DCL Learning Series

Marianne Calilhanna

Hello, and welcome to the DCL Learning Series. Today's webinar is titled "The DITA Recipe for Success: The Best Ingredients and a How-to Guide for a Perfectly Baked CCMS Migration." My name is Marianne Calilhanna and I'm the VP of Marketing at Data Conversion Laboratory. DCL is the industry leading XML conversion provider and we've been in the business of transforming content since 1981. I want to let everyone know that this presentation is being recorded and it will be available in the on demand webinar section of our website at dataconversionlaboratory.com. We'll have time at the end to answer any questions you have, but please feel free to submit anything that comes to mind.

Now, while we were preparing for this webinar, we had a lot of fun with it and it really came up that we consider DITA, the idea is it really is a mise en place for knowledge. And that means DITA provides a method, a way to have everything in its right place. So with that, I'm really happy to introduce today's chefs. We have David Turner from DCL and Nolwenn Kerzreho from MadCap. Now, David collaborates with our clients on a variety of content technology initiatives and you can really throw any content challenge at him and I can assure you he'll deliver a solution. Nolwenn is MadCap's senior solution architect. She focuses on solutions for technical and training content and has worked with DITA based solutions for about 15 years. MadCap helps companies create and manage technical documentation and learning content at scale. And now I'm really happy to turn it over to David and Nolwenn. 

David Turner

All right, Marianne, thank you so much. I say hello to everyone around the world who's joined us today from my kitchen here in lovely Sachse, Texas, which is just outside of Dallas. We did have some fun putting this together. Before we kick in and get too far in, I think we do have a poll. Marianne, can you launch that poll for us? There it is. All right. So basically we want to ask the group, today is DITA Recipe for Success, how familiar are you with DITA? Is this something that you're brand new to? Is this something where you've got some awareness? You consider yourself kind of a hands-on user, you're like a power user, something like that. We'll take just a minute or two here and see what results come back. Essentially, we're just trying to get a sense for how technical we can jump in or how much background explanation we need to do. So little by little. How are we doing, Marianne? Are we getting close?

Marianne Calilhanna

We've got about 78% people voting. We will let it go just another second. I still see some more coming in. Okay, I'm going to shut off the poll and I'm going to share the results. 

David Turner

All right. 

Marianne Calilhanna

Can you see those results? 

David Turner

Absolutely. Okay. So we do have a couple of newbies. We have a whole lot that have some awareness. We have some who are starting to use it and there's some who are power users.

4:00

So with that, let's jump back in. Marianne, do I need to reshare or you got me already – oh, you got me already set up there. Excellent. Okay. Well, with that in mind, since we do have a couple that are new, as we mentioned, DITA really, it stands for Darwin Information Type Architecture, which we could go into, but let's just leave it at this. So essentially the idea when you're working with DITA, like other types of structured content, is the idea that you're moving from managing documents in kind of a traditional method, whether that's Microsoft Word or Google Docs or something like that, where you're focused on kind of doing the design and the finished product all as one piece. And you're moving from that into breaking it into individual components. You're going to separate out the different ingredients, if you will, so that you can put them together on demand for a lot of different reasons. So if you want to use our restaurant example, and a food example that we were talking about here, recipes, it's kind of like if you go to a conference, the traditional method is you go and you pick up like a box of lunch and you can get a turkey sandwich or you can get a wholly put together ham sandwich and then the user has to go and take off what they don't want. But essentially it's already pre-made and prebuilt.

Well, with DITA, you can do things more on demand. It's more like going to a Subway restaurant where you can go in, you can have them assemble it as you go, et cetera. So anyway, so why would anybody actually want to do this? Well, there's a lot of different reasons and anything from getting multichannel outputs, having a single source of truth. Like I said, you've got the dynamic publishing, you could do things on demand, you've got a lot of reuse, so it's going to save you money and localization costs. It's really built for complexity and scale. And that's really what I want to focus on right here. One of the big things is that when you change from being like a little local shop and you're really starting to grow to something that's big, your needs change. So back to the restaurant example, right here at this counter, I make a pretty mean stack of chocolate chip pancakes. And when my kids come home from school or I got one that lives out of town, when they come to visit, I can whip up a batch, no problem. I can do it with my eyes closed. No stress. No anything. But a few years ago, I was asked to feed chocolate chip pancakes to a group of 40 teenage boys.

That was a completely different experience. I had to change the way I thought. I had to change the way my kitchen was set up. I had to change all the different pieces. And so that's kind of the idea. When you're moving from a word-based system or a styles-based system, that traditional authoring to more of a DITA, you've got to start thinking about this. How are my ingredients going to change? How are the tools going to change? Because you're going to need a lot of different things. Another quick example, we just came off of Christmas and New Year. A few years ago, I became kind of the guy in my family to bring desserts at Christmas. And so I started out by, I would make two kinds of pie and a big batch of sugar cookies, maybe a special something year to year. One of our family traditions is we divide up all the sugar cookie dough and everybody cuts and they decorate and all that kind of stuff. Well, then we added a relative with an allergy who can't have dairy. So my deliverables changed from two kinds of pie and a batch of sugar cookies to two kinds of pie, a batch of sugar cookies, a non-dairy pie, and a batch of non-dairy cookies, which of course had to be kept separate from the regular sugar cookies.

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Right? So that sort of changed things. And then this year I had a relative with a gluten allergy. So I delivered two kinds of pie, a batch of sugar cookies, a non-dairy pie, a batch of non-dairy cookies which had to be kept separate, a gluten-free pie, a batch of gluten-free cookies which had to be kept separate, and a whole slew of signs declaring which is which. So the idea here is that this is a simple example, but it demonstrates some of the challenges that you have when you start cooking at scale. So you got to change the way you're thinking. You've also got a lot more risk. In a restaurant, when you move from cooking in your kitchen to cooking at a restaurant you start to have some real world consequences. If I don't get the chocolate chip pancakes exactly right for my son, he might complain, but I can make him a different batch tomorrow and it's not going to be that big of a deal. But when somebody's paying for your food and you've got to do it fast, and you've got to really do it quickly, you've got all these issues with trying to keep the food from going to the wrong table, you got to keep from making your customers unhappy, you've got to make that food consistent. There's a lot that you have to do in terms of risk.

And so in the same way with content, you've got to do some different things so that you can deliver that better quality output. Now, I do want to say one other thing before we start jumping into what that recipe is and the recipe for success, and that is that we have seen some people go to more of this producing content at scale, but they've done it in a way that is kind of mass produced, if you will. What we want to avoid is, and I don't know if they have this term in France or not, but here in the United States, if you go to a big dinner that's being catered, some corporate event or something, sometimes if they serve you a sit down dinner, we have what's called rubber chicken and it's basically all the same kind of chicken, it's kind of bland, it's kind of ordinary. It's very functional, it's very utilitarian, but it doesn't really have zest and flavor. And I think some people approach their content in that way. They really focus on the mass production and they focus on the efficiency, but the content sort of loses its flavor. What we want to do is we want to talk about how you put these things together so that when you're producing at scale, you're still producing a Michelin quality experience. You want to be able to deliver content that's interesting, that's high quality, that's served fresh, that's made to order, and also serve it in a way that's cost efficient and doesn't stress out your employees. All right. So I've been all the talking so far, Nolwenn, before I jump in and start talking about the ingredients, any comments, thoughts here at the beginning in terms of our setup? 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. Yes. On the risks of not doing your DITA content right, there are some stories out there. There are some stories about people trying to get into structured content, not necessarily DITA, but in my case, this is about DITA content, about trying to get all the ingredients into their informational architecture. So the thinking being like, oh, if this tag is there, it's for a reason and we should add it into a recipe. And of course, you don't want to do that. DITA is a standard where you pick what you need and you leave the rest aside. So that was a good example of how not to do it, trying to have too much on your plate. It doesn't taste anything anymore. Another example that I discussed a lot, actually this was quite a long time ago

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at a workshop with Linda Urban in '29 – in 2009, sorry. And she was mentioning someone who they actually, what they wanted is to have content on the web. So they transformed their long document into one big topic and it worked. They could transform but what you said, what you mentioned, they couldn't cut that content. And so there was no granularity, the reuse was extremely difficult, of course. So they ended up cutting and pasting. And they said "Yeah, well, that's possibly something that shouldn't be considered either." I think the best advice would be really to learn about the target before jumping into this new idea of doing things differently. 

David Turner

Absolutely. And I think that's one of the important things that we're talking about today is how do we think ahead to what this really needs to look like when you're implementing, what are the key ingredients? And we're going to hit on four kind of main ingredients as we go through here today, and we're going to tie them into the recipe example and the food example and just have a little bit of fun with it, hopefully not overwhelm you with it. But we want to talk a little bit about how you set up your kitchen and how you get the right kitchen flow and how you get the right people on the team. And I think that really falls in this realm of consulting. We want to talk about the tools that you're using. When you're writing content by yourself for yourself or for small scale or whatever, you can take a lot of time, you can create a single word document, but it doesn't really scale. You're going to need new tools. In the kitchen, my little KitchenAid mixer can make breakfast for my family, but I certainly wouldn't count on it to handle the big needs that we have.

Anyway, we'll talk about that in more detail. So we're talking about consulting, we're going to talk about technology, we're going to talk about change management and governance. One of those things that I think is often left out of these conversations, and then we're going to talk about the content itself, content freshness, content conversion, and so on. So with that, let's jump here into the first one here. So in a restaurant, you've got to work on how you get things set up. If you go to create a restaurant, you've got to make sure that you've got your ingredients in the optimal place. You've got to make sure that the food flows through the right way. You've got to make sure you've got the right staff in place. I think in the DITA world, that translates into finding good help, finding a good consultant. So my question to you as kind of the expert here, how can the presence of a good consultant help make or break a DITA CCMS type project? 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Well, in our case, what we've seen so far is that there are two types of work that a consultant can help with. And the first task is really around what we mentioned earlier, the information architecture. Selecting for you, helping you find the best ingredients for your recipes, basically. Which kind of topics are you going to use? Which kind of reuse are you going to implement? What makes sense for you? It's not because you can do something that you should necessarily do something. The level of reuse that sometimes we see can lead to chaos. So that's one part, helping you devise where you want to go. The second most important task is also

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helping you actually move that content for you. So getting an inventory, getting a starting point, selecting the right CCMS, and maybe advise the lead of documentation or the C level, getting the message through that you need to create a team, you need a squad. In French, we call them a brigade, a kitchen brigade, a squad to help. Because we've seen sometimes one person is overwhelmed. They've become project manager, information architect, lead trainer, and they have all these hats and they're overwhelmed by the work they have to do and whilst at the same time, of course, doing their day-to-day work. So it's very important to think about the people that you're going to need. Do you have them in-house? Do you want to train people and get them to that level? Do you want to hire external help on top of the consultants? Do you want to maybe hire someone special for that task? When you build a restaurant and you have a walk-in fridge, what you can do is very different from a pizza truck. The setup that you have is going to be different and provide opportunities for you. And it's important to have someone with the vision to help you get through these steps. 

David Turner

Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's definitely a lot of critical areas, it sounds like, to where it's good to get help from a consultant. Let me go back and ask my first question a little bit different way. How do they really make a difference? Obviously, I've got people that are in-house that have been working with the content. Certainly they could help me in figuring out the reuse and the content model and the information, couldn't they? Or what happens? Have you seen projects before where there was no consultant involved and they really just tried to implement the tool? How does it make a difference really to have that consultant on the front end? 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Well, the project happens, first, it does happen. I mean, when there is an external help to push through, that means maybe it's more of an egg and a chicken situation where the fact that there is a consultant is proof that there is actual interest and involvement of the company to go through that project, that content project. But they're going to help and groom and communicate and they bring their experience. Sometimes we have customers that have gone through one, two migrations, two tool changes. How many has the consultant done? Possibly dozens. So they will be more efficient. They will make sure the thing happens hopefully on time and on target as well. And they will enable the people who are in charge of doing the stuff to devise a strategy. 

David Turner

Yeah. Well, I think to me, it's one of those situations, don't ever cut corners when it comes to, do I want to have a consultant or not? To me, it makes all the difference in these projects. Sometimes when people put in a new system of some kind, it's really easy to get some benefit without really taking full advantage of it. This is completely off analogy here, but I think about it as some people have tools that – it's like they bought an airplane that can take them anywhere,

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but because they haven't really spent the money and the time to really learn about it, to optimize it from somebody who's dealt with a lot of airplanes before, they end up driving it around the tarmac. So it's like basically they're able to drive the plane from one airport terminal to the other, but they never really get where they're going. 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Yes, exactly. 

David Turner

And I think that's the same thing in these projects. You could technically get it right, but there's so much they can do in helping you to avoid problems and so much that they can do in helping you to do it right and get things started. Anyway, I'm sorry, you were going to say? 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Yeah, I was about to say, don't get me wrong, CCMS and tool related help is going to come with your vendor, at least that's how we do it. But there is internal leverage that a vendor cannot reach and that's where your consultant comes in and they will also be available to you prior to the actual maybe selection of the CCMS. Maybe they will help you selecting a tool for you or with you rather. So it's more of an overarching help that you're going to have. And some people don't need a consultant on some of these pieces that I mentioned because they have internal knowledge, experience, they have very good people in-house who already have that experience and they have an information architect and they have a taxonomist or an ontologist. Well, great. That's fantastic, but not everyone has that. So it's really to make the project fair to everyone, I think. 

David Turner

Yeah. One more quick question before we go to the next ingredient. We had a lot of people on the poll who answered "Yeah, I'm already working in DITA" or "I'm a power user." What's the value of a consultant to somebody who's already maybe in DITA? I mean, obviously, I guess if they're moving from one tool to another, maybe there's some help there. But how can a good consultant be a resource to teams that have already sort of made an investment in DITA? 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Well, usually the involvement, of course, is going to be lighter. But sometimes these teams have implemented DITA like 10 years ago or seven years ago, they're on 1.2, or maybe they're using an open toolkit that's kind of outdated or maybe they never did really have the time to go through their content in the last six years. They've been using that X tool. And so they're piling up content and have made choices because of that technology that maybe will not make sense in the new system. And so that is one ingredient that not many people talked about, but the way you use your content, you manage your content and create your content, store your content, can have and possibly has an effect on your information model. 

David Turner

Yeah. Well, and especially when you start acquiring companies and acquiring other content from other places and all of that kind of good stuff. So anyway, well – in the interest of time, let's move on, though, to the next topic here. Which is: let's talk about industrial grade tools and equipment, the technology. As I said before, you can't really use your home mixer for making, I don't know, baguettes for 2,000 people. What are the important tools and technologies people should be considering when they make the move to DITA? 

24:00

Nolwenn Kerzreho

If they make the move to DITA and there are three friends cooking up their favorite recipes and joining together to eat it up with their friends, they will use their own kitchen, they will use their own ingredients, they know where the spice rack is, they know which tool they can use to do that, and maybe it's fine. If you're starting scaling up and out, that's where things get more complex. That's where you might need to buy specific tool and equipment. So if you're talking about the environment of where your content lives, the workflow, wherever you want to track that content, know which ingredients someone got allergic to something and you want to know and trace back where that ingredient is coming from, well, you better have a good content management system, because that's what you need, that's what you need at some point. And if you're building a kitchen or you're a caterer, you don't want people jumping into each other, like bumping each other, or maybe someone has a huge knife here and someone has something very heavy there and you don't want them to go near each other, really.

So there are some risks. So the implementation of your content should be very, well, careful, well thought out, I would say. So now CCMSs and kitchen, we all know there are basics, the hot, the cold. And if you are really getting into a scale, you're going to hire pastry chefs, which you didn't need when you were three people working in different kitchen or even in the one kitchen, that was fine. So it's all about business rules and putting the people and the ingredients where they need to go. If you're a pastry chef, you never need to go and see the oysters, unless you're making some very new, modern cooking. But you want the flow to be safe, controlled, you want things to be on time and super efficient because you have two hours to deliver all of those different dishes. So the time management is also going to be important in the case of getting industrialized in a sense. 

David Turner

Yeah. I think that's really critical. In working in a restaurant, I remember when I worked in a restaurant, just such a difference like, oh, wait, grating cheese was different when it came to speed. At home, I grate, or I have, like, a little roller thing. In the restaurant, when I first started with this big machine and you took a block of cheese and you shoved it in there, zoom, and it shredded it. And I was like, wow, that was cool. And then we even moved to like pre-prepared bags where we actually just took bags of cheese so it really made things even faster. But you also hit on something I think important there, which is people having access to the right things. We a lot of times don't talk about the regulatory aspects.

But when it comes to your content and creating your content and who can touch what, in a lot of industries, that's really, really critical. So when somebody tells me "I can do DITA without having a CCMS," I think "Well, why would you want to?" Because then you got to build your own ways of controlling that access. Then you got to build your own ways of speeding and scaling. We have had to unwind so many systems through the years where people, quote-unquote, created reuse using some tool that was never designed for reuse and it makes their tools inflexible. I had one customer that we could not upgrade to the latest version. They were on version two of a tool and that tool got to version five, and they couldn't upgrade because they had always just sort of

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taken just the basic parts of that tool and tried to do the rest themselves. And so they built this elaborate thing where this had a contingency of this and this and there was no way you could unwind all that. Where a good CCMS, it just brings it all together. And to me, there's a really, really compelling – what should teams be looking for when they're choosing the right technology?

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Well, here we're talking about DITA. And I think one of the ways to avoid what you were just saying, getting in a fix because you're reusing an architecture that's outdated or not maintained is really to adopt an open standard like DITA, an open architecture. It's step one. I think we've had customers moving from, and you've seen them of course as well, moving from their own XML and boy that hurts or pseudo DITA where it kind of support DITA, but not all of it. And sometimes there are big drawbacks into that. So maybe there are only topics and no topic typing. Maybe the semantics are really, really small or down tuned, maybe the structure itself. So you can have some maps in maps, which is kind of super important for a granular content and proper management of the content. So we've seen that happen and of course choosing DITA is the first step. The second step when selecting a CCMS, if you don't have someone to help you with that part, is really to collect the requirement for all stakeholders. And when I mean all takes the entire team, it's about people. It's about people. You need You need to have their backup. Otherwise, you know what?

IT may just unplug your content project because they were not ever involved into setting up the requirements. And you selected a tool and it's not meeting their basic requirements. So it could be IT's going to be know about your purchase. How does purchase work with – whose budget is it going to come from? What's the timeline? When do you need to submit? What makes a good – this all relates back in the end to building a good case, a good project overview and communicating about it. But first, just for the selection part is really talk to these people. Talk to your team and maybe support what kind of requirement they have. Would they like to have that documentation right there in their tool? Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on your industry. But would you want to send troubleshooting information on your machines and the person just has to see not the ticket number, but the error number and see right away what troubleshooting information linked to that? What is your project? What's your end goal, I think? But anyways, build the story and –

David Turner

And I would say to everybody, there are lots of different CCMS tools out there and different ones have different strengths. Like Nolwenn said, you really need to stand up. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you're doing this for the first time. It could be that you've had a CCMS now since 2012 and you're starting to hate it. So take a look out there. You'll find some are a little more out of the box. Others are a little more built for expanding and extending it.

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Some have really great integration with translation tools. Others have really great and different authoring environments. I will tell you this, I think that's one of the critical things in looking for a CCMS is what's the authoring environment like? And does it meet the need of your authors? Like Nolwenn said, focus on industry standard. And I would say also focus on people who've been around the block, because you can always find a cheap tool provider who says "Oh yeah, we got the name." And if they've got one or two customers, be really cautious going in because it could be bumpy with the learning curve. Nolwenn, I think you had something else you were going to add there. 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

When thinking about the requirements, it's also about if you're in a regulated industry, you're going to have your audits to answer to. You're going to have to be able to qualify your system. You're going to have to make sure this complies with your identity provider through a single sign-on or something. And maybe you need to plug this into your current system or you have an eye on a new way of delivering the content. So I don't think it's only around the authoring experience. I think the writers – again, when you're in your own kitchen, you do everything. When you're in a big kitchen, you can do, you're on the fish or you're on the meat or you're on the dessert or you're on – and this is part of why change management is super important when adopting new tools and new ways of working because you're not the only person in charge of that piece of information anymore. So yeah, I'm thinking that make sure to expand your requirement to involve everyone, including the end goal, maybe it's in two years, but keep that in mind as well. 

David Turner

Yeah. And I just realized I was supposed to put in this poll here before. Marianne, can you jump in here and throw this poll out to everybody? We're asking, what does your, quote-unquote, content kitchen look like today? Where are you storing your technical content? Are you storing it in a file system, in a web CMS, in a document management system? Where is that being held today? 

Marianne Calilhanna

And then we'll give folks just a couple more seconds. I see a lot of votes coming in. Really appreciate if you can just kind of share what you're doing today. 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Yeah. We want to know. 

David Turner

Interesting. I was not expecting so many from code repo there. Okay. Very good. We'll give it about five more seconds. 

Marianne Calilhanna

Okay. Yeah. I'll close it and then I'm going to share the results with everyone. 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Half have voted at the moment. 

David Turner

Yeah. I think those of you who've been in a document management system, I think moving to a DITA based system, you'll find a lot of efficiencies and power. We'll talk about the benefits here in a second. And those of you, if you've used DITA in a code repo environment, it does technically work. And if you're in a small environment, it can probably work okay.

36:00

We've seen a lot of work have to be done in those kind of environments in the past to really help them to mimic what a true CCMS does. But yeah, so we've got a handful of others there. All right. Well, let's finish this off really quickly. Anything else about just the tools and technology? Any other –

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Absolutely. I completely forgot to mention the content analysis tools. I think there are a couple out there, but of course, DCL Harmonizer pops to mind. And also one thing to, when you're talking import, export, what are the possibilities from your current tool, from that document management system? Can you do a dump? From that non-data system, how do you export your content? Can you plan it? If there is strange reusing there, how do you make sense of that content? How do you take it out, that system? Whatever it is and convert. Okay. That's Harmonizer, help, hire, do it yourself. Takes a little time, takes a long time. You're not in a hurry. You want everything at all. That's the migration conversion strategy at its core. And also the import option. So you may or may not know, but MadCap has different tools and one of them is called Layer. And another one is called IXIA CCMS, so that's the DITA CCMS. And so we're building that, actually it's built, it's already done, but we have built that sort of export and that sort of import that can help through. So what kind of capacities do the tool have is kind of important as well to know. 

David Turner

Yeah. And I think that's an important one. We recently did a RFP response with a customer and they talked about just how surprised they were and how different the systems were in terms of the options they had for getting content in and the options they had for getting content out. You also mentioned Harmonizer, just for those of you who don't know. So the idea behind Harmonizer is if I've got two documents that are relatively similar and I put them up on the screen, I can sort of eyeball it and say "Oh, well, this one is about like that." And I could try to find my – this paragraph is about the same as that paragraph, this paragraph's about the same as that paragraph. You can do that sort of manually. Harmonizer will look across hundreds of documents, thousands of documents, and it'll say "Hey, we found this exact same paragraph in 34 places and here's where they are." Or "We found this almost the same paragraph in these 17 places." And it's not just looking at the same form.

You say "Okay, we found some of this in Word documents, we found some of this in PDFs, we found some of this in InDesign documents, we found some of it in HTML" and it helps you to look across all of those things. So it's kind of a high powered tool. All right, but let's talk about the next thing. You mentioned change management a second ago, and I personally think that change management is kind of the secret ingredient. In a restaurant, it's one thing to provide some kind of initial training, it's another thing to really actually create a culture. So I can give somebody a training on food safety practices, but if I don't have a way to stop them when they're doing the wrong thing – I can remember when I used to train people, everybody walked around with a box cutter in the restaurant, so you could cut open a box of things and get out stuff that you had. And then I mentioned we moved to these pre-prepared cheese and pre-prepared lettuce that were in bags. You're not supposed to use a box cutter to open a bag of cheese.

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So we gave everybody that training. But within a couple of days, somebody jumps in and they start doing that. And that's a food safety hazard, the bacteria from the boxes and the bag, it doesn't work. So we had to create a way to follow up things and create a culture. And I think you see this same kind of thing where people put in a tool and they don't actually – either they don't enforce or they create an easy way for people to just keep doing what they were doing. I just listened to a webinar a couple of weeks ago from early information services, sciences, I can't remember, Seth Earley's group. And they were talking about implementing a taxonomy and they enforced the use of taxonomy. And I think the first term that they put in, or they forced the term that was a non-relevant term, it was like aardvark, like an anteater, hard work. And then they ran a test a few weeks later and all these items had been tagged aardvark and it's because it was like the first item in the list and it was the easy thing. So if you as a manager are looking and saying "Well, hey, are people tagging?" You might look at a report and says "Yeah, we've got 47 documents and they've all got a taxonomic term." And you think, great. But the problem is they've all got a taxonomic term that doesn't mean anything. So instead, you've got to build this culture, you've got to build this governance so that people not only use your system, but they use it in the right way, the optimal way, the way that sort of meets the business needs. Do you have any stories, either –

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Yes. Yes, of course. 

David Turner

– good stories or bad stories? 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

The aardvark story reminds me of how sometimes when you check in content or you can label it or you comment for those who are on Git or something like this, when you comment the changes and we sometimes have the question, can you enforce that there is a comment? And we say, yes. Can you enforce that it's a meaningful comment? Not so much. So there are ways you can present something that makes sense or the most sense. You can have a popup that says "Have you done this?" There are ways in the UX that you can help the person do this, and that's why having well thought out UX and tools make sense. And in your case, maybe that term was not the right one, but at least the people could search and view which term it was. So that is also something that you not necessarily think about it. But of course when you enforced rules, well, trust and check, train, of course, trust and check. And at the start, you're going to see errors. And then as you go, people will get adapted and adjusted to the new tool.

Another thing to remember is really to give a safe line to the user to go through the change because there are going to be times when they're depressed, they're overburdened, they don't remember why they're doing – why again are we doing this? And you need to have the motto or safety line for them to tell. Remember, we're doing this because at the end of the day, at the end of the project, that's what we're going to be able to do. Yes. A good story for change management is a story from one of our largest customer, I'm not sure I'm allowed to say their names, large European software customer. And what they did, they had already a team. So typically people will implement a CCMS starting with one division or one core team and then move on with phases as they grow. And what that is that they paired

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someone who – with knowledge of the system, with someone who was new to the system, and they were called documentation buddies. And that was a cool story and a very effective way of helping the people go through the motions, even when not necessarily "Oh, I clicked the wrong thing," but more of the morale, keep up the morale and get the people where you want them to go. Yeah. That was – 

David Turner

One other thing I'll say about change management and governance is I think an incredibly important thing is you've got to – well, first of all, you've got to create a means of following up. I remember as a young restaurant manager I got in trouble with the area manager who came in and said "Why isn't this done?" And I said "Well, I told them." He said "You told them, but did you follow it up?" So you've got to create some follow up type mechanisms. But I think the other thing is, is that you really need to develop champions and develop champions early. And I'll say this, champions, multiple with an S, because I've seen countless projects fail because there was a project champion and they sort of got everybody moving in the same direction, but then 18 months, they got moved to a different project, they left and went to a different company and next thing there's nobody else beating the drum and the tool stops getting used.

All right. In the interest of time let's jump to the last ingredient. We've talked about the consulting and how that's so critical. We've talked about the industry, the industrial type tools and technology. We talked about change management and governance. Well, let's talk a little bit about the content piece and conversion and content readiness. I've used this same quote several times in several webinars, so please forgive me if you're using it again, but Val Swisher, one of the longtime consultants in this industry, has a quote about if you've got crappy content and you go and you invest in really expensive tools, but don't do anything about the content, what you end up with is expensive, crappy content. And that's so true. You've got to address the content. So in some points you might need to rewrite some of it. But I think a big part of it is you've got to do an inventory of it. You've got to make an analysis of it. And the bigger thing is that you've got to convert it. People use the term migration a lot, but a lot of times we're not really migrating something. We're moving somebody from Microsoft Word or from InDesign or from some other tool, and we're having to break it apart and convert it into a completely different model.

It's not like going from Word to PDF, or from like TIF to PNG; it's really breaking it apart into different elements and making sure they're tagged and making sure that they're organized in the right way. That's a very difficult thing with technical content to get done in the right way. There are a lot of people say "Oh yeah, I can write you a script for that." And I think if you have pretty simple content, maybe you can. There's some people who have been trying AI with it and they're like "Oh, it gets me 90% there." Well, the truth is if you're only 90% there, you got a ton of work to get that rest of that 10%. Whereas DCL takes an approach, let us use our expertise, we've been doing this for, well, DCL's been in business 45 years and we've been working with DITA since it came out 20 years ago. Let us take that on. We can basically do all the document prep, do all the document conversion and transformation, do all the quality control

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so that when your people get in the system, it just works. And I'll tell you this, the CCMS vendors are happy when we work with this because then their new users can worry about learning how to use the system and getting the right governance and all of that. And they don't have to think about the content or cleaning up the content. Talked to one company a couple of years ago and they tried to do the conversion themselves. They bought the tool. Two and a half years later, they still had not gone live because they hadn't finished their conversion. "Well, this happened" and "that happened" and "this happened." Whereas a team like DCL, we can knock those things out in no time. So Nolwenn, any quick stories about that before we start to recap? 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

There are so many stories out there about maybe sometimes – there's one thing that is sometimes misconsidered or not considered enough is the timing. So sometimes you convert your content too early and then it change and then you don't really use the new content and then it's outdated and you've spent that money and that time and that energy into moving content that didn't really make sense. And something that I discussed with my project manager, one of our project managers in setting this webinar up, and I didn't expect that one, but I think it's nice. She said people consider the technology, but they don't really consider the content. So they end up having to do this, but too late into the implementation project. So people aren't trained; there is no content for them to work with. And it can have an impact on your getting live. So that's kind of a scary – so her advice, and I thought it was perfect for this webinar especially because she said "Hire your conversion consultant early. Do that early. Do that early." And I think it looks back into our first conversation around who should be on that project and should you hire a consultant? And if you're doing things at scale, the answer is most definitely "Yes." 

David Turner

And I'll add this, you don't have to convert all of your content at once. One of the nice things about working with somebody like DCL is that we'll come in and we'll get the process set up, but then we can set this up to really do it on your terms. "Hey, we need this content now. We're doing a project with IXIA, MadCap IXIA right now where we're starting off and we've got this certain batch of content is kind of priority one and then we're going to move on and we've got the next set and then the next set and we're able to do that over time so that they can focus and they can get this group of people onboarded and then get that group of people onboarded. It doesn't have to be a one size fits all. And you can also approach it with different content types. Hey, we've got this type of customer facing content we want to approach one way. Let's do that. Now we've got this other that's internal facing. How do we do that? Then we got this other that is regulatory in nature. How do we do that? We can approach those things in all different ways. So anyway, we're getting about 10 minutes left and I know I want to hit a couple of quick summary points here. When you look at these four ingredients, they're all kind of powerful on their own, how do they work together and what happens if one of them's missing? 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Well, no consultant, be prepared for costly mistakes maybe or for internal hire, that's going to be important. There are always, always surprises with conversion and tools. Again, timing, be prepared for a longer project maybe.

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And again, it depends on your starting point, of course, and where you want to go, but badly constructed information will definitely limit what you can do with it, what you can do with AI, what you can do with reusability, with web delivery, with even how easily managed it is. If you don't have the technology, well, be prepared to hire, be prepared for costly mistakes. 

David Turner

You did, by the way, you just mentioned AI. So these days we can't have a webinar without discussing AI. 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Yes, absolutely. 

David Turner

How does all this together really help AI? 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Oh, well, there are countless posts there about how structured, semantically meaningful, concise content is better for AI search and IR results and RAG agents as well can help that. Within MadCap, we have this three step, not three step, but three aspects, AI readiness implementation in our tool. So it's about content intelligence, so knowing what's out there, how you're doing that content, is that content reachable? How is it accessed? And so on. Content access, so that's really the access part. So the delivery part, if you'd like. And content assistance for authoring. And really the idea here is to ground the content better for better AI delivery, if that makes sense for you guys out there. I'm sure we're going to get some questions on that. But yeah, that's the main part. 

David Turner

In the interest of getting to the questions, I mean, I would have loved to talk about how does AI have an impact actually on the DITA implementation on the other side, but we'll save that one for another time. Let's just quickly talk about what success looks like so we can get to the questions that I know have started to pile up. So I got two pictures here, and the thinking was at the end of the day, we need to talk about what success looks like, but I think that using our restaurant example, some customers, they might be out of their own kitchen, but they might be moving up to run a food truck while others might be more of a five star restaurant. How do things change? What are the benefits and how does success change depending on whether you kind of have this food truck example or the five star restaurant? 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Well, for us, on my side, as a technology vendor it depends on the point of view. I would say for us, it's a happy customer. It's someone who can go to their goals and go to their management and say "We've done this. Go get our pay raise." For the author, I think it's more about how I deliver content that is meaningful and that our customers can leverage, self-reliant customer, maybe that's a goal. For the implementation people it's "Okay, this is running well. This is stable. This is safe and we can do what you need to do with the least work possible." At the end of Friday night, we all want to go home. But success looks like very different if you're in a large company or a small company. We had successful migration projects from customers. They had two million plus topics and they did it and it was not all of their documentation. So I think it's mostly if the end goal is rich,

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that's the success for our customers. 

David Turner

Yeah. Well, I think a lot of customers have seen significant return on investment in these kind of initiatives. Number one, in terms of being able to keep the right headcounts. Number two, in being able to get the content produced so much more quickly. I've talked to customers who used to take five months to produce a particular publication and when they moved to this structure-based model, it cut it down to they got the updates done and put together in less than like a week, significant, and then saved them tens of thousands of dollars in terms of translations costs. We've had some in the hundreds of thousands of dollars of translation costs, say. But anyway, we got three minutes till the hour, so I'm sure at this point, Marianne, is just a little bit panicked about getting to a question or two. So let's just let you jump in.

 

Marianne Calilhanna

Sure. And I do want to remind everyone, if we don't get to your question, we're going to follow up. So no concerns there. When you were talking about AI, David – well, before the AI part, David, you talked about the example, the Seth Earley webinar example of meaningless taxonomy options. And Nolwenn, you mentioned not being able to ensure the check-in comments are meaningful. Do you think AI could be useful in pieces like that? 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Yeah, actually in that particular example, we're not doing it, but we have customers who implemented that. They had a language checker, very well known language checker. And if the comments were not good enough in the code – get this, so that was for the software devs. If their comments in the code was not passing a certain level of quality, they couldn't commit. 

David Turner

Yeah. And I've seen some tools that integrate with systems like particularly with the taxonomy where the person pulls it up and instead of giving them a list to pick, instead of them choosing, it immediately suggests, the tool has used AI to look and it says "All right, here are the six tools that we think are definitely – or six terms. Here are six terms that we think maybe –" And then the user could say "Oh yeah, all those look good." Or they could say "No, not that one, not that one." And they found a lot more flexibility with that and a lot more power. 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Yeah. But definitely to answer your question, yes, it could be done with AI solutions. 

Marianne Calilhanna

Nolwenn, during the portion where we're talking about technology, you mentioned a few tools. Do you remember what those were? Could you repeat those? 

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Oh. CCMS, Harmonizer from you guys. And I mentioned, well, Flare and IXIA, because we're building that path for migration when people want to scale up and have those business rules in place and switch to DITA. So we have this export tool that is available for Flare, but that's available on demand. So you need to reach out to us to have that made available to you. And the IXIA import, it was more not so much about the tool themselves than the capacities of the systems you're using, exporting from and importing to, and what they can do with your content. And basically when you're selecting something, check the exit strategy. 

Marianne Calilhanna

Well, we've come to the top of the hour. I want to thank everyone taking time out of your day to attend this webinar and a quick reminder that the DCL Learning Series comprises webinar such as this, a monthly newsletter and our blog. You can access many other webinars related to content structure, XML, DITA, AI from dataconversionlaboratory.com. We do hope to see you at future webinars. We hope everyone has a great meal today, whether that's going to be your lunch or your evening meal and have a great day.

Nolwenn Kerzreho

Thank you.

Marianne Calilhanna

Thank you, Nolwenn, and thank you, David. This concludes today's webinar.