Bernard Aschwanden is CEO and Co-Founder of Writemore AI, where he leads product strategy and enterprise engagements focused on modernizing enterprise documentation. He works with regulated and complex industries to convert legacy content into governed ecosystems integrated with CCMS environments. His background includes structured authoring, CCMS implementation, content architecture, and compliance-driven documentation. He helps organizations reduce documentation risk, improve release readiness, and treat content as a strategic business asset.

Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Content Speaking: Structured Content as the Best Investment in Certification, Scale, and Safety

Co-presented with: Ryan Chin

Choosing a component content management system for an aerospace startup requires more than comparing vendor features. The decision must account for evolving aircraft designs, certification, configuration control, limited resources, aggressive schedules, and documentation that will eventually support production, operations, maintenance, training, and continued airworthiness.

Drawing on a real aerospace startup, we’ll explain how to define requirements, determine where DITA and structured content add value, evaluate essential capabilities, and avoid choices that create costly limitations later. You’ll leave with a practical, brand-agnostic framework for selecting a CCMS that can scale from prototype and certification through production and long-term operations.

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Define CCMS requirements around business, engineering, certification, operational, and publishing needs rather than vendor feature lists.
• Determine where DITA, reusable topics, maps, metadata, conditional processing, and structured content provide measurable value to an aerospace program.
• Evaluate support for traceability, configuration control, aircraft effectivity, review and approval, regulatory evidence, and controlled publishing.
• Distinguish essential startup capabilities from features that can be deferred until the aircraft program and documentation organization mature.
• Identify attractive demonstration features that may become operational, integration, performance, or governance problems several years after implementation.
• Avoid common mistakes involving premature customization, weak information architecture, unmanaged metadata, uncontrolled reuse, and dependence on proprietary processes.
• Evaluate migration, integration, implementation, validation, training, administration, and long-term operating costs—not simply software licensing.
• Build a brand-agnostic selection and proof-of-concept process that tests realistic aerospace content, users, workflows, and outputs.
• Select an approach that can grow from a small certification team into a governed enterprise content operation supporting production and continued airworthiness.