to play Guess Our Metadata? There have to be better ways to reduce cognitive loads.

Original published here.

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New tools are a chance to improve your workflow

September 19, 2011 Sharon Burton Best Practices, Business issues, Content strategy, Training

I was talking to a friend whose employer has merged with another company. My friend’s company spent the last 5 years clawing its way to supportable and repeatable processes throughout the company as they build software products. If you are familiar with the 5 levels of the Capability Maturity Model, they had finally reached something close to a level 4.

It was hard and they struggled but development, testing, and documentation had stable processes that supported consistently developing products.

Then the merger happened.

Post merger

As they bring the 2 companies together, they are also breaking the company into 2 parts, based on markets. The split is not based on previous company affiliation, but rather on the needs of each vertical market both companies sell into. It makes sense to break it up this way, because the products are related but the needs of each vertical are very different.

This could all be very good, except for one thing: the company they merged with has no actual product development processes.

And that could all work if Company A (my friend’s employer) consumed Company B. But that’s not what’s happening. As they break the companies apart and regroup into 2 separate business units, the processes of each company are staying in place. Those people who are moving into the business unit that was Company A get the existing and stable processes of Company A. Those who are moving into the business unit of what was Company B get all the processes of Company B, which is to say, none.

6 levels of the CMM

My friend and I have thought for years there are actually 6 levels of the CMM. We both discovered this level when we ran our own consulting companies. We also learned to identify and then run away when we first met with these potential clients because nothing good ever happened.

The 6th level is negative 1. Working with a negative 1 level will destroy your processes if you are a contracting company providing outsourcing services, like product documentation. Think of it as entropy.

There is a place for the negative 1 level – three people creating some wild new technology in a garage somewhere can actually benefit from this level because it strongly encourages crazy mad ideas that then get tried. These ideas would be shot down any other place because they are crazy mad ideas. But for these people in that garage, it’s a creative environment that works.

The moment these people move into any level of developing the crazy mad ideas into some actual products, level negative 1 will kill them. Perhaps slowly, perhaps quickly, but entropy will have it’s due.

And how do tools fit in here?

Very often, companies with few to no processes decide the problems they’re having are because they don’t have the right tools. If they got the right tools, they reason, this would all be better.

So they build a feature list. And they buy new tools.

They don’t bother to train anyone, or set up any Best Practices for using the tools. They just buy them, install them, and then continue on the way they’ve been. And nothing changes, except some vendor somewhere got a nice fat check.

New tools are not feature lists

If you (or your company) are thinking about improving how you do the business of what you do, new tools can help a lot. But new tools also require that you look at your existing processes and be brave enough to change what isn’t working. And something isn’t working if you’re looking to get new tools.

Think of purchasing new tools as a time of reflection for your company. Identify what’s not working in your processes and then find tools that support your efforts to make it work better.

Don’t look for new tools based on a feature list – look for new tools based on the business problems you have and the business solutions you need. When you identify the business issues you need to solve, you’re going to be looking at processes as well. You can’t help it.

I can help you identify and select tools that improve your business. Contact me to find out more.

Modified from the original found here.

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Single sourcing and content management

September 14, 2011 Sharon Burton Best Practices, Business issues, Content strategy

The journal Technical Communication has article that I found very interesting.

Single Sourcing and Content Management: A Survey of STC members. David Dayton and Keith Hopper.

I’m not going to do a detailed review because you all can read it yourself. But what I found interesting was some of the results.

Results

Of the 276 respondents to the survey, half reported using single sourcing or single sourcing with some sort of content management. I would have expected that number to be higher, since single sourcing has been around since at least 1996. The cost (time) savings alone make the content development method make sense. It’s just not a new technology and I was surprised that not 90% or more are single sourcing.

Drivers of moving to a single source and/or content management development method were unsurprising:

  • faster information development
  • regulatory or compliance issues
  • translation efforts

About half the people using single source and/or content management said there are downsides and tradeoffs, which I found completely unsurprising.

These information development techniques are potentially restricting if you want to just focus on writing. These methods force you to think about how and where your content is going to be used and that can feel restricting. But it’s critical, I think, to consider when you develop information.

A surprise

Apparently, the majority of people are using Word to author and are trying to do some sort of single source and/or content management. Which I think is doomed to failure.

Word is a delightful tool for short documents. But if you’ve written a 400 page book in Word (as I have, several times), you know it’s the wrong tool to try anything like single source and/or content management. They don’t give us numbers for the failed projects that were done in Word, but I’d like to see those.

They do seem to find that more larger companies have moved to single source and/or content management as compared to smaller companies. I have to wonder if larger companies see the business benefits of managing their information the way they do any business asset. Smaller companies may not have reached that point yet.

I’d also like to know how many small companies are using Word, as opposed to the larger companies. Again, smaller companies might be using Word because they are not thinking of information as an asset to be managed.

The summation

The summation was interesting to me – the authors say that a single source and/or content management environment has hit critical mass. This information development method is now into the early majority.

But if you look at just those using a content management system (which should include single sourcing but the authors say it doesn’t have to), then this development method has not quite crossed the chasm.

There are a lot of other pieces of good info and you should look up the entire article. It’s worth it.

Original found here.

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