Managing Enterprise Content ch. 7 (Ahles/Hennis)
Chapter 7 continues Rockley’s idea of the unified content life cycle that was introduced in Chapter 5. Here though, Rockley talks about how the content life cycle can be put to better use in making a more efficient unified content strategy to aid your organization. Before you can begin your content strategy though, Rockley says that you must “identify organizational goals and issues, examine your current content life cycle, and analyze your existing and published content to determine potential reuse" (127). Doing all of these tasks will help you gain a better idea of how your content strategy can be improved on, and how these changes can be done through the proper utilization of a content life cycle.
Addressing Issues
At the beginning of the chapter, Rockley talks about the kinds of issues that need to be addressed with the content life cycle. Identifying these challenges should be the first step in your project and could be any number of things within your organization. The issues that Rockley gives fall into six categories:
- Content use
- Content authoring
- Translation
- Global requirements
- Review
- Publication and delivery
For each of these issues, Rockley gives required steps to addressing the issues, and which life cycle phase the issues can be resolved in. For example, the Content use issue of too much detail/too little detail should be dealt in the Create phase and can be resolved by re-evaluating the requirements and rewriting material accordingly along with providing content that is specific to the user’s needs.
Another example would be the issue of authors not being able to find the information that they need. An answer to this would be storing all content in a single repository, one place where the authors can find all the information that is available on a single product. Another response would be developing a better categorization method for the author to find the information. These solutions would need to be developed in the Manage and Create phases of the content life cycle.
Life Cycle Samples
The last half of the chapter gives two samples of how a unified content life cycle works for two companies: CreateSoft and Envigor. Both companies have issues with their produced content and decide to implement different strategies. Envigor decides to switch to XML for more control over their content and ensure a more consistent product. CreateSoft, though staying with their existing authoring tools, decide to try a new management system to manage and distribute their content. Rockley goes into each phase of the respective companies’ plans and talking about the differences between the two. For example, in the area of check-in content in the Review phase is handled differently. Envigor is automatically notifying a reviewer when content is ready for review while CreateSoft manually routes the content to reviewers.
posted by Wes Ahles | 7:02 AM
9 Comments:
Am I being morbid? When I think of the term life cycle, I imagine that death is the end of the cycle. In Rockley's book, her "content life cycle" graphic it is set up so the cycle never ends: Create - Review - Manage - Deliver. It just spins round and round. If content becomes obsolete after it has been delivered, I want to skip the Create - Review elements and go straight to Manage and archive the content (which would un-Deliver it). Maybe I'm taking her too literally, but it affected how I interpreted this chapter.
Welcome to the world of dynamic documentation. In the static model you finish a document and it is forever done. Increasingly, though, documentation is becoming dynamic and updates are posted daily, sometimes hourly.
Additionally, documentation is repurposed - republished in multiple contexts. Also, documentation can be personalized to the individual users. All of these things are possible because of technologies and tools such as XML, DITA, Visual CompuSet, AACR2, DocuMerge, taxonomies, ontologies, Dublin Core, USMARC, and Ajax.
I like what Anne said here. I think of a life cycle of something that actually comes to an end sometime somewhere. It seems like the content life cycle just continues to go around and around until something doesn't fit anymore. In that case I guess you could call it "dead" but according to this it just seems like you revise and start the whole process over again. Really though, does it ever end? When does something become obsolete? I tend to think of something like Windows XP or something along those lines. You buy the product thinking that you have a finished item but no no, you have to continuously be updating it and getting modifications. I wonder how the people at Microsoft finally decide to release the product fully knowing that they are not going to be done, ever it seems.
Just a quick comment about Erik's post: I think the "end" of the lifecycle often occurs only because the software developers tell us it is over; that way they can sell us their "new" product (which is often only a modified version of their "old" product).
I like the comments that you all made - I never really thought about this in terms of software that is constantly updated. It seems like that happens so much that people can barely keep up with the new products! I really like what Larry pointed out about how developers often sell us "new" products that are really just updated versions of the old software - definitely something to keep in mind next time you're buying something like that! Back to the chapter, I can see Anne's point about this cycle seeming to never end. It's hard for me to grasp the concept, but I can imagine how content would constantly be reused within an organization and why it would make sense to do so.
I like the conversation everyone has started about the content life cycle. It seems like every software product nowadays is an update; a new, improved version or another company's version of something that's been done before. It makes me think the cycle only officially ends when the concept of bureaucratic corporate business ends. Such is progress. Such is the concept of document reuse, as well.
This chapter really focuses on the need to develop a plan before you start a project, and I think makes a nice complimentary example for the first part of Chapter 6--Planning and Writing Your Doucments from our Barker text. Don't start a huge reconstruction project without first determining where you want to end up.
I don't know much about content life cycles but I think the whole idea of having content in a single source and being able to update and reuse is great. I wish we had some consistency where I work. Maybe everybody would be on the same page. People are still so protective of their information. They feel it makes them replaceable.
I'm not so sure that the life cycle of content ever dies. It may become dormant but who knows if someone will need it down the road? Just a thought...
Anne brings up a good point with the death of a document. I also have to mention Hennis’s comment on a company merrily ending a document just to repackage it and rename it as “NEW”. Commenting on the chapter I see most soft ware for documents being made and marketed not as a whole but more along the lines as just incomplete, so that the buy needs to purchase one more item to make it complete. A good example would be with Micro Soft’s Paint. My windows 98 had a full list of tools in paint that could be used to do anything, where as in Windows XP you can’t do anything.
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