Chuck Martin
May 1, 2025

More than 200 content developers and strategists answered “Yes” to the title of the famous Dionne Warwick song and indeed found their way to San Jose in early April for the 27th ConVEx conference, hosted by the Center for Information-Development Management (CIDM). The conference offered four tracks over 2½ days on topics such as “Evolving Technical Writing Roles in the AI Era,” “Fighting Words: DITA and The Battle for Better Content,” and “Optimizing Content for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Solutions.”

If Warwick had been at the conference, she might have been tempted to update the title of her classic song to “Do You Know the Way to AI.” While only 11 sessions had some version of “AI” in the session title, AI was on the lips of nearly every presenter, on the minds of most attendees, and in the marketing materials of the many sponsors whose booths ringed the conference ballroom.

Comtech Services’ Dawn Stevens welcomed attendees in the ballroom Monday morning, noting that the conference had grown year-over-year and welcomed approximately 70 locals. Dawn noted that the goal of the conference is to focus everyone on content strategy and content creation, with an emphasis on how different types of change affect the field:

  • Creative change – redefining content as user experience, with writers now using design tools such as Figma and Canva
  • Intermediating change – writers collaborating with designers and product managers and community-driven docs and participatory content
  • Progressive change – continuous upskilling in tech tools and using analytics to enhance content
  • Radical change – AI-generated documentation and writers on product teams as UX/content designers

And with that, attendees were off to the four learning tracks.

Selected Session Summaries

Here are a few notes from some of the sessions this reporter attended.

Scriptorium’s Sarah O’Keefe kicked off one of ConVEx’s four tracks in her session titled So Much Waste, So Little Strategy: Enterprise Content Strategy by noting that large enterprises don’t typically have one source of truth for content across many buckets and that content silos reflect corporate structure. She contrasted tech comm and learning, saying that tools for tech comm are optimized for technical content and learning management tools are optimized for learning content. She surmised it created a huge “us vs. them” problem.

Bhavya Aggarwal, CEO & Founder of zipBoard, a content review and approval platform, in her session, The Power of Collaboration: Transforming Content Development for the Modern User, talked about how teams that collaborate effectively are 5 times more likely to achieve high performance and that collaboration matters because users demand rapid, personalized, and engaging content.

Jonatan Lundin, of Excosoft AB, focused on content delivery and making sure content delivered is relevant in his Delivering Targeted and Relevant Online Information session, saying that relevant content delivery is the ability to deliver the right content for the right role at the right time. He said that when users don’t get content filtered, they have to find relevant content themselves, which means having to judge whether what they find is relevant and useful. Delivering relevant content means hiding content that is not relevant to them. So how to achieve relevant content delivery? One example is serial number-specific documentation.

Rebekka Andersen, from the University of California, Davis, and Carlos Evia, from Virginia Tech, described in Designing Curricular Transformation in Technical Communication Through Industry and Academia how they started a multi-disciplinary research project to understand how content roles have evolved in industry. They asserted it is a complicated love story between industry and academia in technical communication. But there’s also a disconnect between industry and academia because they are not speaking the same language. One issue is that many technical communication programs still do not offer instruction in structured authoring, content modeling, and other topics relevant in today’s content world.

In The Wizard of Docs: Finding the Magic Behind Taxonomy-Driven Documentation, Scott Hudson, Sr. Mgr, Content Architecture, and Eliot Kimber, Sr. Staff Content Engineer, both from ServiceNow, dug deeply into DITA, taxonomy, and classification. They opened their Tuesday morning session with a song about taxonomy using a very Wicked/Wizard of Oz theme. Continuing that theme, they asked “How do we help Dorothy? How do we classify content in a way that works for both authors and customers?” The answer, they explained, lies in DITA Subject Scheme maps, which define consistent terms, define authoring consistency, and enable powerful navigation. It’s not magic, but a structure, scalable solution.

On Tuesday afternoon, Manny Silva, of Skyflow, started his The Docs Pipeline of the (Near) Future session by talking about how the ways we create content are going to change. He said that today’s (C)CMS pipelines consist of authoring, publishing, and collaboration tools, including DITA tooling, WYSIWYG editors, and Sharepoint and Jira. The challenges with current pipelines are that content is created manually, validation is time-consuming, and maintenance requires extensive overhead. His idea is to create pipeline models that focus on two concepts: content testing and content self-healing. In the content testing model, also described as docs-as-tests, docs are testable assertions of product behavior where actual information, not syntax or style, is validated before publication. In the content self-healing model, self-healing tools automatically identify and resolve common documentation issues with minimal intervention.

Wednesday, Frank Miller, of Ryffine, in Structure Through Delivery: The New Gateway to DITA Adoption, suggested that the traditional single CMS source of truth in single, organization-wide content repositories should be replaced with modern content delivery platforms (CDP). The idea is that in the traditional CMS approach to “break down” silos, there is heavy structure, high upfront costs, significant resistance across teams, and an extended period before realizing measurable ROI. Because teams want their own repositories, having all the content in one CDP is a good compromise. Modern CDP platforms support multiple formats seamlessly and connect with existing tools and workflows, so CDPs can be used as aggregation points for content. This new approach starts with delivery and shows immediate value. CDPs replace a “big bang” with progressive structure and with early wins and flexible timing, all of which lowers risk and gives leaders an object that is not only shiny, but valuable.

Overall Themes, and More

A key theme that emerged throughout ConVEx San Jose and its numerous sessions was the critical importance of structure. Structured content was repeatedly emphasized as the cornerstone of effective information experiences—experiences that are significantly enhanced when content is enriched with metadata, systematically organized within taxonomies, and properly classified and governed.

Structuring content, categorizing content, and tagging content are all also keys to successful AI implementations and for getting the right information to the right person in the right role in the right location for the specific task they need to do. As organizations grow, well-structured, well-tagged information allows them to better manage and deliver their growing content, something that isn’t inherent in one of technical communication’s more popular trends: docs-as-code. In fact, one session described a team moving from a CCMS to docs-as-code, and then back to a CCMS because docs-as-code made the team’s work harder.

Structured content and AI were front and center for the many sponsors/exhibitors who had booths around the conference ballroom. They ranged from companies who produce content development, content management, and content delivery tools to companies who offer industry consulting and employment services. Many folks stopped by booths during the course of the conference to get information and to collect swag and treats. A special shout-out to Bluestream and Metapercept as general conference sponsors, Cisco who sponsored Monday’s conference breakfast, and Content Rules for Tuesday’s afternoon snack break.

Exhibitors participated in Test Kitchen sessions, offering in-depth demonstrations of how their products address specific content challenges. These sessions attracted large audiences and provided valuable opportunities for attendees to explore practical solutions to enhance their work.

Throughout the event, numerous informal conversations emerged, as attendees exchanged ideas, discussed shared obstacles, and fostered professional connections. These meaningful interactions underscore the collaborative spirit of the conference, with the hope that these relationships will continue to grow and flourish when ConVEx reconvenes in 2026 at ConVEx Pittsburgh.

Photos by Chuck Martin