The LavaCon Content Strategy Conference | 27–30 October 2024 | Portland, OR
Doug Gorman

Doug Gorman is the CEO of Simply XML, LLC. He has decades of experience working with technology and structured writing in support of better information performance. As CEO of Information Mapping for 20+ years, he brought structured writing and evolving technology to more than 400,000 authors in 43 countries. He holds a BA in Psychology from Colby College, an MS in Management from MIT, and practical experience in successful content management initiatives in very large global organizations.

Enterprise Content Management:
Bridging the Gap

The very large potential payoffs from Enterprise Content Management (ECM) cannot be achieved until Technical Departments and the Rest Of The Organization (ROTO) adopt standards, processes, and tools that work efficiently and economically for both. There is currently a vast “No Man’s Land” between Technical Departments and ROTO.
With an enterprise-level commitment to topic-based writing and a common XML content architecture:

  • Customers will get content that is consistently branded.
  • Efficiencies of reuse and single source publishing will grow.
  • CMS processes will become useful across the whole enterprise.
  • Translation volume, execution, quality, and costs will improve.
  • Your content supply chain will yield great results.
    All roads to the promises of Enterprise Content Management must foster participation from your portion of the 1.6 billion people in ROTO who use Microsoft Word on their Windows PCs.

In this session you will learn:

  • How differences in resources, operations, priorities, and constraints lead to different priorities and actions.
  • Why content needs to be topic-based and cognitively appropriate to make it accessible, understandable, and actionable.
  • Why content must to have an XML architecture so computers can process and control it.
  • How to achieve structured content, interoperability, and symmetry in ROTO or in conjunction with Technical Departments.
  • How to recognize constraints driven by scarce resources of people, time, technology, and money.
  • Tradeoffs required to achieve the broad organizational goals and the specialized goals of both ROTO and Technical Departments.
  • What needs to happen so DITA can move across No Man’s Land to ROTO.