LavaCon 2024 delivered actionable insights, emphasizing that your business case for content operations requires strong alignment with business goals. Successful content modernization hinges on executive support, effective change management, and a wary eye on AI.

The business case for content operations

A female speaker, standing on a stage at LavaCon, the Content Strategy Conference, gestures passionately with her hand raised. The stage is decorated with large, red letters spelling "LavaCon" against a blue backdrop. A podium with the LavaCon logo and an image of a city bridge is seen to the left.

In her keynote session, Sarah O’Keefe showed attendees how to communicate the value of content to executives and others in an organization. But why is a business case needed?

Other than the people in this room, nobody cares about content. They don’t care. They care about the business drivers and how content will achieve things for the business, organization, or mission.

– Sarah O’Keefe

With this context, Sarah described how to effectively communicate the value of content by translating technical terms into business language.

Don’t say transclusion. Say reuse.
Don’t say conrefs. Say no more copy and paste.
Don’t say ditaval. Say variant.
Don’t say XSLT. Say automation.
Don’t say specialization. Say adaptation.
Don’t say plugin. Say publishing pipeline.

As you advocate for improved content operations within your organization, you take on a lot of personal risk. But not advocating for better systems and processes can also incur risks when high-stakes content projects are delayed or derailed.

I talk a lot about risk mitigation. Risk mitigation is really powerful when you’re talking to your C-level executives. But risk mitigation for yourself is also important. You don’t want to get laid off because nothing’s working. In terms of risk mitigation for yourself, if you’re trying to sell a big project, you can lean on accuracy, compliance, and single sourcing.”

– Sarah O’Keefe

Sarah also shared how to secure funding by using AI to get attention for the project.

Figure out what you want to do and then sell it because it will enable AI. Sell it to the people with the money saying, “With X, we can do all this stuff with AI and it’ll be great.” We have a content agenda; they have a different agenda. Sell to their agenda.

– Sarah O’Keefe

The horror of modernizing content

In this session, copresenters Alan Pringle and Janet Zarecor shared the key considerations teams must think about to improve content operations before selecting content management tools.

Because of the festive spooky theme, Janet created many of the background images by staging these toy figures in her amazing green screen set up.

Small Dracula figure in bad lighting standing on a white piece of paper.

Unfortunately, the horror of inescapable technical problems prevented the slides from being shown for the majority of the presentation. We’ve provided the slides below so you can enjoy them now!

From stakeholders to stake-holders: Getting business buy-in for content operations