Project Portfolio

The content community has converted, re-purposed, re-published, copied and pasted, and manipulated content assets for decades to incorporate new content platforms and technologies. Despite efforts to serve the right content to the customer at the right time and in the right format, customers continue to report challenges finding and using the information they need. Enterprise content is at particular risk for failing to meet customer expectations when its content producers aren't aligned.

DITA, an OASIS standard for structured content authoring, is especially popular for technical product documentation. The best thing about DITA: it’s highly customizable. From a wide selection of industry-standard software to the ability to specialize the DITA grammar, you can design a DITA solution to meet precise needs. The worst thing about a DITA implementation: you can go too far with your customizations. A lesson I quickly learned when I took on the role of DITA Specialist.

Domain model, concept model, class diagram, entity relationship diagram, lightweight ontology, or data model – whichever your preferred formal modeling language – a visual representation of the domain of interest is a critical tool for an information, content, or knowledge architect. 

When content is always relevant – throughout the seasons and years – we call it evergreen, named after the category of fast-growing trees that stay green throughout the seasons. Evergreen content never goes out of date. As a result, search engine ranking increases over time and drives more organic traffic to your site. An effective evergreen strategy requires investing in valuable content assets and regular maintenance.

I spend a lot of time planning, capturing, mapping, and reconciling metadata so content consumers find relevant content, enterprise systems deliver and connect content in a way that makes sense, and content groups can more easily adopt future publishing or delivery systems.