Speaker Insight [What's this?]

Fitting in content creation in a SCRUM environment should be straightforward, but it isn’t. How do you integrate your scarce technical writing resources in the cross functional scrum teams? If you succeed and have content creation in all scrum teams - how do you keep your content consistent? What is a good middle way? Check out how DITA helps us here.

DITA (the Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is a document format that has been popular among the technical writing community for the past decade. But its strengths can apply for domains beyond just product docs and online help systems.

Because of its "architectural" features, DITA enables reuse of content created anywhere within a company as part of a cross-company or cross-organization strategy for more agile content management and publishing. The "Content architecture for rapid content reuse" presentation will show how DITA can be used for knowledge capture and agile content manipulation, with a special focus on a practical use case: rapid dissemination of disaster response information.

My talk is predominantly concerned with content development and management processes. While I assume a basic knowledge of the modern XML/CMS tool set, my presentation focuses on how the modularity aspect of DITA management in a CMS can also be applied to workflow management, authorial responsibility, and document quality.

I hope that our account of how we adapted our previous workflow to the new environment will prove useful to content management professionals at any level of experience. I am also keen to share our notion of "publication architects" in the context of content architecture.

We are all somewhere along the road of developing our strategy, technology and process for delivering global customer information. Come along to the talk and hear where Symantec have gone. This will enable each of us to have a vital discussion and tease out further possibilities.

Listening to other people's experiences is always a good start to form your own ideas on creating content for your company.

My presentation will talk about the challenges we face with classifying information so that we can make it as easy as possible to retrieve. This is a particular problem at IBM where we have such a large amount of information available to customers in different formats, repositories and products, however the principles of good classification can be applied to information in any project or organisation.

We investigate a number of methods for classifying, including DITA markup, metadata and social tagging.

CSS provides one solution that supports web, print and epubs. Any organization that requires multichannel distribution of content will benefit by gaining an understanding of how CSS addresses the multichannel distribution requirement.

Our customers told us that the greatest problems they have relate to finding information; there’s no evident structure. Manuals for different systems are inconsistent. Manuals are structured totally differently across Business Areas. Some documentation contains much more technical information than is needed on a regular basis, whereas other documentation contains too much low-level information.

Hopefully they will come away better prepared to move to or move forward with DITA and a technology implication and understand how important it is to work closely with the technology vendor to ensure best practise and real results.

Audience: content managers, content strategists, team leads, project managers and process managers.

Our workshop is quite ambitious. We have had great success at Mekon with our DITA training courses, and this feedback has encouraged us to package up a crash-course where people can get not only an introduction to DITA, but a selection of the leading tools at same time. People will learn all the baseline concepts and get a chance to get a hands on play with tools under the guidance of experienced trainers. It does in a day what might take DITA or DITA tool evaluators weeks otherwise.

My presentation will be a case study with one of our flagship clients (details still TBD), where we built a significant DITA and Component Content Management business case and presented it all the way to the executive level. Our proposals got a unanimous approval from the executive team and we have been iteratively rolling out DITA across their business units since then.