One thing that you will often hear content strategists talking about is the need to break down organizational silos. Only then will content flow from where it is created to where it is needed. It would be more than a little ironic then to discover that the world of content strategy is itself respectably well-outfitted with its own silos. Rubbing salt into the wound, we need to confess that these silos are almost perfectly cut off from each other. The community of content strategists in one silo will be largely unaware that there are other communities of content strategists working... Read more →

Somewhere between the winding down of Octoberfest and the opening of the Christmas Market, Munich plays host to a different type of event. In stark contrast to the more famous events, this one proceeds without much fanfare. In fact, only a small community even knows about it. It is, in more than a few ways, the meeting of a secret society. The secret society is made up of people from around the world who collaborate on the advancement and application of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture or DITA. The goal of DITA, and of this community, is to provide organizations... Read more →

Fail early and fail often. This could stand as the clarion call of agile methods. Don’t tell, show – is another version. A close relative of this one is “talk is cheap”. In my military training, one rather extreme edict we learned was “a bad plan executed with speed and violence is better than a good plan” with this being a rather unbalanced variation on Patton’s already strident observation on the subject of strategy. Basically all this boils down to “learn by doing”. If this line of thinking is applicable to both software projects and battlefields, it is even more... Read more →

There is no shortage of material written on the nature of the book. The accelerating growth in eBooks seems to have excited even more discussion just as I remember the appearance of the Web did some twenty years ago. A couple of chance occurrences have brought me back to this subject. And I think that with this revisiting, I have stumbled onto a surprisingly clear take on the topic and perhaps even a useful one. Recently I was reminded of a specific event that very neatly distills the nature of the book for us. I picks up on a small... Read more →

A question that comes up from time to time, and indeed one I pose to myself quite regularly, is how does the investment in industry event participation pay off. The first answer is usually that it is a way to generate business leads. This is true but it is also superficial. If that is the only goal then there are definitely more effective ways to proceed which are also less taxing. So what then might be another potential benefit that we could use to justify the investment of time and energy that is called for? At the recent Intelligent Content... Read more →

The time of year has arrived that usually prompts me to think about the relatively obscure topic of “intelligent content”. It is prompted in part by the prolonged effects of a Canadian winter. It is also prompted in each of the last six years by the approach of the Intelligent Content Conference. With an eye on that approaching event, and given that the range of speakers and attendees at ICC will be wider than ever, I thought I would assemble a short primer on Intelligent Content. In doing so, I will tap into articles and posts that I have written... Read more →

This will be a brief diversion from my usual focus on the topic of "content" although it will, in due course, discuss concepts of no small relevance when we talk about the business of content. This will be a brief exploration of two ideas: Governance and Management. It has long been my contention that these are two distinct concepts and that keeping them distinct is quite important. And I thought I would explore the two concepts, and their proper interaction, by recounting an experience from many years ago (30 years ago actually). This story is set at Canadian Forces Base... Read more →

At the Lavacon 2013 Conference, I gave a lunchtime keynote address entitled "Breaking Bad Content". It being a lunchtime keynote, I opted to do a few things differently. Perhaps most striking of these was appearing on stage more-or-less in character as Walter White. The other was adopting a presentation format that relied almost exclusively on images from the famed AMC television series "Breaking Bad". And related to the reliance on images, I also deployed a number of stories as a way to illustrate some of the core themes. All of this was intended to work with the lunchtime keynote format... Read more →

Content Strategy has many faces. Some of them have become quite popular of late. And that is all for the good. As usual, I tend to zero in on aspects that are less popular at least in part because they lie beneath the surface. Let's start with the familiar parts. We hear a good deal about how a sound content strategy helps to make your product something people can find when they are looking for something and that can help these people to learn about your product so that, at the end of the day, it is the one they... Read more →

It has been a year since I spend a few weeks on beautiful Denman Island, British Columbia. Aside from doing a few other things, I did find some time to work on some models of the Content Lifecycle - usually in the early mornings and usually while drinking coffee on the cabin balcony where I would be distracted by the view across the channel to Hornby Island. A terrible burden, I would agree. Nonetheless, I did go through many iterations of a Content Lifecycle model in addition to a good deal of coffee. It proved a challenging exercise because I... Read more →