News

What better way to understand a concept or a conference than to hear it from the speakers themselves?

To give you better insight into the state of the content market, this year's event, and the Congility concept, we asked our speakers four simple questions about Content Agility and their Congility presentations.

Here we've got some select examples, but you can also click on the individual speakers for their detailed pages - including answers - or see all the answers grouped by question:

• What does "content agility" mean to you? Why does content need agility?
• Why do you feel Congility 2011 is an event of which you want to be a part?
• What impact do you feel lack of integration has on customers (i.e., siloed internal processes, or inconsistent and fragmented published content)?
• Anything else you want to tell us about your talk? For example, who will benefit from it, and what practical things they would learn to take back to their organisations?

Highlights

Here's the briefest extract of some our favourite answers:

• "Content agility means being able to quickly respond to customer requirements and make sure they experience delight, rather than pain when they need to find information. It also means giving customers the information they need before they consciously start looking for it - for example, investing more in documentation that is embedded alongside a product. I am looking forward to Congility 2011 as a great way to meet like-minded people in the information arena, and to find out about techniques and methods that I can take home with me."
  - IBM's Sophie McMonagle
• "'Agile content' suggests an evolution: from 'documentation' -- monolithic, static, self-contained, passive structural descriptions of product as artifact -- towards information repositories -- multi-faceted, dynamic, connected, proactive and practical facilitators of product as solution."
  - NetApp's Mark Forry
• "If a company wants to manage their brand, they need to manage their customer communications and content in a streamlined way, allowing the right processes, right roles and enough time and training to deliver consistent, high-quality content... Only this way you can implement a quality assessment and quality control process to constantly improve your content (maintenance and governance)."
  - eBay's Nikki Tiedke
• "Not only has content to be succinct and relevant to the customer, but it has to be structured in such a manner that it can be reused at a sub-component level. Agility now means that all the best practice of the last years has to be carried over into a real-time environment, where authored content can be delivered globally in the near instant."
  - Symantec's Fred Hollowood
• "These days people are flooded with information. Providing our users with the information they need, when they need it, should be the aim of every documentation specialist. More than ever, we need concise, clear information that supports our users' daily work."
  - AGFA Healthcare's Eva Lemaire