1. science
2. ecology
3. waste management
4. recycling

Getting Started
With Intelligent
Content
Getting Started With
Intelligent Content
Do you feel the pain?.................................................................................................
3
Is intelligent content for you?...................................................................................................... 3
Is intelligent content for your company?................................................................................... 3
What can intelligent content do for your customers?............................................................. 4
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?......................
6
Intelligent content is structurally rich..........................................................................................7
Intelligent content is semantically categorized..................................................................... 14
Intelligent content is automatically discoverable................................................................. 18
Intelligent content is reusable................................................................................................... 20
Intelligent content is reconfigurable........................................................................................ 23
Intelligent content is adaptable................................................................................................ 25
About technologies and tools................................................................................................... 29
How can you get started?...................................................................................
37
Conclusion...........................................................................................................................
38
#Intelcontent
2
Do you feel the pain?
Is your company’s content out of control? If so, you probably feel the pain. Content causes
pain for many reasons:
▶
It’s created by multiple people.
▶
It’s created in multiple departments.
▶
It’s delivered in multiple channels, in uncoordinated ways.
▶
It’s inconsistent and redundant.
▶
It’s expensive to produce, translate, deliver, and maintain.
Is intelligent content for you?
Maybe you’re a marketer experiencing enough content chaos to make you wonder how this
intelligent content thing you keep hearing about can help you and your company. Maybe
you’re a technical writer wondering what your professional future holds. Maybe you simply
want to understand how things work at this busy intersection – this place where content
and technology meet – and you suspect that you and your company can make money here.
Nodding your head? If so, intelligent content is calling to you.
Is intelligent content for your company?
Intelligent content isn’t for every company. As content strategist Rahel Anne Bailie says,
intelligent content “is not for the company who has 50 pages of highly crafted marketing
content that never changes.” She adds, “For corporations that have relatively simple content
demands … the investment in content to be structured beyond basic HTML may be overkill.”
But for companies that face “large, thorny problems” – companies with many products,
many product lines, many languages, many locales per language, many audiences per
product line and locale and language – “the complexities of content production become
very painful very fast.”
#Intelcontent
3
Do you feel the pain?
What content, exactly? Oh, just … all of it.
Technical documentation. Marketing content.
Customer-support content. Content delivered on
multiple devices, for multiple products, in multiple
locales, to multiple audiences. It all causes pain.
And it could all be made more intelligent, to the
benefit of both customers and companies.
What can intelligent content
do for your customers?
Making content intelligent isn’t easy. It requires
long-term investments of resources and time, and
it requires content strategy aligned with business
goals. It requires that a lot of people work together
in new ways. Don’t let these realities stop you.
While this book shows
web-based examples,
intelligent content
principles apply to any
kind of content regardless
of which department
creates it, what tools
people use to create it,
where it is stored, how it is
assembled, what channels
deliver it, what form it
takes, or who uses it.
Here’s how Scott Abel describes intelligent content and its benefits:
“It’s time for intelligent content – content that is readable by both humans and
machines. Intelligent content is content with superpowers – content that can
(with the help of technology) perform tasks automatically, freeing content
creators to add value through innovation.”
FROM THE LANGUAGE OF CONTENT STRATEGY
content: Any text, image, video, decoration, or user-consumable elements that
contribute to comprehension. —Scott Abel
content life cycle: The process that defines the series of changes in the life of any
piece of content, including reproduction, from creation onward. —Robert Rose
content strategy: The analysis and planning to develop a repeatable system
that governs the management of content throughout the entire content life cycle.
—Rahel Anne Bailie
intelligent content: Structurally rich and semantically categorized content that is,
therefore, automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable, and adaptable.
—Ann Rockley
#intelcontent
4
Do you feel the pain?
The vision of intelligent content is this: Content development, translation, maintenance – all
phases of the content life cycle – become manageable. And the right information gets to the
right customers at the right time in the right format. Not only are customers happier, but
sales prospects are also more likely to become customers.
Why? Because, more and more, it’s not a salesperson that leads to sales. It’s information.
According to Forrester Research, “Today’s buyers might be anywhere from two-thirds to
90% of the way through their journey before they reach out to the vendor.”
What are your buyers doing throughout that first huge part of their journey? They’re judging
your company by what they discover from colleagues, bloggers, social media – and your
content.
intain
a
M
y
a te
Intelligent content makes
content manageable
throughout the
content life cycle.
#Intelcontent
Research
n
Bu
Tr a
sl
Customer
journey
Develo
p
Content
life cycle
Use
Intelligent content delivers the
right information to the right
customers in the right format
at the right time throughout
the customer journey.
5
Do you feel the pain?
What puts the intelligent
in intelligent content?
What makes intelligent content intelligent? Ann Rockley, author of Managing Enterprise
Content 1 and founder of the annual Intelligent Content Conference (ICC), first held in 2009,
gives this often-cited definition:
Intelligent content is structurally rich and semantically
categorized and therefore automatically discoverable,
reusable, reconfigurable, and adaptable.
Structurally rich. Semantically categorized. Automatically discoverable. Reusable.
Reconfigurable. Adaptable. What does each of those terms mean? Let’s take a look.
WHAT INTELLIGENT CONTENT IS NOT
According to Rockley, here are some things that intelligent content is not:
• Documents as black boxes (information bound together in monolithic files
that can be difficult to find and to use)
• The words or images that make up the content
• Campaign-driven marketing collateral that gets used once and forgotten
Throughout this book, unless otherwise noted, quotations and paraphrases attributed to Rockley come from the book she
co-authored with Charles Cooper: Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: New Riders,
2012). At Rockley’s request, we have changed her original phrase unified content to intelligent content.
1
#Intelcontent
6
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
Intelligent content is structurally rich
Structure comes first. Structure – consistent organization – enables automation. And
strategic automation makes content intelligent.
As Rockley says in What Is Intelligent Content?, without structure “it’s almost impossible
to automate content assembly and delivery processes.” To make your content structurally
rich, “you need to remove formatting (look and feel) from source files and add structure:
predetermined organizational patterns supported by metadata tags.”
Let’s look at the ICC website as an example. It provides an agenda, session descriptions, and
speaker information. Various pages use the same content elements: photo, name, business
title, bio, session title, session description, etc. Content elements like these are not, in
themselves, intelligent. But combined with skilled content engineering and a solid strategy,
they lend themselves to intelligent uses.
STRUCTURALLY
RICH CONTENT
The ICC Speakers page
displays each speaker’s photo,
name, and business title in
a consistent structure that
has value for prospective
attendees. This simple
example of how content might
be structured hints at the kind
of complex, sophisticated,
standardized structures that
can be put in place on or off
the web, on a small scale or
a large scale – even across
an organization or a group of
organizations – to create datapowered efficiencies.
#Intelcontent
Name
Photo
7
Business Title
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
Here’s another example. Information architect Karen McGrane describes National Public
Radio’s use of structured content. As you read the excerpt below, don’t worry if you don’t
know anything about APIs (application programming interfaces). The main thing you need
to know is that APIs enable computers to share information directly – programmatically –
with each other.
“[NPR has] set up an API that allows them to take content from a variety of different
providers. They can take content from content providers; text from a variety of different
sources, from all their member stations. They can take music content from a variety
of different providers. And … they run that through an API, which allows them to have
access to clean, well-structured content that then can be queried by these individual
platforms. So [they] get their content out onto a wide variety of different devices and
platforms very easily…
[NPR is] not dependent on custom development to go and get access to that content.
So anytime they want to release a new application, anytime they want to get their
content out onto a new platform, whether that’s an iPhone app, iPad, a mobile
website, an Android app, they want to build a new HTML5 site, they can do that
quickly, sometimes in a matter of weeks, because they have put the effort into having
a clean, well-structured base of content to work from.”
Since implementing this approach, NPR has seen its page views increase by 80%.
WHY STRUCTURALLY RICH CONTENT MATTERS
• It makes content flexible.
• It facilitates content creation because
authors have a pattern to follow,
eliminating the guesswork
of what content to include.
• It can be mapped to styles appropriate
to delivery channels (for example,
one style for desktop, another for
smartphone screens).
• It offers predictability and consistency,
enabling computers to apply
stylesheets and automate processes,
and enabling consumers to use the
content with more ease, confidence,
and understanding.
• It reduces costs because it is easier to
create, manage, and deliver.
• It enables components to be reused
more efficiently.
#Intelcontent
8
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
It’s inefficient – even impossible – to handcraft content for each web page or each output
type individually, to tweak each deliverable until we get that perfect fit. To treat content as
a business asset, we need to determine what content is required, by whom, when, in what
circumstance, and in conjunction with what other content. And then we need to develop
structured content models accordingly.
Structurally rich content adheres to a content model, which Cleve Gibbon defines as
“a formal representation of structured content as a collection of content types and their
interrelationships.”
EXAMPLE OF A
CONTENT MODEL
A content model can be
represented in many
ways. This example shows
one way to visualize the
content model for the
Language of Content
Strategy project, which
involved creating multiple
deliverables – a print book,
a card deck, a website,
a set of audio files, and
an e-book – from a set of
reusable, reconfigurable
modules
content from
a
Example
of of
a content
model
singleof
source.
(from the Language
Content Strategy project)
Content models enable automation. As Scott Abel points out in a comment on Natalya
Minkovsky’s article Content Models: Getting Started With Structured Content,
incompatible content models create some of the biggest challenges for organizations
trying to make their content processes more efficient. When information flows between
inconsistent content models, organizations incur delays and costs.
#Intelcontent
9
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
For content to reach its intelligence potential, related content models must be compatible.
If you use a content model that clashes with content models used by other departments in
the same organization – or by partner organizations – you have a problem: Computers can’t
easily aggregate, compare, and act on all that content in meaningful, business-critical ways.
Compatible content models, on the other hand, can drive applications, power transactions,
enable commerce, update inventories, create invoices, process and collect payments,
arrange for and instigate delivery of electronic and physical goods, and more.
Abel puts it this way:
“The overarching value of content modeling is … the creation of hyper-efficient,
data-powered business that leverages the power of a common model to describe
our content – what it is (and what it isn’t), what it means (context), how it will be
represented, and what other types of content are related to it.”
Content models – and the rich structure they are based on – guide authors, facilitate reuse,
and create the basis for all the business advantages that intelligent content can yield.
The main point: Technology can do its magic only after structure is put in place.
Technology doesn’t create the structure; people do. We could restructure our content today
without buying a single tool. When we move to intelligent content, we must start with
structure.
FROM THE LANGUAGE OF CONTENT STRATEGY
content type: A specification for a structured, standardized, reusable, and mutually
exclusive kind of information entity. —Jonathon Colman
content engineering: The application of engineering discipline to the design,
acquisition, management, delivery, and use of content and the technologies
deployed to support the full content life cycle. —Joe Gollner
content model: A formal representation of structured content as a collection of
content types and their interrelationships. —Cleve Gibbon
structured content: Content, whether in a textual, visual, or playable format, that
conforms to structural and semantic rules that allow machine processing to meet
specific business requirements. —Don Day
#Intelcontent
10
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
WHITE PAPER CASE STUDY
The power of consistent content structure:
A health care story
I
n a white paper entitled Developing Community-Based, Standardized HospitalDischarge Summaries, Intel Corp. and a number of health care organizations in Portland,
Oregon, describe a community-wide collaboration that reduced hospital readmission
rates and emergency room visits by aligning hospital-discharge processes across a number
of area hospitals. Although the white paper doesn’t use the terms structured content or
content modeling, these are central concepts. An important part of this initiative involved
addressing inconsistencies in the structure of a common form, a document that every
hospital uses: the hospital-discharge summary.
Inconsistencies in the structure of a common form are the antithesis of intelligent content.
What’s the big deal about inconsistencies in a form? What problems were these hospitals
facing? According to the white paper, “High rates of readmissions to hospitals put the health
of patients at risk and, under new U.S. regulations, increasingly hurt the bottom line of
hospitals.”
One Intel blogger describes the financial risk this way: “Hospitals with readmission rates
considered too high now carry risk of having portions [of] their Medicare reimbursements
withheld.”
That’s some incentive to change.
How could standardizing the hospital-discharge summary – this piece of every hospital’s
overall content model – help address these problems? That’s one of the things members
of this team set out to discover. As part of a larger health care transformation effort, they
decided to “re-engineer and standardize elements of the hospital-discharge process and
the discharge-summary document.”
#Intelcontent
11
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
WHITE PAPER CASE STUDY
After the team attained consensus on how to standardize this document (including aligning
the changes with various electronic-health-records systems and clinical-records practices),
the hospitals began to use the new hospital-discharge form. Now, from one information
system to another, every hospital-discharge form uses consistent labels:
• Facility name
• Date of admission
• Length of stay
• Attending provider
• Principal final diagnosis
• Etc.
This hard-won consistency in structure has made the content related to hospital discharges
more intelligent. The consistency was “hard-won” because, as simple as these new labels
look, anyone in the content business knows how difficult it is to reach these kinds of
agreements – especially within or across large organizations with established processes,
tools, and terms that have evolved independently.
What was the payoff for putting in all the effort? Transitioning to this consistent content
structure, along with making other process changes across this group of hospitals, led
to preliminary results that promised improved patient outcomes and lower readmission
rates. Beyond the local impact, this team’s efforts set an example “that other health care
organizations across the country can look to as they, too, seek to lower readmission rates,
improve patient care, and reduce financial risk.”
This story highlights the impact that consistent
content structure can have within or among
organizations. Well-structured content – that is,
information that’s organized and labeled
consistently and strategically – is not a nicety.
It’s a business issue with bottom-line repercussions.
#Intelcontent
12
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
WHITE PAPER CASE STUDY
Takeaways:
• Inconsistent content structure costs organizations money. Those costs are
generally unseen until someone (enter, the content strategist) does the hard work
of analyzing the costs and opportunities.
• Analyzing content structure incurs its own costs. Determining which structural
changes will pay off requires an investment of time and money – and an
appropriate skill set. It’s no accident that Intel representatives, with their deep
knowledge of information systems, helped facilitate the discussions among the
hospitals.
• Making structure-related decisions requires collaboration. No one can simply
issue a memo directing every hospital (or every organization in a consortium,
or every department in a company) to start using a new, consistent approach
to structuring and labeling content. Inconsistencies need to be discussed and
evaluated so that the changes solve the right problems, create no new problems,
and get the support they need.
• Processes and information systems may need to change, too. To change content
structures in business-critical ways, you must understand existing processes and
information systems. Before you can align content structures, you may have to
align processes or systems.
For more on the Portland hospitals’
community-based efforts, see the
Intel white paper.
#Intelcontent
13
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
Intelligent content is semantically categorized
Semantically categorized content is associated with metadata – information about the
content. Metadata enables computers to do things they couldn’t do otherwise, like retrieve
content related to a product even if the content never mentions that product.
What does semantic mean?
Semantic means “related to meaning” (as opposed to “related to appearance”). Here’s how
Rockley explains this concept in What Is Intelligent Content?
“Semantic metadata can give sophisticated behind-the-scenes clues as to how
information might be mixed and matched, combined and recombined, supporting
the automatic building of customized information sets.
Here’s an example at the simplest level. The metadata tag < italic > is not semantic; it
describes appearance, presentation. It leaves no room for intelligence; italic is always italic.
On the other hand, the metadata tag <emphasis > is semantic; it describes a quality. Text
marked for emphasis may be italicized for print and extra loud for audio. Smart!”
To continue with our conference-website example, consider the pieces of information associated
with each presenter: photo, name, business title, bio, session title, and so on. These are semantic
categories. These categories describe what kind of thing a piece of content is.
Not how that content should look. What it is.
Let’s say you want to create a structure based on these categories. You need a way to
communicate that structure to the computers that store, retrieve, and assemble all those
pieces of content. You need to assign each piece of content to the appropriate categories.
That’s semantic tagging. Semantic tags (like “photo” or “name”) are one kind of metadata.
#Intelcontent
14
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
SEMANTICALLY
CATEGORIZED
CONTENT
<photo> <blackjacket>
<name>
</blackjacket> </photo>
Carlos Abler </name>
This example shows two pieces of content: the speaker’s name and his photo.
The metadata tags shown in brackets – “name,” “photo,” and “blackjacket” – are semantic
categories. Any piece of content, like Abler’s photo, can belong to multiple categories. In
other words, content can have multiple metadata tags. Metadata tags enable people to
organize digital information in nearly limitless ways. The key is to organize in effective
ways, using categories that serve both the company and its customers. For example, while
the category “blackjacket” would serve no purpose on a conference website, it might help
online shoppers find the perfect blazer.
What is metadata?
Metadata enables computers – and, by extension, people – to find the information they
need. It’s the stuff that makes intelligent content intelligent.
It’s more than just data about data; it’s the encoded knowledge of your organization.
Metadata can describe the behavior, processes, rules, and structure of data and can add
descriptive information.
#Intelcontent
15
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
Well-designed metadata classifies and identifies
elements of content, enabling computers to find
those elements of content and process them in
ways that support an organization’s goals and
meet its customers’ needs.
An organization realizes
the power of metadata
only when everyone on
the content team tags
information in the same
way, enabling people
to build on their shared
knowledge and find
information when they
need it.
Everyone working with a set of content must use
metadata consistently. When metadata is missing
or poorly implemented, computers generate
incomplete or incorrect information products, and
we slap our screens in frustration because we can’t
find what we’re looking for. Misidentified data may
become inaccessible. Unidentified data (lack of metadata) can lead to costly problems.
For example, in 1999, a lack of metadata led to the destruction of NASA’s Mars Climate
Orbiter. The spacecraft’s thrust was miscalculated because one team’s software treated
numbers as pound-seconds while another team’s software treated those same numbers
as newton-seconds. No metadata identified these units of measure. The spacecraft, which
disintegrated when it got too close to Mars, cost NASA over $300 million.2
An organization realizes the power of metadata only when everyone on the content team
tags information in the same way, enabling people to build on their shared knowledge and
find information when they need it. For example, content creators can find elements of
content and reuse them rather than rewriting them – or copying and pasting them.
Metadata comprises two types:
• Descriptive (publication) metadata helps customers find published content.
• Component metadata helps content creators find components, for example, a product
overview they want to reuse. Component metadata has two subtypes:
○ Reuse and retrieval metadata, such as “product name” or “overview”
○ Tracking (status) metadata, such as “draft” or “approved”
David Marco. Building and Managing the Meta Data Repository: A Full Lifecycle Guide. (New York: Wiley, 2000) as cited in
Managing Enterprise Content, p 187.
2
#Intelcontent
16
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
Since metadata determines the success of any intelligent content strategy – enabling
computers to find, track, assemble, and reuse content efficiently – organizations need to
design metadata with care. Metadata design involves a number of “interdependent and
iterative” tasks like these:
• Determining scope, focus, and purpose
• Identifying resource properties
• Designing the description vocabulary
• Designing the description form and implementation
• Creating and evaluating the descriptions3
Metadata is often designed by corporate librarians, information architects, or taxonomists –
people who specialize in creating classification schemes. It takes a specialized skill set, and
mindset, to design metadata in a way that supports the goals of an organization and the
needs of its customers.
The main point: To get the most from your content, everyone involved needs to use
metadata – semantic categories – in consistent ways that support business goals and
customer needs.
FROM THE LANGUAGE OF CONTENT STRATEGY
information architecture: The art and science of structuring information
(knowledge) to support findability and usability. —Claudia Wunder
metadata: Attributes of content you can use to structure, semantically define, and
target content. —Laura Creekmore
taxonomy: A hierarchical classification scheme made up of categories and
subcategories of information plus a controlled vocabulary of terms, usually used to
describe a specific area of knowledge. —Rachel Lovinger
3
Robert J. Glushko, ed. The Discipline of Organizing. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), p. 178.
#Intelcontent
17
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
Intelligent content is automatically discoverable
Automatically discoverable means findable by computers. Rockley says, “Every piece of
content, including text, video, and audio, can be described and therefore understood if it’s
tagged with metadata. Metadata makes it possible to discover content.”
Digital content that computers can’t find might as well not exist. “The addition of semantic
tagging makes it possible to zero in on the required content,” Rockley says.
For example, people discover conference information in many ways: They may search for speakers’
names, topics, etc., using a website’s own search engine or using an external search engine, such as
Google. The better the metadata in the source content, the better the search experience.
AUTOMATICALLY
DISCOVERABLE
CONTENT
#Intelcontent
If computers can’t find your digital content, it might as well
not exist. Web searching, shown here, is just one type of
automatic discoverability.
18
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
Findability goes beyond web search. For example, an employee might want to search an
internal repository to assemble documentation for a certain user type and product model.
In that case, the metadata must enable the system to find the right pieces of content for that
audience and purpose. Or a company might want to customize a piece of marketing collateral
according to a certain persona and phase of the customer journey. In that case, the metadata
must enable computers to find the right pieces of content for that audience and purpose.
The main point: Intelligent content is content that a computer can find in the ways that
the content owners – and customers – need it.
FROM THE LANGUAGE OF CONTENT STRATEGY
findability: The quality of being able to be discovered and retrieved through
searching or browsing. —Cheryl Landes
ANN ROCKLEY: “You have to find ways of being agile, of
automating processes, and personalizing content to establish a
deep rapport with the customer. Think big, act small, and start
moving toward intelligent content best practices to ensure that
you meet your customer needs now and into the future.”
Quoted by Robert Rose in The Search for Intelligent Content in the Universe
#Intelcontent
19
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
Intelligent content is reusable
Content reuse is “the practice of using existing components of content in multiple ways,”
as Rockley describes it. Well-structured, semantically rich content – like the NPR content
described earlier – can be easily retrieved, manually or automatically, for reuse. This kind of
reuse strategy is sometimes called COPE: create once, publish everywhere.
REUSABLE
CONTENT
Name
Bio
Photo
Session Title
Date and Time
Every ICC speaker’s page displays the speaker’s name, bio, session title, and session date
and time. These elements were not copied and pasted onto this page. Each element is
reused – automatically pulled from a single source. The photo is stored in one place, the
speaker’s name is stored in one place, and so on. If you change a photo, name, or session
title, you change it at the source; that change appears everywhere. On a small scale, this
kind of efficiency is nice to have. On a large scale, it’s mandatory. When content is not set up
for reuse, it gets messy fast.
#Intelcontent
20
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
FORMS OF REUSE
A reuse strategy defines the following:
Identical reuse. Content is reused
without change. It may be locked or
editable.
• Where the content should be reused
• The forms of reuse
• Whether content units are locked or
editable
• The size (granularity) of the content
units
• The reuse governance strategy (who
makes what decisions)
Section-based reuse. A group of
components is reused as a unit.
Component-based reuse. Content
components – like topics – are reused.
Conditional reuse. Within a
component, authors provide content
that applies only under certain
conditions – for example, when one
product model has a feature that other
models don’t have.
Reuse can be manual or automated. In
manual reuse, authors find a component,
retrieve it, and reuse it. In automated
reuse, the system reuses content based
on content models, metadata, and
business rules.
Fragment-based reuse. A small
element – such as a paragraph or a
bullet item – is reused.
The main point: While not every piece of
content is reusable, and sometimes reuse
is inappropriate, the more you reuse
content, the more of a strategic asset it
becomes.
Variable-based reuse. The reused
content includes a variable – for
example, a product model name.
FROM THE LANGUAGE OF CONTENT STRATEGY
content reuse: The practice of using content components in multiple information
products. —Kristen James Eberlein
single sourcing: The ability to create content once, planning for its reuse in
multiple places, contexts, and output channels. —Leigh White
#Intelcontent
21
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
THE BENEFITS OF REUSE
Automatic content reuse offers substantial benefits, including these, as
paraphrased from Rockley:
• Reduced development, review, and maintenance costs. When content is
reused, authors and reviewers don’t have to reinvent content wheels. No endless
cycles of rework (copy, paste, review, edit). Content-development teams can
focus on developing new content. Existing content can be updated automatically
everywhere it appears. And a smart content management system (CMS) enables
selective content updates.
• Reduced translation and translation-review costs. These costs are reduced
by the percentage of content reuse (typically at least 25%). “Post-translation
formatting is typically reduced by 30 to 50%. If four or more languages are
translated, often all costs can be recouped in less than 18 months (including the
cost of purchasing a CMS),” Rockley says.
• Increased consistency and quality. Automatically reusable content remains
the same every time it’s published, eliminating the errors or inconsistencies that
can arise when content is copied and pasted or manually updated.
NOZ URBINA: “Intelligent content is content that lives a life
separate from deliverables. Deliverables – sites, apps, microsites,
print collateral, and all the rest – just wrap up a slice of content
for a certain time and context. The content itself is the vital and
distinct business asset that we manage upstream on an ongoing
basis and is adaptive across many projects, silos, audiences,
and deliverables.”
Quoted by Robert Rose in The Search for Intelligent Content in the Universe
#Intelcontent
22
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
Intelligent content is reconfigurable
“Reusable content is modular,” Rockley says. Modular means it stands alone. Modularity
makes it easy for organizations “to rapidly reconfigure their content to meet changing
needs.” As products and customer requirements change, organizations can rapidly
reconfigure their content – “add new modules, exclude modules, and rearrange
modules to build new information products to meet new needs.”
For example, you might configure content alphabetically in one information product
(a Speaker page, for example) and chronologically in another (an Agenda page).
One way to reconfigure content dynamically is to filter out what you don’t want to see.
For example, on the ICC Agenda page, shown here, two tabs – “Filter by track” and
“Filter by days” – enable site visitors to view one track at a time (all dates) or one date at
a time (all tracks).
“Filter by track”
RECONFIGURABLE
CONTENT
“Filter by days”
Date
Time
Session Title
Photo
Name
Well-structured, appropriately tagged content can be assembled – configured and reconfigured –
in various ways. On the ICC Agenda page, shown here, elements that we saw configured elsewhere in
alphabetical order by speaker name are configured here in chronological order by session date and
time. This kind of reconfigurability meets a need – an attendee might want to see this information
configured one way now and another way later.
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What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
Content can be
reconfigured in many
ways. Let’s imagine a
preposterous example. Say
<blackshirt>
</blackshirt>
that you learned that some
people in your database of
conference-goers have a
crazy preference for black
shirts. You could assign
a “blackshirt” metatag to
“Love black
the photos of all speakers
shirts?”
wearing black shirts, and
then you could easily target
an email to that group of
people. “Love black shirts?
Have we got a conference
for you!” This example is far-fetched to make a point: You can structure and tag content –
then configure and reconfigure it automatically – in an infinite number of ways.
The main point: Modular content that can be automatically reconfigured enables you to
give people the information they need (and only the information they need), the way they
need it, when they need it.
FROM THE LANGUAGE OF CONTENT STRATEGY
modular content: A form of structured content that is designed, created, and
delivered as discrete components within the content whole. —Michael Boses
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What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
Intelligent content is adaptable
Adaptable content, usually called adaptive content, is content that can change (adapt) –
not just in appearance but in substance – according to the person receiving it, the device
receiving it, the channel, the time of day, the location, or other circumstances related to the
context of delivery.
“When we know the structure and semantics of the content, we can output that content
to multiple channels, adapting it to best meet the needs of the channel,” says Rockley in
Managing Enterprise Content. Elsewhere she notes that the benefit of automation is that
“content can be adapted with little or no human intervention.”
Adaptivity goes beyond responsive design – that is, beyond design that changes the layout
of a web page according to screen size and orientation. Adaptive content enables dynamic,
tailored delivery.
RESPONSIVE
DESIGN
Responsive content changes cosmetically, not adaptively. The content itself doesn’t change.
Responsive content reflows to accommodate a device’s screen size and orientation, as shown
in these screenshots of the ICC Agenda page on a smartphone.
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What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
Adaptive content is content whose delivery varies based on what the system knows about
the recipient (age, recent search phrases, social media connections, book purchases, etc.).
Content delivery may also vary based on what the system knows about the context of use
(day of the week, time of day, device location, etc.).
Imagine the way search results might be adapted for you if the information system knows that
you’re vegan, you’re attending ICC, you’re using a smartphone, you’re moving at a walking
pace just outside the conference hotel, it’s Monday, and it’s dinner time. If you search on the
term “restaurant,” imagine getting the name of an eatery just around the corner that’s open
now and serves vegan fare. That’s content adapted for your preferences and situation.
ADAPTIVE
CONTENT
Adaptive content goes
beyond responsive design.
The content itself changes
according to the device, the
recipient, or the context of
use. Here’s an example as
described by Marcia Riefer
Johnston: “An adaptive
instruction might show up
as click on a laptop, tap on
a tablet, and say select in a
car’s GPS.”4 That’s content
adapted for the device.
CLICK
TAP
SAY SELECT
Marcia Riefer Johnston. Word Up! How to Write Powerful Sentences and Paragraphs (And Everything You Build
from Them). (Northwest Brainstorms Publishing: Portland, Oregon, 2012), p. 3.
4
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26
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
Here’s another example of adaptive content. Whatever you’re describing (a term, a product,
a podcast … anything), let’s say you create both a long and a short description. The long
description is automatically delivered to laptops. The short description is automatically
delivered to smartphones. For these automatic deliveries to happen, the source content
has to include both descriptions, each one semantically tagged – maybe “longdesc” and
“shortdesc.” And the content-distribution system has to understand what to do when those
tagged descriptions arrive at a given device.
Noz Urbina describes adaptive content in his article The 5 Ws of Adaptive Content: A New
Look at Making Content Contextually Appropriate:
“Adaptive content is a content strategy technique designed to support meaningful,
personalized interactions across all channels. It is content that is conceived, planned
and developed around the customers: their context, their mood, their goals. This
definition isn’t device- (or even technology-) specific. Adaptive content can cover all
content, on all channels.”
If you haven’t structured your content well and determined how you want the content to
adapt to various users or contexts, your mobile content may fit on a small screen, but it may
still be difficult to use.
Urbina goes on:
“To be successful at delivering a personalized experience … adaptive content is a
requirement. It’s content that is designed for both personalization and delivery across
many channels – including print and beyond. It’s more than feeding product or
content recommendations. It can be much more than changing some artwork based
on user interests, and it has to be far more than reflowing web layouts so they are
workable on a specific device.”
Adaptive content “has to know when it should change,” Urbina says. “That means defining
rules that will tell your system when to display what content. When codified into a computer
system, the rules provide your platform with the necessary content adaptation guidelines.”
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27
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
Some people suggest considering ways to use
well-structured content beyond the web, beyond
even print – for example, in email campaigns or
in information exchanges between customers and
employees: salespeople, trainers, customer-support
reps, retail sales staff, field technicians, sales
and presales engineers, business-development
managers. “They all own threads of communication
that intertwine to sew the tapestry of brand
experience for your audience,” Urbina says.
Only intelligent content can adapt to customers’
needs in this way.
“Businesses that have
embraced adaptive content
have seen huge returns.
Website visitors who see
content based on what the
business already knows
about them convert three
to 10 times more than
non-personalized content
viewers. Those are the kinds
of numbers of which all
marketers dream.”
– Kristen Hicks
As Urbina says about adaptive content in a Content Marketing World interview, “A little bit of
forethought goes a long way …. Good planning and structural thinking result in more opportunity.”
Why should marketers care about adaptive content? As Kristen Hicks says in a Content
Marketing Institute blog post, “Businesses that have embraced adaptive content have
seen huge returns. Website visitors who see content based on what the business already
knows about them convert three to 10 times more than non-personalized content viewers.
Those are the kinds of numbers of which all marketers dream.”
The main point: Business success may rest on creating content that can adapt
automatically to a variety of devices, to user-specific information, and to the context of use.
FROM THE LANGUAGE OF CONTENT STRATEGY
adaptive content: Content that is designed to adapt to the needs of the
customer, not just cosmetically, but also in substance and in capability. Adaptive
content automatically responds to the screen size and orientation of any device,
but goes further by displaying relevant content that takes full advantage of the
specific capabilities of the device being used. —Charles Cooper
personalization: The practice of targeting content to users based on one or more
of the following: who they are; where they are; when, why, and how they access the
content; and what device they use to access it. —Kevin P. Nichols
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28
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
About technologies and tools
Technology can’t make content intelligent, but you can’t make content intelligent without
technology. Eventually, when you and your team evaluate technology choices, you’ll run
into terms like XML, DITA, and CMS. The following sections, drawn largely from Rockley and
Cooper’s Managing Enterprise Content, introduce you to some of the technologies and tools
that can help put the intelligent in intelligent content.
About XML
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a set of rules for defining markup languages. It’s the
underlying technology that makes many modern content management systems possible.
XML enables us to break content into reusable components, and it helps us find those
components so that we can arrange them into new information products. It enables
computer systems to talk to each other, which enables departments and companies to
share information.
You don’t have to know much about XML to think strategically about your content, just as
you don’t have to know much about engines to drive your car. But don’t be afraid to learn
about XML. It might sound complicated and geeky. At one point it was; most writers using
it had to edit text as if they were creating code. Early XML authoring tools gave people
no choice but to view the text surrounded by tags, cluttering the screens and making the
programs hard to use. Those days are gone. XML authoring tools have moved on and now
sport easy-to-use interfaces, offering the option to hide the code. The interface can look just
like a modern word-processing program.
KRISTINA HALVORSON: Intelligent content is “content that’s
free from the constraints of a document or page, and therefore
free to adapt to any context or platform” so that it can be
delivered to “the right people, in the right place, and at the
right time … Intelligent, adaptive, nimble, or agile content
– call it what you will, but without it, you’ll stay mired in the
content mess that’s keeping you from getting ahead. It’s time
to make intelligent content a reality for your organization.”
(Foreword, Managing Enterprise Content)
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29
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
XML MARKUP
EXAMPLE 1
XML Tags
This is what raw XML looks like: text strings enclosed in tags. The tags, which are also
text strings – “bookstore,” “book,” “title,” “author,” etc.,– are inside angle brackets.
Since XML tags are semantic, raw XML carries no information about how the content
should be displayed. Source: Introduction to XML, W3Schools.com
In itself, XML can’t make content intelligent. In fact, an XML document “does not DO
anything. It is just information wrapped in tags. Someone must write a piece of software
to send, receive or display it.”
The more you understand about XML, the more you see what it can do for you.
XML is not the only technology solution for reuse, but it’s the most powerful. It supports
intelligent content strategies through the following:
• Structured content
• Separation of content and format
• Built-in metadata
#Intelcontent
• Database orientation
• XSL stylesheets
• Personalization
30
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
XML MARKUP
EXAMPLE 2
The tool used to view this raw XML does not use color. To work in a black-and-white
view, an author needs a trained eye to tell the content from the tags.
Source: Example DocBook article, the FreeBSD Project
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What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
About DITA and other content standards
You’ve probably heard of DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). You might know
that it’s related to XML in some way. DITA is a markup standard that was developed
primarily by IBM. DITA gives content developers a way to get started with XML-based content
without having to create an XML implementation from scratch.
DITA is not the only public content standard – others include DocBook, XBRL, and EDI – but
it is the most widely used. If you’re considering a move to intelligent content, DITA is an
option worth investigating.
Here’s how some industry experts describe DITA:
Joe Gollner: “DITA is an industry standard, a widely used methodology, a grab bag
of XML tricks that seasoned practitioners have learned are essential for making digital
content intelligent. DITA enables people to design, create, and publish content that’s
optimized for efficient reuse across a company or across many distribution channels.”
(email)
Don Day: “DITA is an XML-based open standard for structuring, developing,
managing, and publishing content. Like HTML, XML identifies chunks of content in a
way that both machines [computers] and people can understand. Unlike HTML, which
was designed to display data, XML was designed to give people a way to describe
data. DITA gives people a powerful way to use XML for new delivery trends, such as
responsive web design and adaptive content.” (email)
Jacquie Samuels: “DITA is an open standard that describes the architecture for
creating and managing information that separates the content from the formatting,
allows for a more streamlined content creation process, and opens up the possibilities
of introducing simpler ways of publishing to new technologies.”(What Is DITA?)
DITA was developed primarily for technical documentation. Some companies are now
exploring ways to apply DITA to content created and managed by marketing or other
departments. For one example of a marketing group using DITA, see the blog post
IBM’s James Mathewson on Making Marketing Content Intelligent.
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What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
Organizations that want to make their content intelligent must choose some kind of
machine-ready content standard to codify things like editorial rules, categorization, and
metadata labeling. They may choose DITA, another public standard, a “home-grown”
standard (one they create for their own internal use), or some combination of the above.
DITA MARKUP EXAMPLE —
“TAGS ON” VIEW
Authors sometimes want to see the DITA tags, which are outlined in this view.
Content source: DITA 1015
Ann Rockley, Steve Manning, and Charles Cooper. DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers.
(lulu.com: The Rockley Group, 2009).
5
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What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
About authoring tools
Before content can be managed, manipulated, or reused, it must be created. Authoring tools
are software applications that enable people to create content.
Authoring tools are among the oldest and most mature tools available for the desktop. The
dominant authoring tool on the market is Microsoft Word. Many other authoring tools exist –
including an increasing number of XML authoring tools. Additionally, many of the traditional
tools are adding or have added XML capabilities.
To support an intelligent content strategy, authoring tools must enable people to create content that
can be structured and reused according to a specified content life cycle, Rockley says. George Bina,
who owns the company that produces one such authoring tool (oXygen), notes that authoring tools
also need to give various authors – marketers, technical writers, engineers, developers, accountants,
customer service reps, etc. – various ways to render semantically rich markup.6 For example, power
users may want to see the code and metadata details; casual contributors may want to hide the code
for an authoring experience similar to using a word processor or filling in a form.
DITA MARKUP EXAMPLE — “NO TAGS” VIEW AS IT
APPEARS IN THE XML AUTHORING TOOL oXygen7
In this example, all tags are hidden, making the interface look like a traditional word
processor. Many authors prefer to create content in a “no tags” view. Since this example
comes from a DITA-based file, the author could switch to view the DITA tags (as shown in
the previous figure) or even to view the raw XML.
Via email.
The choice of the authoring tool shown in this example does not represent an endorsement. Tool decisions
must be based on the organization’s needs and preferences.
6
7
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34
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
As authoring tools become more sophisticated in functionality, they can get harder to use.
In his book Author Experience: Bridging the Gap Between People and Technology in Content
Management, Rick Yagodich talks about “how bad it is out there”8 when it comes to the
authoring tools available in 2014. He says, “If the tools are not fit for the purpose of creating
and managing content, how can we ever create that optimal end user experience?”9
Authoring tools are no doubt evolving to become both more powerful and more author-friendly.
AUTHORING-TOOL
MODES
XML authoring tools
enable people to work
in various modes. In
one mode, the author
might see or edit the
raw XML (top right). In
another mode, the author
might simply fill in fields
(bottom right), maybe
even assisted by hints,
shown here in yellow
boxes.
Rick Yagodich. Author Experience: Bridging the Gap Between People and Technology in Content Management.
(XML Press: Laguna Hills, California, 2014), p. x.
9
Ibid., p. 5.
8
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35
What puts the intelligent in intelligent content?
About content management systems
Content management is an integral part of a successful intelligent content strategy. Content
is created in an authoring tool and then saved into the content management system (CMS).
Content may be saved as individual components, after which the metadata is added. Within
the CMS, content is managed and then delivered to the appropriate channel.
Selecting the right CMS can be a lengthy investigational process. One of the hardest
decisions is selecting the type of CMS to use.
FROM THE LANGUAGE OF CONTENT STRATEGY
content management system: A software application that supports information
capture, editorial, governance, and publishing processes with tools such as
workflow, access control, versioning, search, and collaboration. —Noz Urbina
content standard: A design or definition (expressed in a modeling language)
considered by an authority as an approved model. Standards include structural
and semantic models, processes, and presentation semantics models. —Mark Lewis
XML: Extensible Markup Language (XML) is an open standard for structured
information storage and exchange. —Sarah O’Keefe
SCOTT ABEL: “It’s time we recognize that we write for computers
first, then for people. It’s time for intelligent content – content that
is both readable by humans and machines. Intelligent content
is content with superpowers – content that can (with the help of
technology) perform tasks automatically, freeing content creators
to add value through innovation.”
Quoted by Robert Rose in The Search for Intelligent Content in the Universe
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How can you get started?
The path to intelligent content may seem daunting. Here’s a snapshot of the whole path –
all the steps you eventually need to take:
1
Determine your business requirements.
2
Develop an intelligent content strategy.
Identify your customer needs.
Examine your content life cycle.
Audit your content.
Create content models.
Create a reuse strategy.
Design workflow.
Design metadata.
3
Prepare to support your intelligent content strategy.
Prepare to manage change.
Prepare to put people in new roles.
Research the technologies and tools.
For detailed guidance, see Rockley and Cooper’s book Managing Enterprise Content, which
dedicates a chapter to each step.
Meanwhile, here are some things you can do now to get started:
• Identify your company’s content-related pain points.
• Consider ways that intelligent content approaches might address those pain points.
• Determine the kind of improvements that would most benefit your company.
• Choose a small project.
• Create a well-structured content model.
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Conclusion
Getting started with intelligent content takes courage and creativity.
It also takes conversation. If you’re looking for people to learn from and talk
with, here are three things you can do right now:
1
Sign up for the Intelligent Content weekly email newsletter.
2
Join the Intelligent Content Conference LinkedIn group.
3
Plan to attend the Intelligent Content Conference.
RAHEL ANNE BAILIE: “Intelligent content is an approach that
‘should be designed to allow future projects to become part of a
unified strategy.’”
Quoted by Robert Rose in The Search for Intelligent Content in the Universe
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38
About Content Marketing Institute (CMI)
Content Marketing Institute is the leading
global content marketing education and training
organization. CMI teaches enterprise brands how to
attract and retain customers through compelling,
multichannel storytelling. CMI’s Content Marketing
World event, the largest content marketing-focused
event, is held every September in Cleveland, Ohio,
USA. CMI also produces Intelligent Content
Conference, Content Marketing Sydney and Content
Marketing Singapore. CMI publishes the bimonthly
magazine Chief Content Officer and provides
strategic consulting and content marketing research
for some of the best-known brands in the world.
CMI is a 2012, 2013, and 2014 Inc. 500 company.