Conference Program Abstracts

Welcome Address, Critical Conversations
JoAnn Hackos – Center for Information-Development Management

At the 2008 Best Practices Conference, hear CIDM presenters talk about the Critical Conversations they have to spur innovation and advocate for changes that benefit their content consumers. Learn what managers mean when they discuss “changing the language of engagement.” Hear the stories our members tell about the critical conversations they hold with

• team members who must embrace new ways of engaging with content customers
• customers who must tell us about the content they most value
• colleagues through the global enterprise who are responsible for creating content
• senior management who must recognize that content is a marketable asset
• information technologists who understand that content is more than data

At the center of our Critical Conversations is the value proposition for content development. In September, you learn how to

• create and communicate a comprehensive value model for content
• measure productivity and effectiveness
• establish a service model for content development
• develop the right skills to move our organizations forward

As we are challenged with global change—recognizing the impact of reorganizations, offshore development, mergers and acquisitions, new delivery methods, and more—we come together to offer support, knowledge, and experience to our management community.

Content and the Bottom Line: Defining the business value of your publications
Suzanne Sowinska, Barbara McGuire, & Alan Theurer – Microsoft Corporation

How do you measure the business value of your content? Is it a challenge to convince your company’s executives that your publications contribute to return on investment (ROI)? Content is often considered an intangible asset that cannot be measured in monetary terms. Learn how a team of content publishers at Microsoft developed a business value “kit” that provides multiple options for determining, in measurable ways, the value proposition for content publishing.

Critical Conversations with Colleagues—Developing Content Coalitions
Eileen Jones & Jamie Roberts – IBM Corporation
Dean Easterlund & David R. Jones – John Deere

IBM's information strategy is focused on excellence in the Total Information Experience (TIE), by "delivering the right content to the right person at the right time." Information excellence is the shared responsibility of an IBM-wide community of content producers. To deliver their TIE strategy, they created an IBM Content Board. This presentation will discuss how they created the Content Board, its key responsibilities, and how the Board operates across content domains, from pre-sales to Support.

Critical Conversations with Customers ... Are We Asking Questions That Lead to Answers We Need?
Bob Beims – Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.
Daphne Walmer – Medtronic CRM

blogs ... wiki’s ... RSS ... social networking ... online collaboration ... tagging ... social bookmarking ... what do any of these exciting Web 2.0 technologies have to do with the way your customers tackle their enormously complex jobs? And how will they change life for the Information Development community? In this lively panel discussion we'll dive into ideas about how we can all create more "user friendly" technical information, delivered the way the Digital Native wants it ... the right information at the right time via the right delivery channel.

Critical Conversations with IT—Aligning with IT to Bring Solutions to the Business
Ron Watson – ITT Fluid Technologies

Many employees in organizations don’t think of IT in value terms. They think of IT as a cost center or an obstacle to overcome. Partnering with IT, in fact, is more important than ever due to the complex nature of modern enterprise applications. That doesn’t change the fact that it can be challenging. Ron focuses on overcoming the barriers and implementing win-win solutions. Key areas of discussion include

• developing a clear and well-developed business vision and strategy
• leveraging IT technical knowledge with well-developed project management skills and tools
• aligning your project within the confines of closely watched IT budgets
• measuring factors like productivity, headcount, revenue, customer satisfaction, cycle time, and risk reduction

Critical Conversations with Management—Negotiating vs. Building a Vision
Chona E. Shumate – Cymer, Inc.

How do Tech Com managers “negotiate” for what resources they need? The issue is that we should not be negotiating, but rather, building a compelling argument that becomes part of a proposal for your “vision.” Key to this strategy is thinking ahead, being persuasive in your communications, and presenting effective data. Your team plays an important role in your vision-building. This presentation describes how and what to communicate, provides five examples of data collection, and shows you how to demonstrate the leadership your manager wants to see so that you get what you need.

Critical Conversations with Staff—Choosing Your Words Carefully…
Catherine Lyman – Network Appliance, Inc.
Colleen Smith – Teradata Corporation

You have the perfect plan, the funding, and a great team, but your project isn’t progressing the way you expected. What’s missing? Maybe you and your team can benefit from changing the language you use to interact, set goals, and work through daily challenges. Join Colleen and Catherine as they illustrate some common team challenges and how language can help you work with individual contributors to reach your goals. They may make you laugh a bit at the same time!

Critical Conversations with Training—Lessons Learned: Documentation and courseware working together
Wanda Applegate & Laura Readdy – Siemens PLM Software

Traditionally, documentation and courseware have been authored separately with little shared planning or content development. However, the overlap of both customer needs and topics is often significant. This presentation provides lessons learned from a team in the process of bringing together the planning and content development for documentation and courseware.

Dewey: XML-Based Web Publishing at Symantec Corporation
Robert Lee – Symantec Corporation

Robert Lee highlights Symantec’s Dewey publishing system. This system allows Information Development Managers to publish their content directly to the Web, with no interaction with IT or the Web team. Source XML files are converted to How-To topics and are published to the Symantec website immediately. Features include

• streamlined publishing pipeline
• greater access to content from search engines, like Google
• direct customer feedback on each topic
• use of subject metadata in XML source to build Web navigation

By moving to a topic-based publishing model, we have increased our customers’ ability to find content and provide feedback. PDF-based content was all but invisible to search engines like Google. But the new How-To topics consistently appear within the first few results.

Topic-based publishing makes it much easier to point a customer to a solution. Our support forums on the Symantec Technology Network (www.symantec.com/stn) average over 3 million visitors a month. In the past, pointing a customer to a single section of a PDF-based manual was difficult. Support representatives would often create “new” shorter documents by copying and pasting text from the manuals. Having content available in topics saves time for our Support representatives and makes it more convenient for the Support community members to help each other.

Another key strategy is using information gleaned from search engine reports and customer feedback to make editorial decisions. In the past, Information Development teams would work with their product teams to determine which systems needed to be written about, and which had priority. With reports generated from Dewey, we can now see what our customers are searching for online, and read what our customers are saying about the content. This information makes planning our content development priorities much more efficient.

Making the Grade at Survey yoU!
Buddy Lee – Jack Henry & Associates, Inc.

This session takes you through a day at Survey yoU as the Professor discusses the implementation of effective survey techniques. Based on tried-and-tested strategies, you’ll learn how to efficiently gather information from a customer base, objectively measure the results, and critically analyze the data to build customer relationships and improve retention and satisfaction. Implementing these strategies will ensure you’ll graduate at the top of your class!

Promoting the Value of Technical Publications by Focusing on Solutions Documentation
Helen Shaw – Juniper Networks

In 2005, the Infrastructure Products Technical Publications group at Juniper Networks proposed a strategy for creating solutions documentation for specific applications of their networking products. They verified their strategy with customers through their usability program and released their first solutions documentation in 2007. In addition to providing documentation that focuses on how customers use our products, the strategy has resulted in benefits such as the reuse of information for sales and training and career development for employees. The strategy has also been a consideration in the creation of a portfolio of Technical Publications services that Juniper can offer to product teams. June and Helen will share their experiences and the challenges they encountered in developing and implementing their strategy.

Strategies for Applying a Global Service Model to Content Development
Denise Kiser – VMware, Inc.
JoCarol Gau – BMC Software, Inc.
Tim Harrington– Juniper Networks

The panel discusses innovative best practices in creating and managing dispersed teams that are collaborative, productive, supportive, and motivated. Join this diverse group as they talk about how they measure productivity and effectiveness, and the special skills and processes required to make dispersed teams more effective.

Useful Metrics for Measuring the Success (or Failure) of Reuse
JoAnn Hackos & Bill Hackos – Comtech Services, Inc.

As we plunge into the realm of content reuse, we must find ways to give management accurate estimates about our costs to implement, our expected savings, and what the time table will be. We must also determine if we are on track during the implementation project. In this session, we discuss meaningful metrics to measure quantitatively the reuse of XML modular content, the cost structure of an XML reuse project, the value of documentation produced by your group using modular XML, and the increased company profitability created by groups using modular XML.