Focus On SDL
Customer Engagement Strategies
A Paradigm Shift for Technical Documentation

Smart, Intelligent Structured Content
What should a corporation do to recognize that the management of technical information is central to a positive customer engagement? A paradigm shift is occurring that is addressing this very question. The shift is as seismic and profound as the change that occurred when corporations first realized they needed corporate websites in the mid-’90s. That shift required organizations to build out new processes, develop new techniques and deploy new technologies to address the new demands for reaching customers over the Web. Similarly, strategically-oriented companies are now realizing they need to abandon the traditional methods and tools of managing technical information in favor of a new methodology. The industry is referring to this new methodology by a variety of names including “structured content,” “topic-based authoring,” “smart content” and “intelligent content.” At SDL, we view these methodologies as a subset of what we call Global Information Management.

The broad principles of this methodology for managing technical information are not new. But the adoption rate has fundamentally accelerated because of new technologies and a new set of standards for technical information. The methodology essentially involves writing technical information in smaller units of XML topics rather than larger blocks such as chapters or books. The advantage of writing content in XML, and particularly in topics, is critical to this methodology for a variety of reasons:

♦ Since information is written in smaller blocks or topics, it can be more easily reused in diverse contexts.

• As a topic, it lives independently of context in a database and can be “repurposed” or “redeployed” at will to multiple contexts.
• It can be used in documenting products that share the same information.
• It can also be used in technical publications, training material or support material for the same product.

♦ The use of XML enhances the value of topics by separating the content from the formatting information; formatting can then be applied later in the process based on how the content is delivered.

• This makes it possible for the same topic to end up in a paper document, as an HTML page, on a device, or in a product brief—a methodology that has been called “multi-channel publishing.”
• The separation of content and format also makes it much simpler to localize the content, removing costly manual steps involved in translating content into other languages.

As we now see, the core benefits of structured content have particular power for delivering a next-generation customer experience.

DITA and Structured Content
These principles of structured content have been familiar to the corporation for some time now, and have been successfully adopted in the Web content management domain. What is new now is the speed of XML adoption for technical documentation. In the last five years, the acceleration of XML adoption by “technical writing” and “information development” organizations has dramatically increased.

While XML has been around for quite some time (and was a spin-off of SGML before that), its adoption by technical writers has been hampered by the lack of a common XML standard. XML, without a standard, is simply too flexible and involves a lengthy process of consulting to decide how it could and would be implemented. The length of time and cost of deploying XML made it very difficult for technical writing organizations in the past to deploy the methodology, and so each company had its own flavor of XML.

Also new is the emergence of a standard for using XML in technical writing organizations. Called “DITA” (pronounced “DI-tah,” an acronym standing for the unfortunately cumbersome “Darwin Information Typing Architecture”), the standard is now widely recognized as the best and easiest way to structure content in a technical writing organization. Originally developed by IBM, DITA has become part of the OASIS open standards committee and is now a relatively mature standard with a large following.

Even beyond the impact on customer experience, there are a number of benefits of using DITA for global corporations. DITA helps an organization write content once and reuse it across the organization. It thus drives a number of competitive benefits for the global organization, including:

♦ Efficiency gain of 30% to 50% in the development of technical information;
♦ Efficiency gain or cost savings of up to 30% in the translation process;
♦ Faster time to global markets;
♦ More consistent information; and
♦ Ability to release products to global markets simultaneously (“simship”).

These benefits have been known for some time and have been the leading reasons for DITA’s success and adoption.

DITA: The Foundation for Customer Experience
What has been less obvious, and only now is becoming clear, is the importance of DITA and structured content for next-generation customer experience. As discussed earlier, the key problem in this new world of customer experience is the ability to deliver just the right information to the device or context in which the customer needs it. This sounds easier than it is. It means that the content has to be capable of being delivered in “topic-sized” bits of information. The information has to be up to date and current. It should be consistent across the customer’s journey or experience. Support materials, technical documents and training materials should all have consistent information. The information, moreover, has to be capable of being filtered quickly, depending upon the customer and the nature of the request. Further,  the information has to be delivered via the Web to a browser, as well as to smartphones and iPads. These days, this customer-centric information also has to be graphically rich and supported with video.

To complicate matters, customers of this next-generation experience are expecting not only to consume the content, but also to interact with that content by rating it, commenting on it, providing feedback and even by contributing content of their own.

Organizations that are cognizant of these challenges are realizing they must adopt a structured content methodology for their technical information development and they must also adopt technologies that can enable this process.

Building A Customer Experience Content Model
The first step in building a next-generation customer experience is to build what we are calling a “Customer Experience Content Model.” The Customer Experience Content Model (CECM) is a mapping of a company’s go-to-market strategy, product categorizations and key customer profiles or personas. Each of these intersect in a map or model of how content should be enriched or conditioned so it can be assembled dynamically based on customers’ profiles, interests and the products they own.