Arpita Maity, RWS
April 15, 2023

Driving powerful search with knowledge graphs

Search should be about getting people to complete their mission. Search has evolved just as consumers have in their quest for ease of use. As technology has evolved, so has the search to help people achieve more and more complex tasks. Today consumer expectations are such that search is not limited to just text but also in more advanced formats such as voice, AR/VR, or chatbots. […]

Geetha Haridas, Qualcomm
April 15, 2023

Estimation is often an overlooked aspect of the documentation development lifecycle, particularly in environments that require authors to work reactively and meet multiple deadlines in short timescales. Though some amount of project uncertainty is inevitable, failure to estimate documents can have a major impact on the quality of documentation produced. For example, authors might absorb too much last-minute work and might not have time to self-check their documentation, which consequently impacts the quality of work they produce.

Therefore, before agreeing to deadlines, it is extremely important to assess the time and effort required to complete a project and then plan the work schedule. It is also essential to ensure that the projects are not estimated based on individual experience and the estimates are relevant for all authors involved, especially if a project involves multiple authors. […]

Dana Aubin and Trish Grindereng, Comtech Services
March 15, 2023

How do companies measure the business value of technical documentation content, and what does “business value” mean anyway—customer experience, revenue, retained knowledge, or something else? During a recent CIDM managers’ roundtable discussion, members shared their thoughts on defining business value and practices for quantifying the value of content. […]

Fabrice Lacroix, Fluid Topics
February 15, 2023

ChatGPT is probably the most eye-opening and promising innovation of the past 10 years. I have been in the high-tech industry for over 35 years, lucky to be involved in deploying the Internet and creating the first websites, then working in the search engine technology, knowledge modeling, and machine learning space for 20 years, and I must admit that ChatGPT is one of the most impressive things I have ever seen. And it is a shock to everyone, not just tech nerds.

So much so that every company is probably currently trying to assess how this can transform, endanger, or foster its business. ‘What can we do with this? Will it transform the way we work? If we don’t act, will our competitors displace us?’ Interesting moment, full of promises and opportunities. Or not? […]

Dana Aubin and Trish Grindereng, Comtech Services
February 1, 2023

With the start of a new year, it’s the perfect time to think about setting team goals. At January’s CIDM roundtable, we had a great discussion about the diverse ways companies set performance goals and conduct reviews.

Some companies use traditional goal setting where performance planning and reviews are an annual event with goals set at each level of the business and cascaded down. However, other companies are trying different strategies to evaluate employees, which enables goals to be set more frequently and allows for adjustments to changing business demands. […]

Sairam Venugopalan, Qualcomm
February 1, 2023

The queen’s language, the imperial vernacular, the royal dialect,…we’ve seen different connotations of this elite or eerie communication channel or medium of instruction called English. With its far-flung diversification and subtleties, the roots of the British English tree have proliferated into variegated scripts. Conspicuous among the branches of that base tree is international or American English. While all lingos encounter this bizarreness as they have spinoffs, the perplexities are more profound with the English dialect because of the universal and percolated usage or adoption it has. This compendium attempts to muse on a few stark differences that we see with the generalized or global English codifications, offering nuggets for thought, evoking a chuckle, or arousing a revelation. With this subject under the scanner having unbounded lengths and depths, only the surface can be scratched in the excavation or expedition to conduct an anatomy and introspection of the English trove. […]

Geetha Haridas, Qualcomm
January 15, 2023

User documentation plays a critical role in helping users to understand how to use software products. Although the belief that ‘nobody reads documents’ still exists, research studies by Schriver (1997) suggest that users, regardless of their age or gender, read documentation to understand and use products and technology. However, documentation can be successful only if it meets the requirements of users (Schriver 1997).

The demand for quality documentation has given rise to concepts such as information design that are concerned with creating usable information for users. However, information design is a vast field that has been defined in various ways. Information design sometimes involves enhancing the appearance and readability of documentation (Burnett 2001). In some other contexts, information design is a problem-solving activity that authors carry out to create usable documentation (Carliner 2001). Multiple and contradictory views about information design often make it difficult to apply this concept in a practical context. […]

Comtech Services
December 2022

Helen St. Denis, Stilo
December 1, 2022

Migrating unstructured content to structure

There are several ways to convert your unstructured content to a structure such as DITA XML. You can do it in-house, of course, if you have the resources available. It will usually involve writing, adjusting, and maintaining scripts to do the heavy lifting. The more formats the content is in, the more scripts you will need.

Alternatively, you can gather up all your content and send it to a vendor to convert it for you. It is often better to let a specialist do the work so you don’t have to. But it may mean a content freeze for some time while the conversion is undertaken. […]

Anu Singh, Fiserv
November 15, 2022

In the last two years, the way organizations have evolved with respect to digital transformation, in a similar fashion, the traditional approach towards content development has evolved, and the line between–the guided and unguided learning has blurred with a noticeable shift in the learning environment that many of us might be experiencing.

In a corporate learning environment, as educators and clients’ success enablers, it is our responsibility to support learners on their product adoption or learning journey through a holistic learning process and create a learning environment that is safe and provides learners with an opportunity to play with the learning content. As we evolve with Industry 4.0, it is critical to consider the experiences that come with technology and complement it with content that users need with the technology they are using. […]