Get that content strategy funding: show them the money
When you ask management to fund your content strategy initiative, you need to show them the money.
Business case/roi
Full transcript of finance in tech comm podcast
00:00 Sarah O’Keefe: Welcome to the Content Strategy Expert’s podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way.
Hi, everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe. In episode 15, we have a special guest, Erin Vang. Erin is the owner and principal pragmatist of Global Pragmatica, which provides statistical management and content strategy consulting to Fortune 500 companies. Erin’s been doing that since 2008 and has also held senior management positions at Dolby Labs, SAS, and SYSTAT, in software technical communications, QA, program management, and localization. Erin, welcome.
It’s never too late for content strategy
We often talk about building content strategies from the ground up: first, coming up with a strategy to address your content problems, and then implementing a solution. But not all implementations happen that way. If you’ve already started implementing a new system, it’s not too late to think about content strategy—in fact, it’s crucial to make sure your new processes will be sustainable.
Full transcript of the content strategy ROI podcast
00:00 Bill: Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 13, we discuss measuring the return on investment in a content strategy implementation. Hi, everybody. This is Bill Swallow, the Director of Operations here at Scriptorium. I am here with Sarah O’Keefe, the founder and CEO.
Back to school: measuring content strategy ROI
Here in the United States, the summer is now officially over and students are back to school. For many, this means a change in routine and a fresh outlook on the remainder of the year. This is an excellent time to direct that fresh outlook to your content by measuring your content strategy ROI.
Content: Is it really a business asset?
Assets have long life, and their value depreciates over time. Does content meet that definition?
Business case/ROI
Content management
Content reuse
DITA
DITA XML—authors
Localization
Structured content
Translation
Reduce translation costs with XML
$0.21 per word.
That’s the average cost in the US to translate content into another language according to Slator, a translation news and analytics site. That number is not speculative; they analyzed the costs per word from over 80 actual proposals gathered by the US General Services Administration (GSA). You can view the source proposals here.
QA in techcomm: creating use cases
A few months ago, I wrote about how you could benefit from having a test bed for your content. I made mention of use cases several times, but what are they, and how can you make them effective?
The last mile: getting approval for your content strategy
You’ve thought about your content strategy. You have a business case. You have a plan. What you don’t have is a budget and approval to proceed. What can you do?
Brand credibility
Business case/ROI
Case studies
Content pitfalls
Content silos
Structured content
White papers
Creating a unified customer experience with a content fabric
Coauthored by Anna Schlegel (Senior Director, Globalization and Information Engineering, NetApp) and Sarah O’Keefe (President, Scriptorium Publishing)
The interest in customer experience presents an opportunity for enterprise content strategists. You can use the customer experience angle to finally get content proposals and issues into the discussion. Ultimately, the challenge is in execution—once you raise awareness of the importance of content synchronization, you are expected to deliver on your promises. You must figure out how to deliver information that fits smoothly into the entire customer experience. At a minimum, that requires combining information from multiple departmental silos.
How to get budget for content strategy
One common roadblock to content strategy is a lack of funding. This post describes how to get budget, even in lean years (and recently, they have all been lean years!).
Money and technology are not a content strategy
Having the budget to buy new technology isn’t the same as having a content strategy. Case in point: the US government has spent billions on electronic medical record (EMR) systems that can’t communicate with each other.
Buyer’s guide to CCMS evaluation and selection
“What CCMS should we buy?”
It’s a common question with no easy answer. This article provides a roadmap for CCMS evaluation and selection.
First, a few definitions. A CCMS (component content management system) is different from a CMS (content management system). You need a CCMS to manage chunks of information, such as reusable warnings, topics, or other small bits of information that are then assembled into larger documents. A CMS is for managing the results, like white papers, user manuals, and other documents.
Keys to content strategy: ROI
Content strategy requires you to connect information with business results. The key to getting a content strategy approved? Return on investment (ROI). Once you show that your content strategy is beneficial to the business, you are on your way.
Cheap writers can be expensive
Given the choice between an inexpensive writer with a limited skill set and a professional technical communicator, which should you choose?
Webcast: The business case for better techcomm
This webcast recording is a preview of our new Content Strategy 101 book, which will be released in September. Here, Sarah O’Keefe discusses why content strategy is important and how you can use it to transform your technical content from “necessary evil” to a business asset.
Webcast: The economics of information
In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe discusses how the cost of developing content affects what is actually created. She leads with a discussion of Gutenberg and how we went from gorgeous, unaffordable, artistic books that took years to produce to more plebeian but affordable books. Then she considers today’s situation, with particular attention to the possibilities of video, information apps, and a look at what has NOT changed.
The economics of information
Originally published in tcworld e-magazine, July 2011
In Europe before the 1450s, books were precious, rare objects and were usually copied by hand over a period of months or years. Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press changed the economics of information distribution.
Calculating the ROI of DITA
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) provides an XML architecture for technical communication. Although implementing DITA is likely to be faster and easier than building your own XML architecture from the ground up, DITA is not suitable for everyone.
Social media: marketing in every message
Social media has transformed the work of technical communicators, but we’re far from alone in feeling its impact:
Webcast: Calculating the ROI for XML and DITA topic-based authoring
In this webcast, Sarah O’Keefe discusses how to calculate the return on investment of an XML/DITA implementation for technical content.
If you are considering XML and DITA, but are trying to figure out whether you can justify the cost and effort, this session is for you.
The business of technical communication
By default, managers and executives see technical communication as a cost center, similar to a QA department or a Human Resources group.
“Necessary evil” is not where you want to be for great career success.
Balancing user advocacy and corporate responsibilities
Anne Gentle, in the post Writing Engaging Technical Documentation, says this:
I love it when I hear people say, “I no longer work for development. I work for the user.”
In defense of English majors: we can understand business issues, too
In his latest blog entry, Neil Perlin explains how important it is for technical writers to have an understanding of business issues. With such knowledge, they can contribute to cost justifications for decisions that affect them directly. I couldn’t agree more with that. It is absolutely in writers’ best interests (and a matter of self-preservation) to understand processes and costs.
I strongly disagree, however, with the following assertion:
Writers from fine arts or English backgrounds can rarely discuss cost-justification in finance terms, so they have little input on buying decisions.
I am an English major, and I freely admit I am more of a “words” person than a “numbers” person. That being said, I am no slouch in the finance department. (Calculus is another matter, though.) I know many people with degrees in English and the liberal arts who are quite adept at understanding The Big Picture and developing business cases. Lumping all of us into a “can rarely discuss cost-justification” group is unfair.
Now I need to remind myself not to group software developers into a “can rarely write a coherent procedure” category. (It’s easy to make generalizations when you’re not the target of them.)
