Alexander Lum, Director of Product Content Development, has experienced the evolution of content authoring tools and processes in content development workflow throughout his 30+ years of experience.

Today, he specializes in many things, including end-to-end product content development and publishing. His primary focus today is improving customers’ user experiences and updating authoring tools with digital transformation initiatives, including incorporating Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools into product content development workflows.

How We Used DITA to Automate Testing, Improve Gen AI Accuracies, and Lower Costs

Co-presented with: Richard Kung

Is your Content Development team often pressed to “show its worth”? In 2024, we were presented an opportunity, by our VP, to brainstorm ideas how we can leverage our product content to improve efficiencies.

Our team presented an idea that leveraged our DITA source content to help our product verification team (aka QA) automate their testing effort. Our VP was encouraged by our proposal and tasked us with collaborating on a proof-of-concept (POC). After a few months of working alongside a member of the PV team, we developed an innovative automation script that saved the verification team 100s of hours per release, solidified our content in our generative AI experiences, and validated our team’s contributions and impact.

In this session attendees will learn:

• How and why we adopted a DITA authoring workflow
  
• Our DITA best practices and procedural topic templates
  
• How to engage with external teams to deliver solutions that achieve common goals
  
• Lessons learned
  
• Planning POCs and scaling up
  
• How Gen AI helps automation and how our PV automation helps our Gen AI mission

At the end of this session, you will gain insight into how you can show your content development team’s “value” to some of your key cross-functional teams and executives.