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Growing Your Skills – Intelligent Content

by Gloria McConnell, Rough Draft Managing Editor

Happy New Year, everyone! Yes, I know this salutation is a bit late, and it may seem too chipper in this particular economic cycle and time of uncertainty. But I’m sure you do not need yet one more dissertation on that topic. Instead, let’s talk about intelligent content.

What is intelligent content?

I recently attended the Intelligent Content conference and learned much about how people are making the very most of the information within their organizations. For a good introduction to intelligent content, see Ann Rockley’s article, What is intelligent content? Rockley, President of The Rockley Group and STC Fellow, explains that intelligent content is “structurally rich and semantically aware, and is therefore automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable.”

Over a decade ago, I was involved in a project in which my technical documentation and training organization was striving to move to a content management system (one of the underpinnings of  intelligent content). We didn’t think our mission was to create intelligent content, but it was. We wanted to create a database of content that could be used by both the documentation and the training development groups; the technical support and projects groups, too. One piece (“chunk”) of information, multiple uses. We struggled to define what a chunk would be, which system we would use (they were all so very expensive), how we would manage the conversion of our content, eliminate duplication (oh, we had a lot of duplication), and fully implement both system and process. It was overwhelming. As enthusiastic as we were, we were a bit ahead of our time, and not in an organization that could in any way be characterized as “bleeding edge.” So the project stalled and eventually faded away completely.

Now, over 10 years later, the same organization has a documentation group that has actually implemented a content management system. The content is not being used across groups yet, but at least the foundation – the technical content is in place – chunked and waiting for a process that will allow the training group and others to take advantage.

The time is right for intelligent content

What is the difference? We could have done it with SGML, at least gotten started. Several factors prevented our success, and we don’t need to go into those right now. What I did not realize was just how premature we were in terms of creating truly intelligent content until I read The Emergence of Intelligent Content, a whitepaper by Joe Gollner, Vice President of Stilo International. This excellent paper explains why it is just in this past decade that the pieces that allow us to  genuinely talk about “intelligent content” are finally in place.

Career opportunities

I don’t know about you, but for me, it is a very exciting topic. So much information is out there, buried in file systems, sitting on personal computers, languishing on network drives, dumped into the black hole of Sharepoint (because Sharepoint is not properly managed). It is content that is used once or twice and inaccessible thereafter. Well, let’s say it is accessible only when someone undertakes a very significant (manual) search effort.

A recent job search on monster.com yielded over 900 jobs that included the phrase “content management,” with 15 in Arizona. Careerbuilder.com  found over 400 jobs, with nine in Arizona.

Skills needed

According to Kari Ripptoe, the top five skills needed for success in this field are:

1. Strong writing and editing skills
2. Project/team management capabilities
3. Online/content marketing knowledge
4. Tech/web savvy
5. Knowledge of site usability/navigability best practices

Kari is an online marketer and content strategist; learn the full details about these skills on The Caffeinated Blog. More specifically, think about expertise in audience analysis, SEO (search engine optimazation), and yes, content management systems themselves. 

So, if you are contemplating a career shift, you might want to learn more about the opportunities in this field. The time seems right!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under January/February 2009 Issue, Rough Draft Newsletter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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