Managing Writers

My notes for the conference are sitting in Hertz’s lost and found (along with the very nice conference bag, which, unlike the bags given out at many conferences, was chosen by the organizers to be re-usable). So, rather than wait for Hertz to send them to me, I will wing it describing Day two.

In the life cycle of a technology, there is a moment when the discussion turns from technical nuts and bolts to useful applications. I think this conference was an early sign that for XML technology, as used for technical communication, that moment has come. You might say, “haven’t we been talking about applications for a long time?” and you would be right. However, too often the conversation has been dominated by technology and the cool stuff it can do, rather than opportunities to satisfy customer needs and contribute to an organization’s bottom line.

Day two’s talks focused on serving customer needs through information and moving technical communication from a “cost center” to a “profit center.” Bob Boiko got things started with a keynote that called on technical communicators to look at their content from a customer perspective, rather than an internal perspective. His point was most strongly made in his response to a question from the audience about how to deal with mandates from management to reduce costs. He turned the question around, pointing out that as long as technical communicators see themselves as a cost center, they put themselves in the position of having to continually shrink their budget. Instead, we should take the perspective of a profit center and look for ways to contribute to the bottom line. He conceded that this is hard to do, but that we need to move in that direction to remain viable.

Joe Gollner gave the featured presentation, which took a more historical perspective, starting from the earliest written information (on tablets). He carried that through to a view of the world with documents as the central “connector” that remains constant as the “device for communicating and retaining content as part of business transactions.” In his view, Intelligent Content is discoverable, processable, and informative, which makes it possible to create personalized documents and tailor content to customer needs.

Among the session tracks, I found the most interesting to be a session from James Michelson, who I also had the opportunity to speak with a couple of times during the day. His point, simple, but often ignored, is that everything a technical communicator does should be measured by how it contributes to a company’s bottom line.

His business is marketing, and his talk focused on how you can use even small amounts of information about customers or potential customers to create marketing that is much more likely to generate a response. At first, it seemed strange to have a marketer as a speaker at a conference for technical communicators, but in the end it made sense. Like it or not, technical information is part of your company’s marketing message, and therefore, it makes sense to tailor content for your customers, based on their interests and needs.

In his view, most companies focus way too much attention internally (85% in his view, which feels roughly accurate, though he did not back that number with hard data). He would reverse that number, paying 85% of your attention externally.

Overall, I took away several points from the conference:

• Intelligent Content is more than just well-marked up content; it is really the combination of content, information about the potential consumers of that content, and processing that gives that user the greatest possible value from that content.
• Technical communication as a discipline is too often relegated to being a cost center. To continue to be successful, the discipline needs to take charge of the value in its content and deliver that value in a way that contributes to the organization’s bottom line (that bottom line could be profit for a commercial entity, or some other value for a non-profit).
• The prevailing current technology is XML, but the technology is less important than its application.
• The application of technology needs to serve external needs; if it can’t be tied to an external need, then why should the organization spend money on it?

I found the conference to be valuable, and I hope The Rockley Group continues to sponsor it in coming years. I got a lot of interesting ideas, including the topic for my next book (more on that in future posts), from the conference, and I look forward to attending again in the future.

I’m in Palm Springs attending Intelligent Content 2009, a very interesting conference hosted by The Rockley Group. The venue, Le Parker Meridien, is a very nice “boutique” hotel. The conference rooms are well set up and private, and the grounds are beautiful.

The conference started off with an introduction from Ann Rockley, whose company is the sponsor. Her objective is to provide a small, focused conference. To that end, her team worked with the speakers to make sure the talks were of high quality and focused on the objective. So far, most of what I have attended has done that. This entry will provide a few highlights from the first day of talks.

Salim Ismail gave the opening keynote. The question he addressed was “What makes content intelligent.” He defines intelligence as the ability to take patterns from one context and use them in another. In a sense, Intelligent Content boils down to the idea of using embedded information, along with information about the user (i.e., context), to deliver customized information. Although it wasn’t clear at that point, the rest of the day reinforced this as the central element of intelligent content.

Next up was Scott Abel, who provided examples, both good and bad, to illustrate the idea of intelligent content. His recent post on The Content Wrangler describes the “bad” in detail. Apple provided most of the “good” examples, with the central theme being that Apple uses all of the information available to the company about a customer to provide a personalized experience targeted at increasing sales. As always, Scott gave a spirited and informative talk.

This was followed by three parallel sessions. The first I attended described a system being developed for breastcancer.org, a site devoted to helping women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer and their families. Derek Olson and Ron Daniel discovered some interesting, and not immediately intuitive, things about personalization. The central problem they faced was how to gather accurate information from each user so they could select the most applicable information for that particular person. The obstacle was that users often incorrectly characterize the state of their illness, which makes it difficult to give them the right information. They built a flexible taxonomy, which helped considerably, but in the end, the most useful help to users was input from other users, who independently devised a reasonably standard way of describing the critical factors about their situation in signature lines. This ad hoc metadata helped users help themselves. Overall, a nice example of user created design.

Rober Lee, of Symantec, gave an excellent talk about optimizing search results. Unlike standard SEO, which seems to be primarily aimed at drawing the maximum number of hits, his objective is to analyze search results to make sure users get good answers for their searches. Here are a couple of key points:

• Look at search logs
• Look for top search terms
• Test those terms (and look for terms that yield no results)
• Optimize content, then re-test

Optimizing content involves getting the right content for the right search terms. Suggestions for doing this include placing search terms in titles, in the first 100 words of content, and in the filename. One counter-intuitive point is that minimalist writing might not be the most effective way to get search engine hits. Repetitive text early in the content, what he called “stupid text,” helps with this, even though it offends the best instincts of tech writer. Overall, an excellent talk.

There were a couple of other talks, but I needed to duck out early, though I did leave a copy of Managing Writers to be used as a door prize during the evening festivities.

More to follow tomorrow.