Anu Singh, Fiserv
September 15, 2020
In his book “The Fourth Industrial Revolution,” the World Economic Forum founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab mentioned that we must fundamentally change the way we live, work, and relate to one another in this Information and Communication Technology (ICT) era of rapid development. This era is witnessing many disruptive digital technologies, such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things, big data, and artificial intelligence, and are rapidly penetrating the Finance industry while enabling a fusion of physical and virtual worlds through cyber-physical systems (CPS). The cognitive technologies — deep learning, agentive technology, bots, and AI — have made us rethink how we deliver information.
The traditional documents with hundreds of pages have turned into opportunities for providing a more pragmatic way of accessing information focusing on the right content, the right set of people, and at the right time. The big question is how to undo the hundreds of pages and deliver small content modules that a user needs to accomplish a specific task, successfully. Our answer lies in Metadata that makes it possible to select the right content and can categorize a large amount of data. The end result is intelligent information. Also, the focus has shifted from instructing to supporting learner-directed activities and helping a user recover from any error that they inevitably make.
Ann Rockley, who several believe, is the mother of content strategy, says that “We’ve gone from documents which are “black boxes” to content which is “structurally rich and semantically aware, and is therefore automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable”. Intelligent content is an adaptation of digital text, image, video, audio or multimedia data with coding added that allows it to be automatically processed for various purposes and adapted for access across different devices and interfaces1. “Metadata can be used as a tool to mine, manage and move data, regardless of where it resides. And the Hitachi Content Intelligence platform is all about building good metadata and helping customers figure out how metadata can help achieve their business and IT goals.”
When you are managing a business, reduced costs, paced up delivery time, optimized resources and enhanced customer satisfaction matters the most, and intelligent content helps you achieve all of these and more. Although emerging technology is paving new ways for the technical communicator, machine learning and artificial intelligence will play a more important role in help authoring and automation of technical writing. You may be considering machine learning to analyze written text and provide feedback about its readability, or aid to smarter and faster search engines; however, the humane side of content would still need human intelligence to analyze, set the goals, and control the whole process. More recent approaches consider learning as an integral part of enhancing user experience and making it as effortless as possible.