In episode 174 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle explore the mindset shifts that are needed to elevate your organization’s content operations to the enterprise level.

If you’re in a desktop tool and everything’s working and you’re happy and you’re delivering what you’re supposed to deliver and basically it ain’t broken, then don’t fix it. You are done. What we’re talking about here is, okay, for those of you that are not in a good place, you need to level up. You need to move into structured content. You need to have a content ops organization that’s going to support that. What’s your next step to deliver at the enterprise level?

— Sarah O’Keefe

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Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.

Alan Pringle: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about setting up your content operations for success. Hey everyone, I am Alan Pringle and I am back here with Sarah O ‘Keefe in yet another podcast episode today. Hello, Sarah.

Sarah O’Keefe: Hey there.

AP: Sarah and I have been chatting about this issue. It’s kind of been this nebulous thing floating around and we’re gonna try to nail it down a little bit more in this conversation today. This idea of setting up your organization for success and their content operations. And to start the conversation, let’s just put it out there. Let’s define content ops. What are content operations, Sarah?

SO: Content strategy is the plan. What are we going to do, how do we want to approach it? Content ops is the system that puts all of that in place. And the reason that content ops these days is a big topic of conversation is because content ops in sort of a desktop world is, well, we’re going to buy this tool, and then we’re going to build some templates, and then we’re going to use them consistently. And the end, right? That’s pretty straightforward. But content operations in a modern content production environment means that we’re talking about lot of different kinds of automation and integration. So the tools are getting bigger, they’re scarier, they’re more enterprise level as opposed to a little desktop thing. And configuring a component content management system, connecting it to your web CMS and feeding the content that you’re generating in your CCMS, your component content management system, into other systems via some sort of an API is a whole different kettle of fish than dealing with, you know, your basic old school unstructured authoring tool. So yeah.

AP: Right. But in their defense, for the people who are using desktop publishing, that is still content operations.

SO: Sure, it is.

AP: It’s just a different flavor of content operations. And frankly, a lot of people, a lot of companies and organizations outgrow it, which is why they’re going to this next level that you’re talking about.

SO: Right. So if you’re in a desktop tool and everything’s working and you’re happy and you’re delivering what you’re supposed to deliver and basically it ain’t broken, then don’t fix it. You are done. You should shut off this podcast and go do something more fun with your time. Right? What we’re talking about here is, okay, for those of you that are not in a good place, you need to level up. You need to move into structured content. You need to have a content ops organization that’s going to support that. What do you do? What’s your, you know, what’s your next step and what does it look like to organize this project in such a way that you move into, you know, that next level up and you can deliver all the things that you’re required to deliver in the bigger enterprise, whatever you want to call that level of things. So desktop people, I’m slightly jealous of you because it’s all working and you’re in great shape and good for you. I’m happy for you.

AP: So making this shift from content operations and desktop publishing to something more enterprise level like you’re talking about, that is a huge mind shift. is also technically something that can be quite the shock to the system. How do you go about making that leap?

SO: Well, I’m reminded of a safety announcement I heard on a plane one time where they were talking about how, you know, when you open the overhead bins after landing, you want to be careful. And the flight attendant said, shift happens. And we all just looked at her like, did you actually just say that? And she sort of smirked. So making this shift can be, it’s can be, it’s difficult, right? And what we’re usually looking at is, okay, you’ve been using, you know, Word for the past 10, 15, 20, 57 years. And now we need to move out of that into, you know, something structured XML, maybe it’s DITA, and then get that all up and running. And so what’s going to happen is that you have to think pretty carefully about what does it look like to build the system and what does it look like to sustain it? Now here I’m talking particularly to large companies because what we find is the outcome in the end, right, when this is all said and done and everything’s up and running and working, what you’re probably going to have is some sort of an organization that’s responsible for sustainment of your content ops. So you’re to have a content ops group of some sort, and they’re going to do things like run the CCMS and build new publishing pipelines and keep the integrations moving and help train the authors. And in some cases, they’re kind of a services organization in the sense that you have an extended group of maybe hundreds of authors who are never going to move into structured content. So you’re taking on the, again, word content that they are producing, but you’re moving it into the structured content system as a service, like an ingestion or migration service to your larger staff or employee population. Okay, so in the future world, you have this group that knows all the things and knows how to keep everything running and knows how to kind of manage that and maintain it and do that work. And probably in there, you have an information architect who’s thinking about how to organize content, how to classify and label things, how to make sure the semantics, you know, the actual element tags are good and all that stuff. But right now, you’re sitting in desktop authoring land with a bunch of people that are really good at using whatever your desktop authoring tool may be. And you have to sort of cross that chasm over to, now we’re this content ops organization with structured content, probably a component content management system. So what I would probably look at here is, you know, what is the outcome? You know, thinking about the system has stood up, we’ve made our tool selection, everything’s working, everything’s configured, everything’s great. What does it look like to have an organization that’s responsible for sustaining that? And that could be, you know, two or three or 10 people, depending on the size, again, the size and scope of your organization and the content that you’re supporting. But in order to get there, you first have to get it all set up. You have to do the work to get it all up and running. Our job typically is that we get brought in to make that transition. Right? So we’re not going to be for a large organization, we’re not going to be your permanent content ops organization. We might provide some support on the side, but you’re going to have people in-house that are going to do that. They’re going to be presumably full-time permanent kind of staff members. They know your content and your domain and they have expertise in, you know, whatever your industry may be.

AP: Right.

SO: Our job is to get you there as fast as possible. So we get brought in to do that setting up piece, right? What are the best systems? What are the things you need to be evaluating? What are the weird requirements that you have that other organizations don’t have that are going to affect your decisions around systems and for that matter, people, right? Are you regulated? What is the risk level of this content? How many languages are you translating into? What kind of deliverables do you have? What k...

Position enterprise content operations for success (podcast)