Chapter 18. Changing roles
Implementing a unified content strategy together with the designated tools requires new roles, a modification to existing roles, and new skill sets. Part of managing change will be getting new roles in place and adjusting others to meet the new requirements.
Senior content strategist (new role)
Working in a unified content environment means working in a collaborative environment. With a collaborative environment, someone needs to understand all the content and the overall content requirements to ensure that content comes together in a logical manner. This task falls to a senior content strategist to work with all the stakeholders involved in the design and development of content to ensure that the unified content strategy is effectively addressed.
This is a management role. In particular, the senior content strategist needs to communicate the concepts and advantages of reuse on an ongoing basis to facilitate agreement among project teams.
The senior content strategist must also be able to oversee many projects and determine the unified content strategy required to address both the needs of all the stakeholders and the needs of the content as a whole.
In addition, the senior content strategist must work with all the content creation teams to ensure that models and guidelines are followed and that everyone is in agreement on how to most effectively support the unified content strategy.
Skills and knowledge required include:
• A broad-based understanding of business needs.
• The ability to determine an effective unified content strategy.
• An in-depth understanding of customer needs and the ways in which the unified content strategy can support those needs.
• An in-depth understanding of the unified content lifecycle and the authors’ requirements for success.
• The ability to manage diverse requirements.
• Negotiating techniques.
• Strong people management skills.
This is primarily a management role that requires extensive coordination of people, processes, and change, and a desire to implement and manage best practices.
This role could be combined with the role of content strategist.
Content strategist (modified role)
Content strategy plays a key role in analyzing, designing the content strategy, and working with stakeholders.
The content strategist is responsible for building the information product models, component models, metadata, reuse strategies, and workflow. He or she works closely with information architects and user experience designers to ensure that the content can support the desired customer experience.
The content strategist needs the following skills:
• Analysis
• Analytical problem-solving
• Customer needs analysis
• Content analysis
• Content organizational analysis
• Design
• Information product and component models
• Metadata (content management system)
• Information retrieval
• Reuse strategy
• Standards
• Usability
• Information
A lot of this work will be done as part of the project, but it is an ongoing task, required to meet new and changed needs.
Content owners (modified role)
In a unified content strategy, content can be used in many different information products. Common content, and product- and channel-specific content, must be owned. The owners of common content need to ensure that the content is maintained and is appropriate across multiple products.
Owners of product-specific content need to ensure that the content is created and maintained throughout the life of the product and they also need to ensure that it integrates effectively with the common content.
In a traditional authoring environment, authors own the content they create because they are also responsible for creating a specific information product. However, in a unified content strategy, content can be used in many different information products. The concept of the content owner needs to change to accommodate this.
In a unified content strategy, the person who authors the content still owns it, but may not own all the content that comes together to create an information product. There may be many authors, all of whom may not be responsible for creating an entire information product. Rather, they may be responsible for creating content about a certain subject that goes into many different information products.
In addition, there needs to be an owner of the unified content, someone who can oversee the creation of all the content related to a particular product, service, product family, or any other associated content set. The unified content owner facilitates the collaborative authoring process and ensures consistency and quality of the materials.
The role of the unified content owner could be assumed by an existing author, business owner/analyst, or project manager, reporting to the senior project manager. The skills required of the unified content owner include:
• Information analysis
• Information design
• Ability to determine an effective unified content strategy
• Ability to manage diverse requirements
• Negotiating techniques
• Strong people management
External authors (modified role)
Working with external authors is more difficult than working with internal authors, as you cannot always control how they provide content. To support structured content and a clean conversion of their content to structured content, create structured templates for authors to use.
Internal authors (modified role)
Creating materials in a unified content strategy separates the creation of the input (content) from the output (channel or information type). This means that internal authors, as proficient communicators, will now rely less on the tools used to display the final information.
Internal authors no longer have to worry about applying styles or becoming involved in the formatting of the information; formatting is automatically handled by the authoring and delivery systems. Instead, authors can concentrate exclusively on the content they create and combine.
Internal authors identify the building blocks of information and how the blocks will fit together. They also identify opportunities for content reuse and write applicable content components for reuse. Their skill set must expand to include:
• Working in a collaborative environment
• Creating structured content and writing to models
• Writing reusable content
Business owners/analysts (modified role)
Business owners/analysts are very important to an effective unified content strategy. They determine the requirements of the business and frequently, the customers’ needs as well. Their role is to ensure that products, services, and content are designed to effectively meet the customers’ needs. However, they must also ensure that any strategies and solutions meet the needs of the employees, the individuals tasked with creating the products, services, and content.
Too often organizations bring in a technological solution to business problems. It is critical that business owners/analysts participate in the effective design of your unified content strategy. Their role is to ensure that content meets the needs of the customer, and the unified content strategy meets the needs of the authors.
To support a unified content strategy, business analysts/owners should expand their skill set to include:
• A broad-based understanding of business needs
• The ability to determine an effective unified content strategy
• In-depth understanding of customer needs and the ways in which the unified content strategy can support those needs
• In-depth understanding of the unified content lifecycle and the authors’ requirements for success
Editors (modified role)
Standards and consistency are important in creating seamless unified materials. In a unified content environment, it’s particularly important that editors look not only at the words, but also at how the information is used to ensure it is written effectively for reuse.
To support a unified content strategy, editors must understand:
• The unified content strategy
• The information product models and component models
• Editorial techniques
• Writing for multiple channels, information products, multiple audiences
• Structured writing techniques
Information architect (modified role)
The role of information architecture expands from web information architecture to:
• Web
• Mobile
• eBooks
• Apps
Each platform has a different set of navigation systems and organizational structures. The information architect needs to determine platform specific:
• Organization
• Labeling
• Navigation
• Taxonomy and metadata (customer facing)
The information architect should work closely with the content strategist to ensure the unified content strategy effectively supports the architecture and vice versa.
Information technologists (modified role)
In a traditional authoring system, many authors are responsible for creating the output for their content. In a unified content strategy, this is handled automatically by the system. An information technologist is required to handle the technology of the system. This may be a role that resides in the information technology area or within the content area.
An information technologist is skilled at implementing content models in the various tools, including programming and supporting stylesheets to meet specifications provided by the information architect.
Information technologists should be well-versed in a wide variety of tools and technologies, including XML. Specifically, they should understand the tools and technologies you choose for your system.
Their skill set includes designing and developing:
• DTDs or other supporting content frameworks
• Authoring and publishing stylesheets (XML-based)
• Authoring templates
• Workflow creation
• CMS configuration
Art (modified role)
Art is likely to be a team with the following roles:
• Graphic design (Web, mobile, eBooks)
• Interactive design (Flash, JavaScript, Ajax)
• Media (illustration, photography, video)
Multiple renditions of all assets are required to support all platforms.
Metadata must become richer to ensure that assets can be found regardless of where they have been used in the information set.
Publishing roles
The primary change in publishing-specific roles is the move from strictly print publications (books) to print, eBooks, and apps.
Acquisitions editor (modified role)
Acquisitions editors are typically responsible for identifying market requirements and seeking out authors to meet those requirements. Acquisitions editors will be responsible for acquiring content for information product suites, including:
• Books only
• eBooks only
• Books/eBooks with associated apps
• Courses only
• Courses with associated books/eBooks
Development editors (modified role)
Development editors work with the authors to ensure that the quality of the content meets the desired publishing requirements and deadlines. They also coordinate activities between the author and graphic designers and production. Their role is relatively unchanged but they will work online more with the author and add eBooks and apps to the materials they manage. The role of development editor will also include:
• Checking revisions from authors
• Completing art and photo requests
• Reviewing copyedits
• Reviewing art and photos
• Entering copyright information
• Contracting with an indexer (at XML stage)
• Checking pages and page proofs
• Checking the integrity of the eBook
Assistant editors (modified role)
The assistant editor’s role changes quite a bit, with more and more work moving online and many manual activities eliminated.
The assistant editor is no longer responsible for:
• Printing copyeditor files for the author (assumes that all edits have been done online)
• Incorporating author revisions (assumes that revisions are done online so there are no revisions to incorporate)
Assistant editors will be responsible for:
• Converting external authors’ manuscripts to XML
• Adding art, photos, and video, or creating placeholders in XML
• Checking that art, photos, and video have been imported correctly
• Reviewing art, photos, and video with the development editor to ensure that they are acceptable
• Incorporating the index in XML if the indexer does not do it directly
• Adding credit lines for art, and so on, where appropriate
• Identifying that content is ready for production (changes workflow metadata to “ready for production”)
• Checking pages
• Checking indexes, and front and back matter
• Checking printer’s proofs
• Testing eBooks
Copy editor (modified role)
The role of the copy editor is the same, but copy editors will perform their tasks using a collaborative online review tool.
Production-print (modified role)
This role expands to the design of print books, eBooks, and apps. You may have production teams that specialize in one or the other, but not necessarily all.
Production creates page layout templates that are designed to import XML content. Standard templates are required for the standard information products. Production imports the XML, just as they would the Word document and adjusts the template to accommodate the size of the content.
Changes to the content can be made by others in the XML and then they can publish to styled print themselves. Alternatively, production could reimport the XML and adjust the template for any content changes (e.g., more content).
This process reduces the burden on production to manually incorporate changes and optimizes the role of page design experts.
Production is no longer responsible for:
• Incorporating the author revisions into final layout; this is now done in the XML.
• Uploading files for the printer. This can be triggered automatically once all the appropriate approvals are complete by identifying that the content is ready for printing via the workflow.
Summary
Implementing a unified content strategy together with the designated tools requires new roles, modification of existing roles, and new skill sets. Part of managing change will be getting new roles in place and adjusting others to meet the new requirements.
There are a number of new and modified roles:
• Senior content strategist (new role)
• Content strategist (modified role)
• Content owners (modified role)
• External authors (modified role)
• Internal authors (modified role)
• Business owners/analysts (modified role)
• Editors (modified role)
• Information architect (modified role)
• Information technologists (modified role)
• Publishing roles
• Acquisitions editor (modified role)
• Development editor (modified role)
• Assistant editor (modified role)
• Copy editor (modified role)