CIDM eNews 01.19

CIDM eNews

January 2019
A monthly e-newsletter from The Center for Information-Development Management (CIDM)
Dawn Stevens, CIDM Director

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Round Table Highlights: Taxonomy Development

Sabine Ocker, Comtech Services

We are sharing 2.5 quintillion bytes of data  on the internet daily. According to the IBM Marketing Cloud Study, 90% of the existing content on the internet has been created since 2016. We have heard this sheer magnitude of new information available to us each and every day referred to as the “content tsunami.” Emerging paradigms such as the Internet of Things and interactive content access such as chatbots will only continue to accelerate the volume and velocity of the giant wave of new information. Given this reality, the user’s challenge to find and filter information quickly and effectively increases exponentially, no matter the context of the information they are seeking. As taxonomies are an integral part of effective finding and filtering content, so their significance is only expected to grow as well.

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Use Case: Technical Documentation Team
SmartDocs for creating and maintaining customer-facing document sets Challenge

Lisa Pietrangeli, 36Software

Many of our customers have in-house technical writing teams that create, edit, and maintain product documentation. One particular customer was experiencing associated challenges with their creation and maintenance of customized, modular content. They needed a system that would help them produce customized manuals for their customers on-demand to accompany each unique sale. The organization’s technical writing team recognized the benefits of applying content reuse and conditional text to their content in an effort to streamline the process and get documents into their customers’ hands faster.

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Evolving from writers to UX writers

Elizabeth Hui Reese, Microsoft

Talk to anyone who started out as a tech writer at the beginning of this century, and they’ll regale you with stories of spending time in big docs, long publishing times, and an inability to change things quickly. I started out during this period, editing big binders of training materials for our customers who were studying to gain Microsoft certifications. These days, it’s rare for me to write an article that’s more than 100 words. The focus of the writers on my team is no longer on text-heavy documentation, but on how to craft the right in-product messaging that’s targeted, helpful, and delightful—all in phrases that are sometimes shorter than a 140-character tweet.

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Welcome New CIDM Member—Amazon Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals, companies and governments, on a paid subscription basis. The technology allows subscribers to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, available all the time, through the Internet. Learn more about CIDM (Center for Information-Development Management).

CIDM is calling for contributions to the bimonthly publication, Best Practices. Please contact Susie Christmas for more information.

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