The Content Philosopher

Content Strategy and the Web Matrix

Early in 2012, I found myself at a venue that was new for me. It was the South by Southwest (SXSW) event that was convened in a rainy Austin Texas in March 2012. The venue was new for me because the event was one that was so very focused on the art and craft of designing and developing the latest portable device or the next social media nexus. In reality, it was not a new venue for me. It had just been so many years since I had found myself at one of those events that serves as a cross-roads for investment dollars, talent, ideas and an overwhelming sense that the marketplace is changing. SXSW reminded me of the early web conferences (1994-1995) or a little later of the small commercial bump that occurred when XML received its first (and last) wave of market interest (1998-2000).

Of the things I was noticing at SXSW, what stood out most clearly was the talent and focus of the young developers and designers who were there in force. I immediately recalled that this was also what stood out at the events during those earlier web shifts. And I was specifically attuned to the audience because I was there to participate in a panel called Rude Awakening: Content Strategy is Really Hard (access to the audio recording is provided). This panel session was very well attended and very well received - chiefly through the stellar contributions of my co-panelists Kristina Halvorson (Brain Traffic), Karen McGrane (Bond Art+Science / KarenMcGrane.com), Mark McCormick (Wells Fargo) and Erin Kissane (Brain Traffic / Contents Magazine).

What I realized as I surveyed the SXSW attendees was that most of the people were themselves performance artists. As designers and perhaps especially as developers, each of them exemplified of how knowledge, skill and passion can come together to create superlative products. They appeared to me to resemble, as I mentioned as one of my less intelligible contributions to the panel, Neo in the Matrix or perhaps Trinity.

Now what perchance would this all have to do with Content Strategy? Quite a bit, actually, but I will need to explain. The truth of the matter is that I have witnessed three successive generations of web designers and developers. Each of these generations has exhibited the same remarkable fusion of knowledge, skill and passion and has been able to accomplish great things. And yet each of these generations has also found itself struggling with the same problems. Throwing ourselves back to the first web generation we can recall the "blink" tag and the early challenges with cross-browser compatibility. And there has been an unending, and even expanding, parade of cross-channel challenges ever since. In response, ever more sophisticated design and development tools and techniques have been introduced and refined. But still the challenge remains. In fact, it only seems to get more, well, challenging. 

So very much like Neo at the climactic conclusion of The Matrix Reloaded (an ending by the way I totally saw coming) our intrepid web designers and developers are starting to recognize that they are trapped in a loop. Like Neo starts to realize it is all beginning to feel a little like Nietzsche's eternal recurrence - with each generation essentially reliving the same process all over again. Fortunately once the cycle is recognized, change is inevitable. Knowledge alters reality. 

And so it is that the performance artists like Neo and Trinity, who are so accomplished at envisioning and implementing web experiences, find that all roads lead, inexorably, to the Architect, or perhaps in our case the Content Strategist. And what this means, in simple terms, is that at some point it must be recognized that the recurrent challenges that we face in managing content and in delivering effective web experiences will not be solved by more skill and passion alone. At some point, strategic knowledge must come into play and with it approaches to leveraging technology that are genuinely scalable and sustainable. This is the point where content is recognized as a strategic resource that needs to be handled somewhat differently than has been the case in the past. And it is the point where a new leadership role is cast - that of the Content Strategist.

There is a growing community that is forming around this emergent role of the Content Strategist and there is definitely an increasingly clear picture forming of what that role entails. From my perspective, which is only one of many at play in this community, a key aspect of the Content Strategist's role is helping the performance artists to see and understand the predicament in which they find themselves.

This is a very challenging task, let me assure you. One reason it is so challenging is that performance artists are very much about "performance" and inserting a notion that the content that drives user experiences needs to be abstracted away from the actual execution will be largely met with incomprehension. In some cases, the suggestion will be met with contempt. Again performance artists appreciate and acknowledge performance. This is their strength so it is not a question of it being a failing. However, without the introduction of a due level of abstraction and generality (and therefore reusability) into the content the recurrent cycle of working harder and more skillfully will not solve the problems afflicting today's content channels. 

As I can on almost any topic, I could take this further. (I have approached this topic once before in a post About Content Strategy.) But I will halt here. My main purpose is to offer a suggestion. Perhaps the scope of what we consider Content Strategy is even broader and deeper (and more important) than we have been allowing ourselves to consider. And perhaps if this role is fully realized then one of the things that will be noticeable will be that the performance artists will be among the chief beneficiaries. With the right architecture in place, and the right strategic approach to handling content resources, the knowledge, skill and passion of the web design and development community can move to a whole new level. 

The Consolations of Content Management

Albrecht Dürer: St Jerome in his Study

Something that I have observed over the years is how frequently people who have worked in, and made a contribution to, the field of content management have decided to chart a path that takes them off on a different professional path. Each time this happens I count it as a loss because these people are often among the most passionate and talented members of our community. And each time this happens I stop to consider why these people have seemingly grown tired of pushing the evolution of tools that help people to create, manage and leverage content. What I come to conclude, again each time, is that this phenomenon tells us something very important about the nature of content itself. 

What each of these departures reminds me is that content is all about potential. At various conferences in 2011, I have been pushing one of my more inaccessible definitions in declaring that "content is potential information". Information, under this rubric, is an action and one for which people and organizations can be held accountable. Content by contrast is what people and organizations prepare in order to be able to perform effective information transactions when circumstances demand. The issue that arises is that the benefits to be derived in the creation and management of content are only realized when this potential is converted into information that is executed as part of an effective decision or action. It is the domain of action that gets all the attention. The link between the information transactions that people get excited about and the underlying content resources is often forgotten. More precisely, the relationships between information transactions and the underlying content resources is properly understood as a complex system where direct, one-to-one causal relationships cannot be definitively identified.

St Jerome: The Patron Saint of Content Management
See DDishman717 on Deviant Art

I suspect that this is the reason that working in the field of content management can come to feel somewhat unfulfilling. On a project level, content management projects often (or usually) struggle to make their business case in a way that corporate executives will find compelling. The only way to correct this is to ensure that investments in content management are overtly combined with new information products and services to which explicit benefits can be tied. On a personal level, much of the most valuable work in content management is directed to designing and staging content resources so that people near the coal-face can perform effectively and this means that much of the content work, even if vitally important, will go unacknowledged. As a consequence, skilled practitioners in the field of content management can fall prey to what I call "content fatigue" and after many years of earnest labour they decide to make a change and to take a few steps closer to the action. I can confess that I fully understand their choices even while I selfishly regret the loss of their contributions.

Now seeing the field of Content Management from this perspective, and witnessing a long history of departures of able practitioners, does lead to the question, at least in my mind, of whether or not it is advisable or advantageous to remain engaged in the pursuit of content management as a field of endeavour.

The question naturally put me in mind of Boethius (ca 480 - 524 AD) whose Consolation of Philosophy (ca 524 AD) explored the benefits yielded by the life of the mind as a route to knowledge and justice in a world of harsh realities. The work was in fact written while Boethius was in prison awaiting execution, with his having fallen afoul of the realpolitik of post-Imperial Rome. Despite his situation, the Consolation of Philosophy remains remarkably positive and it became one of the most influencial works in the western canon (translated countless times including by King Alfred, Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth I). In a manner not unlike what I have described of content (as potential information), Boethius explores the world of ideas and how this world can influence, positively, events in an often rough world.  

Returning to the topic of content management, I can say that I have seen many occasions where prudent, or sometimes just plain lucky, investments in content management have provided tremendous and longstanding benefits amid the realpolitik of organizations who pride themselves on being coin-operated machines. More concretely, there have been a number of occasions in the last couple of years where I have accidentally come upon situations that showcased the ongoing positive effects of investments I had previously led in content management. Sometimes these investments had been made years earlier and in one graphic example the investments had been made almost two decades earlier.  

In the most graphic of these examples, I was in a meeting with a number of executives who were responsible for a lion's share of the technology investments in an organization that is populated by a few hundred thousand employees. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss possible strategies for managing the steps whereby a large technology infrastructure could be put through a rationalization process. As something of a distraction from the discussion, I noticed that the various documents on the table all had a familiar file number in the top right hand corner. I further noticed that the discussion made repeated reference to material that was available within a corporate repository or to the corporate collaboration environment that was chalkerblock full of electronic references to that corporate repository. The tablets in everyone's hands hopped from reference to reference until a piece of relevant content was pulled up and shared around the table. 

Tablet Access to Corporate Content Resources

It had been so many years that it took a few minutes for me to realize what it was I was seeing. In the early summer months of 1991, I had commenced work on a study into the possibility of applying technology to the problem of creating, managing, distributing, finding and using digital information within this same organization. This study went through a number of iterations and led, in 1993 and 1994, to a series of increasingly ambitious integration efforts that sought to implement the vision of a digitally enabled and integrated environment for knowledge workers. I had been the lead author on the study and had been called upon to lead the prototype integration efforts as well as a number of pilot deployments. This period in my history was one that had faded from memory, or been repressed, because it was a time of near-insane workloads and impossible schedules.

I was aware of the fact that these efforts had succeeded in putting this monumental organization on the path of ground-breaking investments in Enterprise Content Management. But it was not until I was in this meeting that it really hit me that those early days had in fact put in place a system, and a method of collaborating, that had effectively served as the working environment for thousands and thousands of people. For the bulk of their professional careers, this was the way these people actually did business. What came over me was a profound sense of responsibility for those things I had written, presented and implement so many years ago. Fortunately, at least in the meeting I was in, it seemed that the effects of the system had been positive. I was seeing a manifest example of people who were habituated to creating content and managing information in a way that remains far from common. It was far from common because it seemed to be quite effective.

There have been other situations that are similar to this experience although usually on a smaller scale. What all these situations tell me is that constructive investments in content management can provide positive and pervasive benefits when the investments spread out to become a foundational part of the environment in which people work.

Sometimes the situations help to make it clear that the positive effects of toiling away on content management can come simply by refining and articulating new ideas. As an example, I was at conference a few years ago that one of my other large customers hosted internally each year. At this event, a team presented a brilliant case study of a CM project that they had just undertaken. When asked how they got the idea, their answer rang in my ears. They said that in the previous year they had attended the presentation I had given (Web 2.0 and the New Collaboration Paradigm) and it had inspired them to jump in with both feet. I was thrilled, naturally, and proud. I was also struck by what this meant. It meant that the sharing of ideas on how content management could be improved as a practice and as a field of technology could itself lead to improvements. The content of the ideas alone could become the actions of people that you have never met and these actions could lead to positive outcomes.

So it seems that there are indeed many consolations of content management and that this field can bring benefits to both organizations and to those who make this field their primary area of endeavour. I guess this means that I will continue to pursue content management and if anything to redouble my efforts to make its potential benefits something many more people and many more organizations can leverage as improvements in how they perform.

Poetry in the Machine

The question sometimes come up of what the value of an arts education might be in the modern world. Acknowledging that this is quite a sprawling question and that the better answers will be the least welcome ones, we can chose instead to focus on a much smaller version of the question. What value, if any, can be realized by projects that seek to apply modern technology to handling and analysis of literary and historical materials? What value might there be in what is often called the "digital humanities"?

There are two sides to this question. One is fairly obvious and uncontroversial. The other is markedly less so but also much more interesting.

The uncontroversial rendition essentially asks whether the application of technology can assist researchers in the humanities to advance their work. The answer is quite obviously yes. As more and more historical and literary materials find their way online, and are joined there by more and more published research, the greater the speed with which researchers can access and connect these materials. Steven Pinker in a recent talk in Ottawa about his latest book (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined) specifically highlighted the fact that a work of such sprawling synthesis could not have been performed in a reasonable time if the vast majority of the relevant materials had not been available online.

And this points us towards what is probably the most important way that technology can be leveraged to improve how work in the humanities is pursued. The use being made of open standards to make materials accessible is something that is accelerating and evolving at quite a pace. The open standards in question are largely those surrounding the open encoding of research materials themselves using the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the open exchange of data resources using the Resource Description Framework (RDF). The consequence of leveraging these standards is that the full range of the content becomes available for linking and processing using automated mechanisms. This, in turn, can be used to discover and document new connections that would have remained hidden without these ways to expand the researchers' view.

Additional examples could be put forward exemplifying how technology can assist humanities research but all of them will have a similar air of obviousness about them. If there are other angles to explore when considering this question then that is really where our attention should go. For example, are there benefits for the field of information technology that might be realized through digital humanities projects? The answer to this question is also a firm "yes" and in fact evidence of this can be found all around us.

As should surprise no one, literary and historical materials exhibit a bewildering range of features. This is true of the materials themselves and it is true of the publishing, dissemination and revision patterns that trace each unit's trajectory through history. And this is true whether we are talking about volumes of poetry, picaresque novels, journalistic exchanges, or encyclopedic reference tomes. It follows that every attempt to apply technology to the handling of these materials forces us to wrestle with a plethora of complex challenges. Specifically, in wrestling with literary and historical materials we are forced to think about patterns in human communication that we would be unlikely to encounter in the conduct of routine business. And this has the consequence that we will, through these endeavours, develop and test technologies that are fundamentally more attuned to the unpredictable ways in which people behave than we would ever otherwise imagine. Projects in the digital humanities, if pursued fulsomely, will push the boundaries of technology. In fact, this is, in no small way, how we arrived at the internet of today.

Although it is neither well known nor widely acknowledged, among the most interesting things about the above-mentioned open standards (XML, RDF, and their fellow travellers) is the fact that they have emerged in large part to give us better ways to handle the things that people actually need to do with the content they create, share, squirrel away, retrieve, reuse, publish, forget, recover and so on. Historically, computers have evolved to do a reasonably good job at handling a very limited set of the transactions that people undertake. Specifically, computers have established a real strength around capturing, storing and processing data such as what we find in inventories and financial ledgers. Computers have, until recently, been far less successful at handling "content" which is a much more complex amalgam of data prepared and transacted in ways that are primarily geared to consumption by people. As we see with social media, however, there is a massive, and growing, interest in applying computers to helping people create, manage, share and evolve content as part of their social networks. It turns out that one of the best ways to learn about what content is like and what people tend to do with it is to look at literary and historical materials. The patterns we encounter in poetry, drama, encyclopedia, commonplace books, correspondence, newspapers and so on - exemplify exactly the range of structures we find ourselves wrestling with today. And so it is that there are numerous precedents where we see how vanguard work on digital humanities projects has provided lessons and working models that have helped us to tackle content as it surges online.

One example is a rather grand one. The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) was a standard that was ratified as an ISO standard (ISO 8879) in 1986. While tracing its roots back to challenges like handling legal material on mainframe computers, the team that helped finalize the standard included people with an interesting array of experiences including at least one doctorate in German Philology. As a consequence of this diversity, the standard embodied a grammar for representing the patterns that were found in human communication with this spanning a disturbingly broad range and one that definitely reflected an acute familiarity with literature. Moving the dial forward, we find a reformed physicist working at CERN and trying to bring to life something called the World Wide Web. By one of recent history's better turns of good fortune, the publishing team working at CERN at the time was populated with expert users of the SGML standard (ironically one of the world's few locations with a high concentration of this knowledge). And so it was that the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) accidentally leveraged SGML and with it a wide range of features that made it something that could be extended easily to accommodate a universe of content prepared by people working in many fields and in many countries.

There are other examples that are much more explicit. In an obscure area of the academy, work had progressed on a standard music description language and this effort had confronted the issues with representing time sequences in a way that could be interpreted by different software programs. When the people working on improving how technical information for military systems could be made more effective, they stumbled upon this work and immediately recognized that however useful these models might be for representing Mozart to a computer it was going to be excellent for representing multimedia training resources for a battleship. And this is precisely the path that the US Navy decided to follow, although they understandably felt inclined to keep quiet about their sources. In another example, in this case with the Canadian military and a solution that was then escalated to a number of NATO projects, an architectural strategy was taken up that had been originally developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for encoding and exchanging "headers" (bibliographic profiles for literary and historical resources). In the legal environment, it was found that the models expertly developed by the Text Encoding Initiative for marking up drama texts applied directly and completely to the encoding needs of court reporting systems. Courts cases, it turned out, are pure theatre and the applicability of the drama model surprised no one who was working on the project. In other cases, strategies for encoding and exchanging complex indices for artifacts such as encyclopedia blazed the trail that in many ways leads us to the open data standards that are so topical today in discussions of open and linked data (RDF and OWL, the Web Ontology Language).

It is interesting that of the two lead editors of the XML recommendation (W3C 1998), one wielded a doctorate in Comparitive Literature and the other had cut his teeth as a professional software developer working on the project to digitize and index the Oxford English Dictionary. I have written more about the evolution of these open standards, and how they have enabled the online revolution occurring around us. See the whitepaper The Emergence of Intelligent Content: The Evolution of Open Content Standards and their Significance. For more on the nature of content, see The Truth about Content and its related posts.

And so it is that many of the open standards that underpin the web and the burgeoning world of social media exhibit a variety of connections to the world of digital humanities. While it is something that would benefit from some systematic research, it is difficult not to conclude that these connections, and their roots in the world of literary and historical research, have contributed a lot to the subsequent success of these standards in enabling a brave new world of digital communication. It follows then that there will be ongoing benefits to be realized by returning to the font and continuing to explore how leading edge technologies can be applied to yet more literary and historical challenges. Current efforts in this area are in fact stirring up new opportunities to advance technology toward becoming more adept at handling the content that people actually produce and use. Indeed, this is an important avenue to pursue because it will be through these efforts that we will ultimately give our technology the human face it needs.

See Screen (2002-2005)

Content Integration

Conferences can be interesting events. At the very best of them, themes emerge that were not entirely planned and they emerge somewhat spontaneously out of the interaction of people thrown into chance encounters. This seems to have been the case with the LavaCon 2011 conference that was convened in Austin, Texas on November 13 to 16, 2011.

This gathering brought together an interesting mix of people, many of whom have strong roots in the field of technical communications (TechComm). I have written a couple of posts specifically about this community of practice (see Intelligent Content and the Future of Technical Communications and The Fusion of Business Analysis and Technical Communications). There were other people in attendance, naturally, with there being a solid representation of web content strategists, social media entrepreneurs, localization specialists and visual communicators.

Photo by Darin R. McClure - Can you spot the chief troublemaker?

At LavaCon 2011 the theme that seemed to leap forth was that of "integration". The integration theme took several forms and this is what made it so interesting. One form was the importance of integrating the various communication disciplines into a coherence and holistic approach. With so many new devices appearing on the market, and so many new markets opening up around the world, it was widely conceded that while technical communication will continue to cover a wide range of channels, there will be an increasing emphasis placed on communication strategies that foreground graphics, photographs, audio and video. This shift in emphasis is in turn being driven by a number of pressures - not least of which is the decreasing amount of time users have to "read the documentation".

Another form taken by the integration theme was particularly strong and this was the focus placed on integrating content resources into the core business processes of the organization. This trend was itself set within the yet larger trend within organizations towards finding, and realizing, each and every opportunity to integrate offerings and activities into a unified and highly efficient whole. 

Photo by Darin R. McClure

Following my usual practice, I spent the early parts of the LavaCon conference taking in the ideas being addressed in presentations, workshops and lounge discussions and then feeding them into an evolving version of my keynote presentation. This practice is a slightly risky one in that it can spawn a lot of work in revisions and additions to the planned presentation. And this was very much the case on this occasion. On the positive side though, this practice can adapt the keynote to fit into, and amplify, the ideas that are in circulation given the people that have come together. At LavaCon 2011, what I picked up on was the rising importance of "integration" and consequently my keynote address, delivered on Monday November 13, 2011, cast integration as the most important of the major trends being observed.

This emphasis also seems timely given the concurrent rise into prominence of the idea of Content Strategy. I asked the conference, in rather stark terms, to consider how strategic their strategy really was. Citing a number of case studies, I warned the attendees to be wary of confusing low level tactical plans with a true enterprise content strategy. Tactical plans, which might address specific needs around improving the efficiency, or effectiveness, of technical communication investments, must not be mistaken for an enterprise strategy.

 

The Content Revolution - LavaCon 2011 Keynote

View more presentations from Joe Gollner

An enterprise content strategy looks primarily at how content resources, and processes, need to be integrated with the core business processes of an organization and with the organizational structures governing its primary products and services. Integration is in fact the key concept here, I argued. A content strategy that connects to, and fastens onto, one or more of these "central nerves" in your business will get lots of executive attention. Conversely, an approach to content that is too tactical, as will often be the case when the "strategists" involved have only been exposed to the working levels of technical communication, will in fact work at cross purposes to an integrated content strategy. An overly tactical approach will tend to spawn yet more silos in the organizations and the optimization of these silos will often prevent their integration with other areas of investment. This is something to be avoided.

By watching the following video (deftly captured by Daniel R. Odio), readers can decide for themselves how successfully I managed to tackle the integration theme and to provide a coherent treatment of the topic of developing an integrated content strategy. The session does start with a brief segue into Monty Python and this was provoked by some of the lively exchanges facilitated by the irrepressible Scott Abel, the Content Wrangler. Flowing out of the keynote presentation was a cascade of very interesting discussions and these, to my mind, make all the last minute adaptations completely justifiable. They also suggest to me that we might be onto something.

Lavacon 2011: The Content Revolution Keynote by Joe Gollner from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

 

 

Introducing Content Scenarios

So what are Content Scenarios?

Content Scenarios are functionally realistic illustrations of content resources and process steps that can be used throughout the content solution lifecycle to maximize investment effectiveness. 

In the following presentation, delivered at DITA Europe 2011 in Prague, I elaborate a little on what Content Scenarios are and why they are important for all content projects (and not just projects leveraging the Darwin Information Typing Architecture or DITA). Specifically I put forward Content Scenarios as part of a methodological remedy to what I label the core challenge facing Content Management projects - namely the unsustainable postponement of payback.

Implementing DITA Solutions using Content Scenarios

View more presentations from Joe Gollner

Essentially, Content Scenarios provide a tangible demonstration of how new strategies for acquiring, managing and delivering content will make a difference to customers, users and business stakeholders. The most important feature of Content Scenarios is that they must be meaningful to Business Executives who do not care about the technology behind the scenes.

The really short version is that a Content Scenario is a “demo on steroids” that can be used for more than just selling the concept, important as that may be. Less accessibly, a Content Scenario is a fully elaborated “content model” that does not just define the structure and meaning of the content, it exemplifies and demonstrates how the structure and meaning drive functional behaviour (aka what it really means). 

So what really makes up a Content Scenario?

• Functionally realistic content examples:
  • Assembled from real documentation
  • Sensitive details removed
  • Supported by web friendly media assets
• Supporting details about:
  • Business context
  • Key users and stakeholders
  • Critical business requirements
• Content & Process Models
• Demonstration scripts for key process steps
• Reference implementations for key process steps

Why are Content Scenarios Important?

• Projects benefit from the early demonstration of envisioned capabilities so that all stakeholders can get behind a common vision (that they have been able to see in action)
• They can be used to build a common vision among stakeholders from across an organization and its partners
• They can be used to makes requirements concrete & tangible for all stakeholders
• They allow stakeholders to explore future states including new requirements that only emerge as a consequence of the technology innovations being contemplated
• They allow business processes to co-evolve with the capabilities of the tools being deployed thereby ensuring that all technology investments are maximally leveraged
• They allow design efforts to benefit from iterative learning as feedback is harvested from stakeholders through cyclic demonstration
• They provide a validated reference baseline for testing efforts so that the testing focus is placed on functionality that is most important to the supported business needs
• They provide secure ways to engage vendors by providing them with non-confidential reference instances and process descriptions
• They can be combine together to form higher-level business demonstrations that traverse organizational boundaries and thereby be used to drive out integration requirements
• They provide a way to engage business executives in a way that they find meaningful and compelling.

Where did the idea of Content Scenarios come from?

The idea for content scenarios goes back several years. In my own history, I gave a presentation in at CALS Expo 1996 titled “Coordinating SGML Projects to Maximize Enterprise Benefits” (CALS stands for Continuous Acquisition and Lifecycle Support). In this presentation, I explored the application of rigorous configuration management practices to SGML content models and this led me to argue that Document Type Definitions (DTDs) could not in fact be managed in isolation from the associated business context and application functionality. One of the key recommendations at the time was that projects should develop comprehensive collections of representative content that could be used to illustrate the business context of the content models and to demonstrate the planned application functionality. On subsequent projects in the defence & aerospace sector, this approach was pursued aggressively and to great effect.

Moving the clock forward to 2000, I gave a presentation at the annual XML conference titled “XML Business Templates”. This session also gave rise to a whitepaper of the same name (available from Whitepapers Old & New). This presentation returned to these same ideas and did so with reference to a number of implementation projects where the same rationale was applied within other industry sectors. Specifically, the value of shareable collections of reference content instances was demonstrated within engineering environments where online interaction across large networks of suppliers was a critical objective. In these projects, it was proven, repeatedly, that projects benefitted significantly from using this combination of shareable content and lightweight application components to explore opportunities for innovation before major investments were made in the software and hardware infrastructure. In these same projects, it was further proven that even after the major outlays were made on licenses and machines there continued to be a major role for the XML business templates in testing the new environment and in providing a fall-back capability that was called upon with remarkable frequency when commercial products were found lacking. 

Content Scenarios Today

All this has led to what I now call Content Scenarios. There are other inputs that should be noted including what is called “scenario-based testing”. The challenges that Content Scenarios have arisen to address are elaborated in more detail in a previous blog post about Content Management at the Crossroads and in a discussion that broke out on the CIDM (Center for Information Development Management) LinkedIn group. At this time, a number of colleagues and I have been investing time, energy and money in developing the kernel for a number of Content Scenarios. This effort is not insignificant, as can be expected, so it is proceeding in parallel with other projects.

The initial Content Scenarios are being implemented using, and for use with, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) although that will not be the only content standard that we will tackle. As they achieve a level of completion these Content Scenarios will be made publicly available under a share-alike type license and perhaps under the agreement (unenforceable probably) that organizations using them take steps to provide some contributions to the collection. The goal will be to help the various standards communities by providing resources that can be used to demonstrate the role that they have been created to play. Hopefully the availability of an evolving set of shared Content Scenarios will also assist product vendors in their efforts to integrate their respective offerings so as to support the type of functionality that customer organizations actually need. And finally, it is hoped that these resources will help these customer organizations more directly - by helping them to demonstrate the functionality that they are pursuing and then achieving the types of results that attracts the attention of executive management – and in a good way.  

 

Stakeholders, including vendors, can unite around a good idea that is powerfully expressed

Occupy the Future

It is the natural tendency of all systems to outgrow themselves and to become unsustainable. This is a tendency I have described previously as barnaclization (see The Barnaclization of Systems and Institutional Dissociation). There can be no question that many aspects of the global economy exhibit various forms of barnaclization, sometimes in its early forms and sometimes in the later stages of encrustation. The global financial system pretty fairly falls into the latter category. In taking a step back, almost anyone can see that there will be a sustainability problem with a system that establishes an unbounded hierarchy of incentives connecting the highest offices on Wall Street to the smallest of small-town investment advisors. Similarly, no one can really be surprised that there will be problems when all forms of government see unbounded debt as an acceptable method for co-opting special interests, deferring decisions and placating voters. When these systems interconnect and become integral to how communities and people go about their daily lives then the only hope for correction will lie in catastrophic failure, of which we have had a few recent examples.

So there is a sense in which the Occupy Wall Street movement, and its various echoes even including an Occupy Ottawa initiative, does have a good point to make. It can however be observed that in decrying the demerits of an economic system that increasingly rewards 1% of the population the protestors are largely advocating for remedies that have always encouraged new forms of barnaclized hierarchy. Specifically, the implied solution to the imbalances created by unbridled capitalist barnaclization is the elaboration of additional governmental control mechanisms that themselves quickly become self-serving encrustations that are wholly unsustainable (if history is anything to go by).

It can be helpful to recall the wisdom of St. Paul who offers us a stark but inescapable truth – Radix Omnium Malorum est Cupiditas, or Greed for Gain if the Root of All Evil. It is helpful because it can prod us to consider whether or not the Occupy Wall Street protestors can really be so easily differentiated from the outrageously rapacious bankers that they are protesting against. When we consider that the gain being sought by various parties can take many forms, and not solely or directly money, then it does make it harder to make the distinctions. Rest assured that the people manning the barricades have their reasons for doing so and that these reasons will only partially be altruistic whatever they may declare or think.

Of course the wisdom of St. Paul is a rather daunting standard to invoke as it would seem to leave us very little latitude to go about doing business, or indeed living, in a way that we can recognize. As a businessman, it is a question I have had to consider on more than one occasion. Fortunately, the wisdom of St. Paul carries with it a good deal of, well, wisdom. (Quite apart from any inspiration that might be involved, we should recall the historical St. Paul was very much a man of this world before his conversion and therefore knew whereof he spoke.) It does not, for example, pillory gain itself as the source of evil but rather an undue and unbridled pursuit of it. Going further, it does seem to imply that a fair gain, such as realized through a genuine exchange of value, should not be a problem. And this is where the wisdom of St. Paul shifts from being a prohibition to being a pointer towards a better choice. Specifically, if you undertake to earn your gains through the provision of value to those from which you are collecting returns, and if you even go so far to deliver a surplus of value, then it becomes possible that what gains are realized will be bought and paid for in the exchange and therefore fairly earned.  Now this is a line of thinking on which many a medieval scholar spent countless hours working by candle light and we can observe that medieval society, and medieval thought in particular, achieved its own dizzying heights of barnaclization.

Nevertheless, the wisdom of St. Paul does provide us with a starting point from which to what incremental adjustments might be made to our economic system. And the Wall Street protestors are helping us to revisit some elements that could certainly benefit from adjustment. But the wisdom of Saint Paul would definitely incline us to sidestep grand visionary schemes of sweeping reform because we know where this leads. Or at least I hope we have learned this one lesson. 

 

Learning XML in Oxford

One question that comes up with some frequency is “how can an organization build up an in-house technical competence with XML?” This is a slightly different question than “how do I introduce my content teams to working with XML editing tools?” The latter question is a very important one but it is also one that is best addressed, in my experience, using customized training programs that are integrated into the work activities of the content teams and delivered in increments over a period of time. The question about how to build up an in-house capability that can adapt and extend XML processes and products is in fact a much harder one to answer.

There is always the “trial and error” school, which will always be part of the equation. However, by itself this can be a very risky way for an organization to establish a proficiency in getting the most from what XML has to offer. Then there is the option of depending upon product vendors and consultants to provide this expertise but that too has drawbacks – among them cost, availability and it must be said varying quality. There is also the option of attending various XML conferences but the problem here is that these events are primarily a meeting of practitioners to exchange ideas on topics that have happened to surface in recent project experiences. This too has merit but it falls short on building the solid foundation of knowledge that will be necessary if maximum value is to be taken from these conferences. So each of these answers has a role to play but there will ultimately no substitute for building up an internal center of XML expertise that is comprehensive and well-grounded. The question remains “How is this best done?”

Recently, when confronted with the question “how can an organization build up an in-house technical competence with XML?” I have admitted that I only have one answer. I refer the people to the XML Summer School that is held each year in Oxford. This year it will run September 18 to 23 at St Edmund Hall (Teddy Hall) which is part of the University of Oxford. The venue for this event would be difficult to top as Teddy Hall provides one of the most historic, and most central, locations within the city of Oxford. You can check out the environment with a virtual tour that provides immersive panoramic views. Attractive as the venue is though, this is not what is important about the XML Summer School.

What makes the XML Summer School important is the fact that it combines a number of critically important threads that together contribute to building a genuinely effective knowledge of XML. For people who are new to XML, the XML Summer School provides an immersive three-day introduction where participants will get their hands dirty with XML markup, XML Schemas, XSLT, XPath and XQuery. It is worth point out that in this program, they will be learning from a team of people who together marshal decades of experience. 

This last point about the experience and expertise of the instructors highlights a key strength of the XML Summer School. In addition to providing an outstanding learning opportunity for people new to XML, the Summer School also assembles an impressive collection of XML experts who, in parallel to the introductory program as well as following it, delve into discussions of the central trends and issues in the world of XML. These discussions provide seasoned XML practitioners and the experts themselves opportunities to advance and refine their knowledge of emergent topics. What makes this so important is that the XML Summer School, in its format and through its engaging social program (that includes punting of course), allows novices and experts to mix and to get to know each other and to share knowledge in an informal way.

The informal learning that occurs at the XML Summer School is more important than many might think. An acquaintance of mine, Etienne Wenger has been instrumental in advancing the concept of Communities of Practices and in one of his publications, Situated Learning (authored with Anthropologist Jean Lave), a key idea of legitimate peripheral participation is introduced and explored. This concept explained, to my mind better than anything before or since, how people learn to become practitioners and in time experts within a domain of applied knowledge. Right now, the XML Summer School is the only offering available anywhere that provides a forum that facilitates a learning dynamic that enables practitioners at all levels to advance and to help others to advance. 

Now all this might be a bit much to lay at the door of this annual event. However, over the last twenty years I have explored just about every learning opportunity available to participants in the community of markup practitioners. In 2003, as a break from the grind of business, my company sent me to the XML Summer School and I was therefore able to compare what it had to offer to all other options. Quite frankly I found that the XML Summer School was genuinely unique and it effectively provided what I deem to be a key ingredient in building an XML community of practice. It provided a venue for people at all levels of XML expertise to learn new things, re-affirm some oft-forgotten basics, and see what others are doing in fields far removed from their own. In short, it provided an XML education.

So it remains my position that any organization who needs to build up its internal capability to leverage XML, and I think that this pretty much catches all organizations these days, should take a close look at the XML Summer School. The school convenes in Septembers normally, as this is still part of the summer vacation in Oxford (how civilized is that) and it happily also coincides with when most organizations are getting back to work. And I would encourage people to look past the attractiveness of the venue (especially those in management positions who might see this as a little too attractive) because the XML Summer School represents an exceptionally good value even for those who might need to travel some distance to participate.

Now having made a series of disavowals that try to minimize the importance of the venue for the XML Summer School when compared to its contents, I do need to observe that Oxford in fact provides the perfect place to delve into a new language, in this case XML. This is where one of the greatest achievements in scholarship, the Oxford English Dictionary, was undertaken and interestingly undertaken as one of the best examples of crowd-sourcing that worked marvels. Going a little further back in history, this is also where, in the mid-seventeenth century a remarkable cadre of scientists emerged as an "invisible college" and among other things put forward, and into occasional use, a universal grammar or as they termed it a new philosophical language.  

Fear of Content

Content can be a little frightening, it’s true. Not to everyone mind you. Some people simply love content, with all its oddities and challenges. More often than not these are the people who spend much of their time designing and creating content. But there are definitely people who look somewhat askance at this thing called “content”. The reasons why some people are less than enamored with content are worth considering and not only to refute them. There may well be good reasons to be afraid – or at least to approach content with due respect. 

Now the truth is that the vast majority of people do not fall into either of these categories. These are the people who have never given any thought to what content might be. And if these people are confronted with the question – What is content? – their answer might be something like – It’s the stuff we publish. Actually that’s a pretty good answer. But it’s not an answer that is necessarily based on much reflection. In most cases, what we will find underneath this answer is a base assumption that content is a pretty simple thing.  

Now what typically happens when you start into a content management project with the base assumption that content is a simple thing? The answer to this question is simple – disappointment and sometimes even dismay. It turns out that content is anything but simple. And strategies and implementations that assume otherwise quickly encounter problems. 

Among the areas where this pattern is seen in action most frequently is within the Information Technology (IT) branches of organizations. To people who are seasoned implementers of databases and business applications, content is merely the stuff that has not yet merited their attention and therefore has not yet benefited from the discipline that comes with proven analytical and design methods. The distinction is made between unstructured content and structured data. A common statement you will hear is “it’s just content – what we need is data”. Seen strictly from the perspective of what most business applications can handle, this sentiment actually does make some sense. Or at least we can understand it in this context.

However, experience has repeatedly shown that several consequences immediately flow from the viewpoint that sees content as raw material that is simple, unstructured and awaiting proper organization. First, the analysis activities that genuinely attempt to model all of the structures evident within content quickly find themselves in a continuous loop of refinement. If they are carefully attending to what they are finding and to what the various stakeholders are saying about the content, it seems that there is virtually no end to the details that come to the surface. Second, the design and implementation of the database environment becomes a far more onerous undertaking that anyone expected. Third, the output products generated by the publishing processes always seem to disappoint someone. Finally, because it was assumed that content is simple both the project budget and the selected solution technology are found to be completely inadequate. The need to continue applying resources to refining the analysis, stabilizing the database environment and adapting the outputs therefore hits a wall with management impatience.

Following this path at least has the benefit of providing some of the lessons that only implementation experience can provide. It is often at this point that people really begin to wonder about what content might be. And if they reflect back on their experiences they come to see that content is not simple and that it’s best not to think of it as “unstructured”. In fact, it becomes evident that it is much more prudent to classify content as “hyper-structured”. Content brings together a variety of data patterns, often from diverse sources, pedigrees and domains, and then arrays these data patterns within complex rhetorical structures that professional communicators are adept at using to convince people to behave in certain ways – literally to “inform” them. This is one of the key take-aways from Bob Boiko’s book “Laughing at the CIO”. For content to be modelled and managed well and for useful, and usable, information products to be published, it is essential that content initiatives start with this more fulsome understanding of the nature of content.

Now when the true nature of content is encountered, even if it is not fully appreciated, one common reaction will be denial. It won’t necessarily be recognizable as such but it will clearly be visible in shaking heads, dismissive hand gestures, glasses being removed, notebooks being closed, meetings coming to an inconclusive end, managers being called, accusations being made. For those who assumed that content is simple, and that their content projects would be easy, the inevitable disappointment still comes as a rude awaking. 

In all too many cases, particularly amongst IT shops where content will almost always remain a peripheral distraction, an initial disappointment does not lead to much in the way of learning or adaptation. More commonly, the next content initiative is simply supplied with additional resources and an emboldened mandate. This time the implementation team will get a firm sign-off from the business stakeholders on the requirements before commencing the design and development effort. With this clarity in hand, the elusive success will come into reach. Sadly, each successive effort along these lines will become a yet bigger failure and still the pattern will tend to repeat. With each repetition, a glimpse is provided into what content is really like but the cycle is sustained by an impulse to turn away ever more resolutely and to re-embrace the base assumption that content is simple and we just need to get the analysis right. This is in fact an anti-pattern that is best labelled “Fear of Content”.

However common this anti-pattern may be, there is still hope in that it is becoming increasingly important that we improve our content management systems and publishing processes and that more and more people are coming to a better appreciation of what content is really like and how it really needs to be handled. And when approached in the right way, the very features of content that can make it challenging to manage and process can also be seen as what makes it valuable, important and even at times fascinating.

The Reason and Passion of XML

 

People who know me are frequently surprised, and perhaps pleased, to find that my blog so rarely mentions the three-letter acronym with which that they have come to associate me. This acronym is XML which is distilled from Extensible Markup Language. People who have known me for a long time are even more surprised because in the later 1990s and early years of the new millennium I chaired the XML World conferences. In this capacity, I used the stage to pronounce upon the many important things we could use XML to do. Often these pronouncements paid only passing attention to the benefits that most advocates were seeking and moved instead onto topics that I am sure those same people found baffling. 

 

As one example, I gave an opening keynote at XML World 2002 in New Orleans and the title of that talk was "Super-Integration: The Next Big Thing". The subject of this talk was the role XML could play in passing small units of data between applications large and small to provide completely new types of services. In retrospect, there was a measure of truth seeded within these prognostications.

Now since that time I have moderated my message and adjusted my focus more and more to the topic of content and less and less on the specifics of a particular encoding and exchange standard. Part of this moderation has come from the fact that XML itself is something of a compromise attempt to provide this type of exchange mechanism for data, application messages and then perhaps content. Also, having been raised on SGML and having been a great admirer of its grammar for modelling the structures present in content as it is found in the world, I continue to find XML somewhat lacklustre as a "meta-language". However when I was asked recently whether it was possible to have "intelligent content" that was not managed as XML I grudgingly said "No". Today, it is only by using XML that we can interact with all of the applications that are in use and thereby achieve the type of integrated behaviour that makes a real difference.

The title of this post comes from the title of a presentation I gave at the XML-in-Practice conference in 2009 - The Reason and Passion of XML. In this talk I tried to summarize what I had learned over the years about the types of applications that open markup standards make possible and the types of justifications that I have found to be most successful for engaging executive decision-makers. The "Reason" side of the equation specifically looked at the mechanics of a good business case - where numbers are used to quantify the benefits that will accrue to an organization if XML is used to enable intelligent content solutions. A couple of cases were used to illustrate the types of numbers that can be presented and then realized through effective implementations. However, the "Passion" side of the equation was, to my mind, the more interesting, and far more important, part.

Reason and Passion of XML (J Gollner)

View more presentations from Joe Gollner

The "Passion" side of the equation is really about framing a vision of how business might be conducted when an organization taps into the wellsprings of their content and brings the latent intelligence to the surface using open markup. The underlying point of the presentation was that the rational side to the business cases has never been enough to sustain "intelligent content projects". For the vast majority of organizations, open markup standards such as XML are simply too new and the impacts across their operations too various for these types of projects to be "easy". While addressing the practical managerial mindset, as embodied in the finance department, is an essential step to get an investment in XML approved, it is not sufficient to carry these projects through the hours of darkness and uncertainty that doubtless lie ahead for them. For such projects to be sustained and successful, it is necessary that the vision of something new and compelling must be taken up by those executives whose role is more strategic. If this type of support is put into place, then projects introducing XML-enabled content solutions can be explosively successful. Again, case studies were used to illustrate what can happen when all these stars are aligned.

All of this then takes us back to the subject of my last post, Content Management at the Crossroads, where I argued that the content management industry has collectively failed to make a connection with the strategic mindset of business executives and therefore has failed to excite any genuine passion for the types of business change that intelligent content technologies can unleash. I further argued that a key part of this failing can be found in the fact that we have not, as an industry, collaborated sufficiently on making the complete value of our specialization accessible and tangible to these all-important stakeholders. We have not established any shared demonstrations that can be used to showcase the types of content scenarios that are becoming possible and without these we cannot excite any real passion for what we can do.

Without collaborating as an industry to embody and exemplify the passion side of the content management business case, through the use of shared content scenarios, advocates for content innovations, whether these are vendors of content management tools or individual champions within organizations, are forced to work alone. They are forced to trade only in rational arguments that speak to the practical mindset and to the skepticism of auditors. And this, as Bob Boiko so correctly identifies is a dead end. If this path is followed alone, it is not long before financial savings become the only acknowledged benefit and soon any hope of innovation dies from a thousand self-inflicted cuts. The business of content does not need to fall into this trap and it is therefore critical that collectively and individually we pay ample attention not only to the reason of XML but also to the passion.

 

Content Management at the Crossroads

For a number of reasons, I have been thinking recently about the state of the Content Management industry. These ruminations took me back to one of my posts from the summer of 2009 called The Trials and Tribulations of Content Management. In this post, I declared that historically the content management industry, as a whole, has under-performed. I continued with the supposition that one contributing factor to this under-performance was the apparent absence of any shared understanding of what indeed we were trying to manage. We did not, I felt, have a common definition for what we meant by the term “content”. No wonder then that the various players in the industry only occasionally, and in all likelihood accidentally, coordinate their activities and investments in a way that makes a positive difference for business stakeholders, aka the customers.

I promptly set about writing a series of posts that sought to lay down some definitions and to summarize some of the trends that are discernable in the last 20 years in the life of the content management industry. While I am reasonably pleased with the conceptual integrity of the definitions being sketched out, I am also quite certain that these efforts have made no appreciable impact on practitioners and players in the industry.

Undeterred I am returning to the topic and this time I will approach it from a more practical, and hopefully more accessible, angle. This time I will focus on a different shortcoming in the content management industry: the generally poor state of the shared resources available to assist content management practitioners, product vendors and customer organizations in demonstrating meaningful content processes (i.e., that run from "end-to-end" in a value chain) that will make concrete sense to business stakeholders. Such demonstrations, in addition to communicating the benefits of content management, also provide real-world scenarios that can be used to facilitate improved interoperability across products boundaries.

At a number of recent industry events, I have made a point of reviewing the demonstrations that various vendors use to illustrate the capabilities, and presumably the value, of their respective product offerings. In almost all cases, the content being used, and the business scenarios being demonstrated, are almost ludicrously simplistic. Without a word of exaggeration, most demos consist of one or two short documents, with obviously bogus content, being modified, stored, retrieved and rendered so as to showcase one or two product features. How, it should be asked, would this help a business stakeholder, who is confronted with very serious content challenges and even more serious business problems, understand the potential value of any one of these content management tools? The answer is simple – they don’t help at all.

I would submit that without shared demonstrations that illustrate how a number of content management tools can interoperate to address real business problems, there can be no genuine improvement in how the industry as a whole performs. Quite simply the business requirements that need addressing exist at a higher level than any one content management tool. Demonstrating the features of any one tool does not actually demonstrate any value to the prospective business customer.

Indeed I have an even more deep-seated concern. I worry that in the absence of any shared demonstrations, the chances are that the product teams for the many individual content management tools are in fact working towards partial, or worse invalid, requirements. Product plans for any given tool that do not take into account the larger business needs will be intrinsically flawed. When I see the laughable state of most product demos I can’t help but wonder what will happen when these tools run into real requirements embedded within real business processes. What happens when these individual tools actually need to interoperate with other tools to support people doing real work? From bitter experience we probably all know the answer to this question. As implementers we have to hack and patch the various products together so as to realize a working solution.

It is my belief that the content management industry exists for a very good reason and that businesses around the world in fact desperately need help in managing and leveraging their increasingly valuable content assets. It is also my considered opinion that as an industry we have fallen short in our efforts at collaborating together to provide these customers with more tangible examples of how content management tools can interoperate to deliver value. More to the point, I believe we have collectively fallen short in evolving shared resources, what I will hereafter call “content scenarios”, that can be used to facilitate the evolution of better content management tools and improved integrated behaviour across these tools.

There are standards bodies that were in fact formed in large part to do just this very thing – to facilitate cross-industry coordination, in particular between vendors and customers – and it must be said that these standards bodies have not performed this service particularly well at all. There are several reasons for this but they deserve separate treatment.

The fact remains that without such coordination the content management industry will remain trapped in a state of perpetual under-performance. This is bad news for all members of this community. It is even worse news for the many organizations who need better content management support than they are getting and who will continue to get by with the working solutions they manage to assemble from the piece-parts available from vendor shelves. The good news, as a little light at the end of the tunnel, is that the industry is more than capable of making improvements in this area and thereby heading down a better path. In fact, there are signs that this has already begun…