The LavaCon Content Strategy Conference | 27–30 October 2024 | Portland, OR
Nitza Hauser

Nitza Hauser is the Sr Director, Technical Content Strategy at Medidata Solutions, a Dassault Systèmes company. She has been a Technical Communicator for over two decades, and a freelance translator and system programmer prior. Nitza is passionate about good technical communication that meets users’ needs and about simplifying or automating processes to allow writers to concentrate on what they do best – write! She is also a certified Scrum Master and an advocate for well-implemented Agile methodology.

While President of the Society for Technical Communication NY Metro chapter, the chapter won many awards (Community of Excellence, Pacesetter, Most Improved Community, Apex). She serves as an adviser on the NJIT Board of Visitors, MS in Professional and Technical Communications (MSPTC) program, and on the advisory commission for the BS in Professional and Technical Writing at NYC College of Technology.

Content and Silos and Users, Oh My! Transforming Our Customers’ Content Experience

Co-presented with: Frances Gambino

One company, many teams producing customer content, and no one noticing how the customer experience plays out. Sound familiar?

In 2022, we set out to develop a unified, self-service customer knowledge portal. Multiple Medidata teams joined forces to build a repository for content ranging from technical documentation and release notes to customer education and customer support articles – without need for lengthy migrations or re-training. Enter the Medidata Knowledge Hub!

We established a common taxonomy, added machine learning to power a faceted search capability, and used the same visual design as our products so the Hub is a natural extension and user-assistance companion to our product platform.

The Medidata Knowledge Hub breaks down content silos and transforms our customers’ content experience, expanding their self-service knowledge universe and enabling them to move seamlessly between product and product knowledge in all interactions with Medidata solutions.

In this session attendees will learn:

  • How we built the value proposition for this application and organized corporate stakeholder support across the organization
  • How we selected a technology partner to drive the success of our initiative
  • How we strategically designed the shift to the new application with a minimum change management factor for knowledge developers and users
  • How we took this opportunity to build in upgrades or enhancements to such core knowledge management components as taxonomy, user personas, and knowledge type labeling
  • How the implementation and deployment meets the expectation six months post-release
  • Lessons learned
  • A summary of ROI and Next Steps