Content, Seriously Consulting Ltd.
Making order from content chaos.
What’s the difference between an article and a rant? It likely depends on whether you whether you find the pieces informative, and whether you agree or disagree with the premise. Either way, we hope you find the material useful.
In October 2023, a meeting of a Boye & Co digital leaders community brought together about a dozen people to discuss topics of mutual interest. My role was to present on the topic of artificial intelligence. Because artificial Intelligence is an area that is so wide and so varied, We focused on the aspects that …
One night recently, just before going to bed, I saw a chat message pop up on my screen: Hey, is your website down? I tried to send someone to it but looks like it’s not there.” I let out a big groan and shot off a chat message to the person who maintains my website. …
Accessibility guidelines for digital content turns 10 this year – the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) became an ISO standard in 2012. The start of the W3C initiative was in 1995, with version 1.0 published in 1999. Yes, accessibility standards have been around that long! Yet my industry experience tells me that many development …
What happens inside the content world seems to be opaque and mysterious. Operating models for content are mostly stuck in the 1980s, taking word processing and spreadsheets as far as possible, but woefully inadequate for a world where content goes far beyond “documents”. Content is expected to be componentised, re-used, adapted, reconfigured and repackaged, and …
A recent conversation between a content operations and a Digital Asset Management (DAM) specialist prompted the question: why can’t you just use a DAM to store content? Why would you need a separate authoring environment for content? Good question, right? When should you put content into a DAM, and when should you use some type …
It’s time to get real about how we talk about content technologies, particularly about content management technologies. The content industry has a naming problem. The problem is not just about the semantics of how we name things – the frustration of sitting through a meeting where a group of professionals argue vehemently about “templates” only …
We know from experience that when it comes to personalisation, there are all too many pitfalls. Take this example: “Dear Amazon, I bought a toilet seat because I needed one necessity, not desire. I do not collect them. I am not a toilet seat addict, no matter how temptingly you email me I’m not going …
Headless CMSes won’t solve your content problems. How the headless trends move content complexity upstream. When you do a Google search on the term “content operations”, the first page of results is overwhelmingly made up of ads from headless CMS vendors. To be clear, the vendors themselves have heads; it’s their content management systems that …
This past year has seen a lot of changes, both in personal habits and business practices, and how they affect each other is still a work in progress. On the personal front, we’ve gone from the frenzy of online socialising to a more introspective state. Compared to the first year of the pandemic, where everyone …
Discovery is the first step in any project designed to solve a business problem or to reach a business goal that involves content. The Five Pillars framework is an approach adapted from standard management consulting methods into an inquiry method developed specifically for the discovery phase of content projects. The method draws out the salient information …
It may seem odd to begin the discussion of content and context with data, but stay with me. The importance of having good data hygiene, good reference data sets, and data standards for interoperability is growing as we need to present better visualisations or crunch data in more sophisticated ways. The ability to carry out …
What happens inside the content world seems to be opaque and mysterious. Operating models for content are mostly stuck in the 1980s, taking word processing and spreadsheets as far as possible, but woefully inadequate for a world where content goes far beyond “documents”. Content is expected to be componentised, re-used, adapted, reconfigured and repackaged, and …
In October 2023, a meeting of a Boye & Co digital leaders community brought together about a dozen people to discuss topics of mutual interest. My role was to present on the topic of artificial intelligence. Because artificial Intelligence is an area that is so wide and so varied, We focused on the aspects that …
One night recently, just before going to bed, I saw a chat message pop up on my screen: Hey, is your website down? I tried to send someone to it but looks like it’s not there.” I let out a big groan and shot off a chat message to the person who maintains my website. …
Accessibility guidelines for digital content turns 10 this year – the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) became an ISO standard in 2012. The start of the W3C initiative was in 1995, with version 1.0 published in 1999. Yes, accessibility standards have been around that long! Yet my industry experience tells me that many development …
Search the term “omnichannel” and you’ll get multiple search results for “omnichannel marketing” with “omnichannel retail” being a strong contender for search results. However, this tells only a small part of the story. The Wikipedia entry for omnichannel is worth reading because it goes beyond the narrower world of marketing and sales to a wider …
One of the frustrations of doing content consultations is when the organisation resists recommendations to improve the content production process. The consultation is going smoothly. The discovery and gap analysis has been completed, and a set of recommendations has been approved. The stakeholders are on their way to adopting a highly-efficient ecosystem, and then the …
What are the five ways that content operations powers omni channel needs. This video gives you a whirlwind tour. But before we get into it, let me clarify what I mean by content operations. Content Ops is about production efficiencies, looking at end to end processes, eliminating the many non value add activities and then …
A recent conversation between a content operations and a Digital Asset Management (DAM) specialist prompted the question: why can’t you just use a DAM to store content? Why would you need a separate authoring environment for content? Good question, right? When should you put content into a DAM, and when should you use some type …
It’s time to get real about how we talk about content technologies, particularly about content management technologies. The content industry has a naming problem. The problem is not just about the semantics of how we name things – the frustration of sitting through a meeting where a group of professionals argue vehemently about “templates” only …
We know from experience that when it comes to personalisation, there are all too many pitfalls. Take this example: “Dear Amazon, I bought a toilet seat because I needed one necessity, not desire. I do not collect them. I am not a toilet seat addict, no matter how temptingly you email me I’m not going …
Headless CMSes won’t solve your content problems. How the headless trends move content complexity upstream. When you do a Google search on the term “content operations”, the first page of results is overwhelmingly made up of ads from headless CMS vendors. To be clear, the vendors themselves have heads; it’s their content management systems that …
This past year has seen a lot of changes, both in personal habits and business practices, and how they affect each other is still a work in progress. On the personal front, we’ve gone from the frenzy of online socialising to a more introspective state. Compared to the first year of the pandemic, where everyone …
Discovery is the first step in any project designed to solve a business problem or to reach a business goal that involves content. The Five Pillars framework is an approach adapted from standard management consulting methods into an inquiry method developed specifically for the discovery phase of content projects. The method draws out the salient information …
It may seem odd to begin the discussion of content and context with data, but stay with me. The importance of having good data hygiene, good reference data sets, and data standards for interoperability is growing as we need to present better visualisations or crunch data in more sophisticated ways. The ability to carry out …
One of the misconceptions about the production of content is that of the content “supply chain”. Books published in print works on a supply chain model: create, print, sell, done. There is a distinct beginning and end. That’s become a less common scenario in today’s business environments. Content production is circular, and works on a …
If you know about content strategy from the practitioner’s point of view, you’ll know that we like our quads. (To be fair, our field of practice practically lives in spreadsheets. But let’s face it, spreadsheets don’t make for sexy visuals.) Do a Google image search on quads, and you’ll find square quads, round quads, quads …
What Is Content Operations? What’s old is new again, and the area of content operations falls squarely in the middle of that old adage. Deane Barker, respected consultant and author of Web Content Management, has found references to content operations in a blog post from over a decade ago. Similarly, I have found reference to …
What happens when you start working in an area that has no real name to it? When it involves content and data, but it’s not “content strategy” exactly, and it’s not “content operations” exactly, and it’s certainly not “data operations”? You adopt a label that is the closest term to what you want to describe. …
