Noz Urbina

» Senior Consultant and Trainer, Mekon

Presentation(s): [Workshop] Intro to DITA in Multiple Leading Editors: A DITA Crash Course & Plotting The Course to a Successful DITA Implementation: A Journey Nearing its End

Since 2006, Noz has chaired the Congility events platform (formerly known as X-Pubs).

B. Noz Urbina is a Senior Consultant and Trainer for Mekon Ltd. With years of experience as a content strategy and content management consultant he has provided services to Fortune 500 organisations and small-to-medium enterprises. Noz's expertise is brought into projects for requirements analysis, project planning and scoping, tool selection support and training.

Previous to working with Mekon, Noz worked in the XMetaL team as Partner Manager, facilitating the growth and cross-pollination of a pan-European partner network of content solutions and tool providers. He has held a number of business development and professional services positions where he was able to develop his expertise in a cutting-edge, efficiency-driven, business context.

Blog: http://lessworkmoreflow.blogspot.com

Twitter: @nozurbina

Linkedin: http://es.linkedin.com/in/bnozurbina

Speaker Insight [What's this?]

What does "content agility" mean to you? Why does content need agility?

• Content that has "agility" is portable, reusable, manageable. You can find, transform, and evaluate it so that it gets where it needs to go on time, on budget and to the right audience on the platform of their choice. You can understand it better by understanding what it is not: Content locked in storage and delivery formats that require investments of unfeasible amounts of time and money to effectively filter, search, reuse, translate or republish is not agile. Content with agility isn't 'magic'. It doesn't write itself and it doesn't solve all your content problems.

  It does however solve a LOT of them, leaving you additional resource (again, time and money) to focus on improving processes, refining your audience personas and building bridges with your peers and their content. This all makes the overall business benefit and customer experience contribution even greater.

  Finally, content that is "agile" should be top-line (like marketing) and bottom-line (like tech docs) oriented. It should be good for improving your product, brand interactions and experience - leading to more top-line revenue from happy customers. It should also take the donkey-work out of getting there - leading to lower costs and better bottom-lines.

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Why do you feel Congility 2011 is an event of which you want to be a part?

• Congility is Europe's only event this focused on taking a strategic approach to content. With the X-Pubs legacy there will be lots of great DITA, XML and Component Content learning opportunities on offer, but the content agility concept, and this year's content integration theme, take the concept wider and ask today's big questions: How does structured content play with unstructured? How do we integrate Subject Matter Expert (SME) and User Generated Content (UG) content? How do we balance online, mobile and offline (print) concerns? How do we collaborate better?

  We lack end-to-end thinking and cross-tool, product agnostic strategies. Congility is therefore taking the content discussion where it needs to go.

  I'm really looking forward to engaging with the speakers and attendees in this community.

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What impact do you feel lack of integration has on customers (i.e., siloed internal processes, or inconsistent and fragmented published content)?

• I think the biggest barriers to content excellence today are in the areas of collaboration across content sources, communications teams, and customers.

  Silos internally create visible silos externally. This makes customers, in short, insanely frustrated.

  Not only external customers... the poor support engineer or service person trying to install, maintain or use a complex product is customer. So is the sales person trying to best present a complex product or service. The nature of their role might make them dependant on lots of product data or technical information that they themselves might not fully understand.

  If you have a breakdown in how you label, structure, translate or deliver these things because this or that team hasn't checked in with their peers, then the gaps end up in the content consumers' lap. They have to navigate our output, so if we don't establish clear standards to help organise the vast quantity of knowledge on offer we do them a disservice. We also do ourselves a disservice by letting our brand be impacted, and missing cross-sale, upgrade or repeat-business potential. Every touch-point should be considered an opportunity represent the brand and add value.

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Anything else you want to tell us?

...or anything more about your talk, e.g., who will benefit from it, and what practical things they would learn to take back to their organisations?

• 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.

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