Keynote Speakers

Featured Speakers

Core Speakers

Keynote Speakers

Gabor Fari, Microsoft

Intelligent Content: An Emerging Trend in Enterprise Content Management

Intelligent Content is emerging as one of the next important trends in Enterprise Content Management. The traditional approaches of creating content on the desktop and managing it in a Content Management system need to be supplemented by Intelligent Content approaches, which allow content to be assembled on-demand and according to business rules from ’self-aware’ components. At the same time, most of the pure XML-based approaches also have limitations, both from a user-friendliness and flexibility perspective. Intelligent Content has the potential to combine the best of both worlds. The presentation will provide an overview of the limitations and challenges of managing content in regulated industries and emerging new trends leading to ECM 2.0 and the Intelligent Content Framework, and the importance of combining technology with Intelligent Content Design.

About Gabor Fari

Gabor Fari started with Microsoft in January 2006. In his role as Solutions Strategist within the Health & Life Sciences Industry Unit, Gabor plays a key role in defining and executing Microsoft’s Life Sciences solutions and business strategy. His main areas of focus are Enterprise Content Management, Regulated Document Management and Clinical Trials. Gabor is also the architect and driving force behind the Intelligent Content Framework, with the mission to introduce an entirely new way of managing Enterprise Content in Regulated Industries, based on the latest XML technologies. He also serves as a product advisor to several Microsoft Life Sciences partners developing next-generation solutions for the industry.

Prior to Microsoft, Gabor worked at Open Text Corporation, the largest independent provider of ECM software and solutions. He started with Open Text as Senior Account Executive in 2001, and held the position of Manager of Global Field Marketing for the Life Sciences Division for the last three years. Next to his role in Field Marketing, Gabor was actively involved in business development and product strategy for Life Sciences solutions. He helped manage the successful transition to a vertical-oriented business model and in defining specific Life Sciences solutions, related to Regulated Documents, Clinical Trials and Electronic Submissions. Gabor also represented Open Text at key Pharmaceutical and Health Care industry initiatives such as SEBiX, SAFE and HL7/IHE, and has been an invited speaker at a number of industry events.

Gabor holds a Master’s Degree in Chemical Engineering, specializing in Bioprocess Engineering, from the Budapest Institute of Technology, and an MBA from Rutgers University. He has been involved directly and indirectly with the biopharmaceutical industry throughout his 20 year career, in a variety of roles. He began his career as project manager for New Brunswick Scientific Company, where he also managed product development and design, and delivered a number of successful projects in the areas of fermentation and cell culture to produce novel vaccines and antibiotics.

Bob Glushko, University of California, Berkeley

Intelligent Content: The Foundation for Information-Intensive Systems and Services

Intelligent content is the foundation for information-intensive systems and services. The most information-intensive ones are those with few or no requirements for physical and personal interactions, or where personal interactions are narrowly focused on the information exchange needed to make decisions and apply other information. Examples include accounting and auditing, publishing, legal and professional services, customer support, business intelligence, logistics, remote monitoring, and energy management. Other information-intensive services also involve essential personal or physical interactions, including traditional classroom education, emergency and surgical healthcare, sales, consulting, and personnel resources administration.

The rapid adoption of intelligent content in such a diverse set of industries and domains makes it impossible for information designers and managers to be familiar with all of them. However, it is possible to apply a very different framework to the design of information-intensive services and systems that emphasizes what they have in common rather than how they differ.

Many of the most complex of these “information-intensive service systems” combine person-to-person encounters, self-service, computational services, multi-channel, multi-device, and location-based or context-aware services. Each of these contexts has characteristic design challenges, design methods, and opportunities for employing intelligent content to create and sustain value. This conceptualization of service system design makes it easier to see the systematic relationships among the contexts that can be exploited as design parameters or patterns, such as the use of intelligent content for personalization or the substitutability of intelligent content for person-to-person interactions.

About Robert Glushko

Robert J. Glushko is an Adjunct Full Professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he is one of the founding faculty members of the Information and Service Design program in the School of Information. He has a PhD (Cognitive Psychology) from the University of California, San Diego and an MS (Software Engineering) from the Wang Institute.
He has thirty years of R&D, consulting, and entrepreneurial experience in information systems and service design, content management, electronic publishing, Internet commerce, and human factors in computing systems. He founded or co-founded four companies, including Passage Systems in 1992, which pioneered the automation of SGML-based single source technical publishing, and Veo Systems in 1997, which drove the use of XML and web services for electronic business before its 1999 acquisition by Commerce One. Veo’s innovations included the Common Business Library (CBL), the first native XML vocabulary for business-to-business transactions, and the Schema for Object-Oriented XML (SOX), the first object-oriented XML schema language. In 2008 he co-founded and serves as a Director for Document Engineering Services, an international consortium of expert consultants in standards for electronic business.

He is a member of the Board of Directors for OASIS, an international consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of “open standards for the global information society,” and is also on the Board of Directors for the Open Data Foundation, dedicated to the adoption of global metadata standards for statistical data.

Featured Speakers

Chona Shumate, Cymer

How to Turn Content Into A Corporate Asset: Cymer’s Journey to DITA and Multi-channel Publishing

Recognizing content as an asset and conveying the value of information – value beyond IP – requires fundamental shifts in how we think about content. Ours came out of a business need, and evolved into the first steps of an emerging technology. Using far-focus vision, along with some courage and innovation, we researched, found new tools, learned new skills, and built a second-tier roadmap for our content and delivery. Understanding where we were going, how we were going to get there, and what we needed was essential for turning our products into assets. This required new skills, new processes, and new mindsets. We’re now ready to take multi-channel publishing to the next level of understanding, namely that content is an asset if it has life, if it is dynamic, and if it is responsive. Think about transitioning “dead documents” to “live content.” We want to help our users move from consuming information from a conveyor belt to becoming bi-directional learners, adapting to the newer generation user so that learning is personalized, visually-driven for the global user, and search-based to build user intimacy and trust with their content.

About Chona Shumate

BA English, MA Technical Communication and Rhetoric, New Mexico State Univ, Las Cruces, NM. 22 years in the tech comm industry, currently Sr. Manager of Tech Pubs for 13 years at Cymer, Inc. Presented at STC and CIDM Best Practices. Former member of DITA OASIS Technical Committee, Co-authored several SEMI Standards for Documentation and Training for the semiconductor industry.

Michael Boses, Quark

Enterprise Processes and Intelligent Content: Case Studies in Architecture and Usability

This is most productive time in history to be thinking about intelligent content. A mere decade ago, nascent concepts of intelligent content represented technologies that were nearly impossible to implement in any real-world environment and infrastructure. Fortunately, most organizations were able to consider these concepts as “nice-to-haves” at the time.

But things have changed, and today these same organizations have mission critical enterprise processes that are hindered by a document model that is terribly obsolete. Organizations must find a path to implementing intelligent content to drive business process automation, leverage intellectual property, deliver dynamic publishing, and more.

This presentation will focus on the successes of some early enterprise adopters of intelligent content. What were the challenges, successes, and ultimately best practices that we can take away from their experience? The use cases presented will look at very large communities of content creators, very large taxonomies of document types, and how the enterprise architectural requirements were reconciled with the end-users needs for intuitive applications that would allow them to do their work.

Highlights of the session include:

• Intelligent Content and Enterprise Architecture: interoperability, information silos, and emerging standards
• Intelligent Content and the Desktop: why authors should not need to know or care about XML
• Intelligent Content and Stakeholders: requirements, harmonization, and business change

About Michael Boses

Michael Boses, Quark Director of XML Technologies
Michael Boses is co-chair of the OASIS DITA for Enterprise Business Documents Subcommittee, and a frequent conference speaker where he shares his real-world experiences in helping organizations succeed with XML. On a daily basis, Michael collaborates on projects that involve moving hundreds of users to XML authoring, and realizes that no matter what the size, project success comes down to improving each author’s user experience and productivity

Core Program

Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

Intelligent Content Meets Intelligent Hardware and Software: How iPhones, Google Wave, and Mobile Applications are Leveraging Content to Provide Smart Solutions

Location awareness, social networking, mashups, and mobile communications are changing the way we interact with business-critical information — and with one another. Attend this session with content management strategist and social media choreographer, Scott Abel, and you will learn how iPhone applications, analytical search engines, pattern matching technologies, smart web browsers, and eBook readers are helping us provide intelligent content solutions to our clients. Discover how smart web browsers, smart devices, and smart content marketers are using technology to provide value-added intelligent content services to customers. Find out how some organizations are leveraging content technologies to differentiate themselves from the competition. Real world examples will be used and a question and answer session will be provided.

About Scott Abel

Scott Abel is a content management strategist and structured XML content evangelist, whose strengths lie in helping organizations improve the way they author, maintain, and deliver their information assets. Scott is also a social media choreographer, helping organizations around the globe leverage the power of social networking for business-critical applications.

His blog, The Content Wrangler (http://www.TheContentWrangler.com), is a popular online resource for content professionals with an interest in content management. Scott’s social networking site, The Content Wrangler Community (http://thecontentwrangler.ning.com), is a global network of content professionals that attracts thousands of members from around the world. Scott also maintains a popular Twitter feed (http://www.twitter.com/scottabel). A founding member of Content Management Professionals (http://www.cmpros.org), Scott previously served as Executive Director of the organization.

Scott writes regularly for trade and industry publications, blogs, and newsletters. He’s a featured presenter and live blogger at content conferences in North American and Europe. He also co-produces several industry events, including the Web Content (http://www.webcontentconferences.com) and Intelligent Content (http://www.intelligentcontent2010.com) conference series.

He’s working on a new book right now for Rockley Press entitled, “Social Media 101″.

Rahel Anne Bailie, Intentional Design Inc.

Thinking Bigger, Thinking Smarter: Raising Content IQ with a Good Strategy

We’re being challenged to integrate content, share information, and serve up content from various sources in new and increasingly innovative ways. This trend is pushing us to collaborate beyond any arbitrary boundaries previously set by technologies, departments, organizations – or ourselves. Yet when content is discussed, it’s generally at a tactical level: marketing collateral, technical documentation, customer support, blogs, or user-generated content. The challenge to deliver content in better, smarter ways is becoming the next frontier, both internally “with production efficiency in mind” and externally “looking for competitive advantage”. The starting point for building a delivery model needs to start further up the value chain, with the acknowledgement that content is a corporate asset that deserves the same consideration as other intellectual property within the organization. Conventional thinking produces conventional results. When looking for the competitive edge to deliver products and services, the same edge is needed for content that supports the product and the organization. This calls for more emphasis up front on content strategy, and a bolder view of what content can be and do.

Enterprises are beginning to understand the need for a content strategy to ensure that the content they create is useful and usable, on target and on brand. The investment in content is not inexpensive, and managing it extends throughout the entire content lifecycle, from creation to sunset, as well as its governance. This presentation examines some of the new ways of thinking about content destined for the Web and related channels, where portability and interoperability are anticipated and expected. This session demonstrates ways that a good content strategy can address these issues, promote your brand, create operational efficiencies, and create value for users in unexpected ways.

This session covers:

• Salient aspects of a content strategy
• How content strategy is tied to user experience and brand management
• Ways to create added value from existing content
• How to make smart decisions around content for intelligent delivery
• Benefits to organizations of varying sizes

About Rahel Anne Bailie

Rahel Anne Bailie is a content strategist whose practice involves business analysis, information architecture, usability, content management, and communications. She has operated Intentional Design since 2002, helping clients analyze business requirements and spectrum of content to get the right fit for their content development and management needs, and facilitates transitions to new business processes, content models, and technology implementations. Rahel was elected STC Fellow in 2009, and manages their Content Strategy SIG. She also holds memberships in associations such as CM Pros, IAI, UPA, and the Internet Strategy Forum to keep current in pertinent practice areas.

Diane Burley, Pure Contemporary

Social Media “Corral Your Mavericks with Social Media Governance

Social Media 1.0 consisted of hoping that someone in your organization (usually the staff intern) knew enough about Twitter, Facebook, Digg and YouTube just to get something out there. But as social media picks up steam creating great opportunities for branding and search engine optimization, it’s time to go from ad hoc to systematic. But how?

In this talk we will discuss:

• Ways social media improves audience loyalty & builds traffic
• How semantic analysis impacts social media
• Methods to weaving social media participation into the workflow,
• Automating tasks to relieve the burdens from staff
• How to push your brand, build audience and increase loyalty, and accentuate the positives and negatives of your assets
• Automating syndication

About Diane Burley

Diane Burley is an online media specialist who knows how to transition traditional-media business structures and brands into multi-channel successes. A rare combination of technologist and journalist — Burley understands the workflow, the cultural speed bumps, the advantages of different channels, and a multitude of ways to leverage great content!

A strategic visionary and online pioneer Burley has put numerous media companies online including daily metros, radio stations and her own site, PureContemporary.com — a global, “prosumer”-based, web-only luxury vertical media site that offers a compelling mix of highly regarded editorial and monetized content. Through SEO, she has cultivated an international audience of nearly 125,000 monthly unique readers.

An award-winning writer, highly sought after global speaker, and chief confidante to today’s highest ranking web publishers, she is adept at putting digital terms (SEO, the importance of metadata, monetizing content, digital asset management) into plain business parlance. Burley engages her audiences through vivid metaphors “peppering” her talks and writings with her own experiences and actual case studies. She also is a spokeswoman for Nstein Technologies, and author of a new blog on digital publishing, SiliconValet

Michelle de Haaff, Attensity Group

Do You Hear What I Hear? Engaging Your “Social” Customers Through a Knowledge Repository

Customers are flocking to the Web to discuss everything from customer service complaints to product recommendations. Expert forums, not a company’s call center, are rapidly becoming the destination for frustrated customers. Now, more then ever, online chatter contains a treasure trove of immediate, rich and detailed information about customer sentiment. Companies nimble enough to listen and act on the customer-created content will win over not only the hearts of potential customers, but also their business.

At a time when what customers say online has a significant and immediate impact on brand equity, it’s important to listen to what customers are saying, have the ability to analyze it, and take swift action. Michelle de Haaff, CMO of Attensity Group, will provide case study examples of industry leaders such as JetBlue, Travelocity and Charles Schwab who are mining unstructured text for insight into customer thoughts and actions.

This session discusses how companies can develop an efficient knowledge repository to enable more effective creation, maintenance and administration of business knowledge from the web and other sources, and link it with all service-relevant documents. Real world examples of what’s worked (and more importantly what hasn’t worked) in analyzing social media content will be provided. She’ll also highlight the steps businesses can take to proactively address the concerns of their social and most influential customers. Finally, de Haafe will explain how and why the companies who are most successful in leveraging social media to connect and serve customers are those who are using an integrated approach of semantic analysis technology and old-fashioned customer service.

Attendees will leave this session armed with the tools necessary to monitor, analyze and repurpose social media content to intelligently respond, react and reach out to the social customers shaping their brand.

About Michelle de Haaff

As CMO, Michelle de Haaff leads Attensity Group’s marketing and product management efforts globally. Michelle was previously VP of Marketing at Adspace Networks. At Blue Martini Software, Michelle led the development of eCommerce, Content Management, Campaign Management and BI applications. Previously, Michelle led the eCommerce and database marketing teams at Levi Strauss and was a CRM practice manager at Ernst & Young. Michelle graduated magna cum laude from NYU and holds an M.S. from Northwestern. She has three very active sons.

Glenn Emerson, Suite Solutions

It’s all about the content!

It’s all about the content. Using content in new, automated ways, exploiting XML semantics and the related technologies that make real time processing and use of XML possible is not at all possible if the content itself is not designed to support the automation. Computers are stupid. They are good at recognizing and processing patterns. At the core, though, any content strategy requires solid information architecture and a well thought out semantic and metadata strategy.

Using DITA examples, this session will explore how intelligent content can enable automation of development management, enhancing productivity and responsiveness in times of shorter schedules and tighter budgets. We will look at the savings possible, through use of granular semantic elements, minimalism, layering and metadata to characterize content.

About Glenn Emerson

Glenn recently left Xerox after a 12 year stint to become an independent consultant in DITA, content management strategy and information architecture. His background includes numerous awards and a patent for user-assistance information products while at Xerox. Glenn now works with Joe Gelb, of Suite Solutions, Ltd. to provide professional services necessary for organizations seeking to adopt or convert to XML authoring, content management and publishing.

Joe Gollner, Stilo International

Intelligent Content Management

The emergence of intelligent content, and new types of applications that it makes possible, is a more significant phenomenon than we collectively appreciate. For one thing its emergence (and this will sound a little shocking) signals the death of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as we have known it. And this is not at all a bad thing. Let’s be honest, ECM had never found the right balance between investment costs, implementation impacts and benefits realized. If we are being blunt, and it seems that we are, ECM had never really been pursued in a manner that would genuinely enable or improve enterprise performance.

Now all this is about to change because the tools and techniques for creating, leveraging and evolving intelligent content are now within easy reach and organizations can now shift their focus onto exactly what they need to achieve, where they can improve and what new products they can create. We know how to design intelligent content structures. We know what it takes to convert our legacy holdings into suitably graduated intelligent content. We know what steps we need to take to create and maintain intelligent content as part of larger integrated processes. We know how applications need to be designed to exploit intelligent content so as to deliver never before seen services. And we know what it means to evolve and adapt intelligent content so that our investments exactly match the rate of return that we can reasonably expect. We have, in effect, learned how to not only make content intelligent but how to make content management intelligent as well.

So it is with confidence that we can declare: Enterprise Content Management is dead! Long live Intelligent Content Management!

About Joe Gollner

Joe Gollner is the Chief Solutions Architect (Advanced Content Technologies) at Stilo International and the director of Gnostyx Research, an initiative dedicated to promoting open content technologies. He has been an active practitioner of, and wayward champion for, standards-based content management for over 20 years and he has worked extensively in such industry sectors as aerospace, defense, engineering, healthcare and energy, where the intelligence of content and its exploitation have been of paramount importance. In his presentations, he tends to mix a variety of materials including little known historical facts, hot-off-the-press project experiences, and hopefully the occasional glimpse into the future. To the delight of some, and the dismay of others, he has started to focus his blog more resolutely on the topic of intelligent content (www.gollner.ca).

Pradeep Jain, Ictect, Inc.

Intelligent Content Architecture at the US Air Force

This session offers an overview of the Intelligent Content Architecture used for managing Policies and Directives for the Air Force e-Publishing site (http://www.e-publishing.af.mil), part of the Air Force Public Information Management System (AFPIMS). While the e-Publishing site has used XML content for 6+ years, the site moved from an “outsourced” process to an “in-sourced” process in the last 12-months.

The session focuses on the transition and covers the following:

• Overview of the situation
• Challenges faced
• Development of Content Models based on established rules
• Insourcing challenges
• Tools and technologies
• Content quality control
• Overview of the Intelligent Content Architecture
• Current state
• Summary of the benefits
• Lessons learned

The session will conclude with a brief demonstration of the processes used in various stages of the content lifecycle including submission, review, quality control, formatting, publishing and amendment of Policies and Directives.

About Pradeep Jain

Pradeep Jain is a Business/IT Architect with 15 years of experience in developing XML-based solutions for complex business processes. His experience in architecting solutions includes e-Publishing, Asset Appraisal, Contract Management, Large Scale e-Commerce, XBRL documents, and e-Governance Processes. Pradeep has spoken at XML conferences in the US and Europe since 2000. Pradeep has an MBA from Marquette University and a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan. He has been an adjunct faculty on Business Administration at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, WI, where he has taught courses on strategic IT management, innovation management and intrapreneurship.

James Michelson, JFM Concepts

Using & Reusing Intelligent Content for 1:1 Cross Media Marketing

This session is designed to give those responsible for delivering and maintaining web content a look at the best approaches to create and serve relevant and personal material. Discover how savvy writers, technology experts, and marketers are using the latest tactics to coordinate cross media campaigns, track results, and generate follow up communications without needing support across multiple departments or firms.

Discover how savvy marketers are using the latest tactics to coordinate cross media campaigns, track results, and generate follow up communications without needing support across multiple departments or firms. The speaker will present a practical guide to delivering personalized content across various marketing channels. Participants will examine a real world examples in multiple formats that demonstrates proven strategies to attract prospects and convert leads into sales. The sample materials can serve as a platform for the attendee’s own projects.

The session will demonstrate how to develop personas for each prospect, capture the prospect’s attention, determine their demographics, and drive the lead to the web for personalized information. Focus will be on using variable content with multiple touch points and communication methods. The presentation will outline successful tactics to ensure the best possible outcome and highest ROI from content based marketing and sales efforts.

The topics to be covered in this session include:

• Developing personas to understand prospects and customers
• Segmenting prospects and conducting real time personalization to serve web visitors specific content regardless of their entry point
• Creating & presenting highly targeted marketing campaigns using integrated micro-sites and personalized landing pages
• Providing personalized and highly relevant content from database analysis, web content, list & market procurement, and list & market analytics
• Collecting and comparing metrics across all media
• Implementing automated follow up and fulfillment processes

About James Michelson

James Michelson is an honor graduate of George Washington University with more than 15 years executive marketing and sales experience. He has a Masters degree in Business Administration from Jacksonville University. James has held key positions for both Fortune 15 and small firms in technology, industrial, retail, and finance industries. He creates programs that improve response, serve variable content, and drive sales. James is also an adjunct professor of business, teaching students how to create enterprise level marketing and sales campaigns in practical ways. He is a principal at JFM Concepts, providers of the VDP Complete® marketing system.

Mary Miller, AchieveGlobal

Designing Content for Reusability

Creating training for a large, global set of learners requires a new approach to developing content. Today, content needs to be increasingly customized, modular and multi-modal in nature if it is to effectively meet the varying needs of users. This demands designing for reusability.

Many E-Learning implementations exist in a silo because learning content management is not integrated with the rest of an organization’s content resources. Consequently, a lot of the content used in training needs to be duplicated and gets out of sync with its source. The isolation means that content takes longer to develop and difficult to leverage and repurpose for different applications and delivery formats. The redundancy also drives up translation costs.
This session will address this issue though a case study that highlights AchieveGlobal’s transition to single-source in order to more effectively meet the needs of tens of thousands of learners across 40 countries and in over 30 languages. Learn how an integrated enterprise learning suite capable of delivering multi-modal output coupled with designing enterprise content for reusability improved AchieveGlobal’s speed-to-market through real-time product and branding updates, on-demand delivery formats that meet any level of cultural or technical readiness, customized modules to support multiple audiences and localized changes to meet global market needs.

Specifically, learn:

• How to create reusable learning objects that can be rapidly assembled into customized training products.
• How a structured approach to content development that enables multi-modal training delivery.
• How to determine what content is reusable throughout your enterprise.
• Best practices for moving to a single-source strategy.

About Mary Miller

Mary’s role has been to build the strategy and infrastructure to offer flexible and scalable Blended Learning Solutions leveraging AchieveGlobal content. This includes content delivered via classroom, eLearning, discussion threads, blogs, wikis, assignments and webinars; storing the content in a Content Management System for quick and easy tailoring and customization. Mary had been the architect for several award winning solutions, including programs winning CUBIC and ASTD, Personnel Today, Brandon Hall and UK Open University awards.

Kelley Myers, Microsoft

Social Mash-up Case Study: Community + Content

Creating engaging online hubs is challenging in today’s ever-on-always-plugged-in world. We’re bombarded with social networking sites that blur the lines between personal and professional activities. Going social and being viral don’t happen in a vacuum. For consumers websites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are appealing and easy-to-use. The personalized content makes the intuitively interesting communities online. More and more corporations are plugged creating Twitter feeds, managing YouTube channels, and making fan pages on Facebook.

But what happens when you are a large global corporation trying to build a new brand, drive customer engagement, and make sure that there is a measurable return on your investment? In an effort to innovate how we keep our customers informed and engaged, the Microsoft Advertising Community and Web Publishing teams developed a reusable microsite that allows us to cover major industry events globally. But we didn’t stop at development; we then turned to creative marketing efforts to drive traffic, socialize the microsite, and keep it fresh for each event.

In this presentation we’ll look at the teams that built the microsite, share success measures and reporting, look at cost savings and the future of online community engagement. This presentation is appropriate for anyone in marketing, content publishing, public relations, community development or social media looking to extend online engagement with customers.

About Kelley Myers

In 2005 Kelley began working for Microsoft Corporation as an online content manager. Today Kelley leads the creative service and publishing teams for the Microsoft Advertising website and is currently managing a global redesign for all 29 advertising websites.

Kelley lives in Bellevue, WA with her two children, her husband, and an aging overweight Weimaraner named Zoe. She is a mixed media artist, occasional quilter, and blogger. You can follow her on Twitter @Kelley_Myers.

Natasja Paulssen, Quatron

The magic of intuitive content access

Ever had to find some information and it turned out it was scattered over many IT systems? Ever notice that the same questions delivered different answers, depending on the IT system you asked? Noticed that the ONE portal they promised turned out to be just another, if a little more fancy, menu structure?

Information is captured in IT systems, governed by rules that were important when it was created. Those same rules prevent other people from being able to use the information outside the context of creation.
What we need is information that is fitted to our information need. An environment that predicts what we will ask. A place where we feel at home, that inspires us to do better and that connects us to relevant related content and people.
What we need to do is pry away the content from the fingers of the IT systems, free it from its chains, enable the flow of information and then assemble it together in a meaningful context for whoever is going to use it.

Doesn’t that sound like magic? This session demonstrates the intuitiveness of the interface we built.

About Natasja Paulssen

Natasja Paulssen twitters under natasjap, blogs at Dutch Rose Reflections and is co-founder and director Sales & Marketing at Quatron. Natasja’s main focus is human-sensible information, i.e., information that has to be read by people. Content management principles can help bridge the gap from siloed technology to real people. She lives by the following words: “Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths” (Karl Popper), believing that an idea unchallenged is worth nothing at all.

Richard Sikes, Across Systems, Inc.

Business Intelligence for Language Technology

New technological developments have brought concepts from data mining, linguistic analysis, and business intelligence into the realm server-based, enterprise-scale linguistic asset management. Content creators ranging from language infrastructure managers and technical writers to translation and localization resources can now access centralized repositories and tools for composing, reusing, translating, maintaining, managing, and organically expanding multilingual source and target language content. Furthermore, these tools provide valuable management information for monitoring linguistic asset growth as well as the underlying IT infrastructure to aid informed, cost-effective decision-making.

This presentation will first discuss why multilingual content is an asset, a concept often missing in the corporate C-level offices. The focus will then turn to descriptions of how data mining, computerized linguistic analysis, and business intelligence have been applied by newly developed software technology to management of these assets.

Multilingual terminology creation is as much an art as a science, and can be prohibitively expensive. But scientific algorithms can assist in reducing the fields of choice to sizes more readily and cost-effectively managed by human resources. Application of statistical methods can help terminologists efficiently parse through very large repositories of aligned source and target language content, harvesting term candidates and their most likely translations for further consideration and refinement by humans. We will explain the process and show how it is done.

Linguistic analysis by software has now transcended the worlds of spelling, grammar checking, and terminology compliance. Sophisticated rules can now be defined and applied to source language to determine comprehensibility and translatability. The same or other, appropriate, rules can be applied to target language content. We will describe how this is now possible and focus on some of the cost benefits of applying this technology.

About Richard Sykes

Richard has been immersed in localization since 1989. Through his consulting company, Localization Flow Technologies, Richard is known worldwide as a localization management consultant, technology trainer, and speaker. His articles regularly appear in MultiLingual magazine. Richard is a Language Technology Evangelist for Across Systems, among other technology providers.

Samantha Starmer, REI

Successfully Evangelizing Intelligent Content

Many of us are in organizations or work with clients where we know that intelligent content is necessary for the business to be successful. We continually push the need for content re-use and content personalization as critical pieces for delivering the goals of the business, driving efficiency, communicating to users and optimizing the user experience.

However, we may have had difficulty getting funded, keeping appropriate resources or prioritizing the essential work to support intelligent content. To many business executives, anything related to content management, publishing or information strategy is not sexy, feels like a complex IT initiative and therefore can easily be swept under the budgeting rug.

Unless the decision makers are well versed in the benefits of intelligent content and understand best practices for targeted, personalized content and optimizing user experience based on content, the resources, time and funding for the necessary technology and resources can be one of the first things cut in prioritization exercises.

To be successful at moving intelligent content forward in both our individual companies and in the larger world of business, we must learn how to successfully evangelize intelligent content and the resources to support it. This presentation will provide specific, actionable, experience-based tips for successfully connecting with the decision makers in your organization and making intelligent content a key component of their priority map.

A case study will be used to show how to identify the business case, business strategy and political support for intelligent content and the work necessary to support it. Specific examples of how will illustrate how to bring the disciplines and resources necessary to deliver intelligent content to a top retailer, allowing both for dynamic, personalized marketing communications and a transformed customer experience. Attendees will walk away with inspiration on how to gain support for this work from the ground up, as well as actionable tips and tricks learned the hard way in an eventually successful journey to evangelize intelligent content.

Topics include:

• Identifying and pitching the business case for intelligent content
• Understanding how intelligent content might drive revenue as well as efficiencies in your organization
• How to structure presentations and determine the best ways to speak to each necessary audience
• How to gain ‘buzz’ around intelligent content so that you get funded without even asking
• dentifying the needs and gap analysis with existing content practices
• Evangelizing appropriate prioritization and resourcing to support intelligent content work
• Managing through expected roadblocks, naysayers and politics
• Highlighting the importance of data driven decisions and establishing intelligent content metrics

About Samantha Starmer

Over the last 11 years, Samantha Starmer has worked on a wide variety of content, user experience and information architecture projects while at Amazon.com, SchemaLogic and Microsoft. She is currently a senior manager at Recreational Equipment, Incorporated (REI), leading the teams that run Information Strategy and Online User Experience. She holds a Master’s of Library and Information Science degree from the University of Washington, a certificate in Content Management. She lectures at the University of Washington Information School. Samantha is currently on the Oversight committee for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and has also served on the boards for the Information Architecture Institute and Content Management Professionals.

Noz Urbina, Mekon Ltd.

Integrating Information Intelligently Across Customer-Facing Services

Too often customers find inconsistent content, messages and presentation when they come to find answers to their questions. Customer-Facing services teams are isolated and siloed.

When content is separated along departmental lines instead of along semantic, subject-based lines, it becomes disjointed. Content creation slows because you can’t reuse what you can’t find and customers suffer because information isn’t consistent or navigable.

Multichannel publishing is finally ingrained in the industry consciousness. Only in recent years, however, do we realize how many directions these new channels need to flow in order to meet the needs of internal and external content consumers on an ongoing, incrementally improving basis. When publishing becomes conversation, not presentation, then internal processes and culture need to change.

This presentation will walk through how sharing taxonomies and content standards, and integration of various optimized systems, can help disparate Service-divisions think and speak as one. It will take a real-world client example as a model to examine how an intelligent approach to intranet portals can break down information silos.

About Noz Urbina

Noz is Senior Consultant and Business Development Manager, Mekon Ltd, where he provides XML solutions consultancy services to global organizations and small to medium enterprises. Delivering consultancy and training almost exclusively in mark-up technologies since 2000, Noz’s expertise is brought into projects for business case and process analysis, requirements development, and project planning and strategy.

Previous to working with Mekon, Noz worked in the XMetaL team as Partner Manager, facilitating the growth and cross-pollination of a pan-European partner network of Content Solutions and Tool providers, and has held a number of business development, technical services, and sales positions where he was able to develop his expertise in a cutting-edge, efficiency-driven, business context.

Paul Wlodarczyk

Building Intelligent Content from 30 Years of Legacy Documents

When businesses implement intelligent content, they usually adopt a “day forward” strategy that assures all new content is “intelligent” (in XML and dynamically published), and they minimize the volume of legacy content to convert and migrate. Semiconductor equipment manufacturers – like many other capital equipment manufacturers – support products that last 30 years or more, so legacy technical content is critical to keeping that equipment up, running, and profitable for their customers.

In one such company today, that legacy content exists as monolithic manuals in PDF format that are hundreds of pages long, or as PDF renditions of engineering drawings, or as data in enterprise systems in relational databases or ERP systems. Field Service Engineers spend many hours per week searching for content across multiple systems – ERP data, content repositories, engineering websites, drawing repositories, knowledge bases, technical forums, email, personal notes – to find the procedures, drawings, reference information, and expert advice they need to effectively troubleshoot and repair customer equipment.

In the future, that information needs to be seamlessly integrated into a single-point of access that provides the Field Service Engineer with information that is relevant to their current context: the product they are working on, the customer account, the current configuration, the current problem or fault condition, the latest engineering information and best known methods – all without entering a word into a search box.

The challenge for intelligent content is simply stated: How do we get there from here? In this presentation, we’ll discuss this company’s unique pathway forward to intelligent content:

• The complexity and richness of content types and sources that must be unified through search and navigation for the end user (service engineers);
• Building a firm foundation with a sound information architecture including taxonomy and metadata;
• Taking the first steps with a modular content strategy based upon PDF documents in SharePoint, with a unified custom search experience;
• Transitioning in later phases of the project to intelligent XML content integrated with enterprise data in a seamless, task-focused interface.

About Paul Wlodarczyk

Paul Wlodarczyk is Director of Solutions Consulting at Earley & Associates, where he is focused on technologies for taming content lifecycles and exploiting unstructured content. Paul has 25 years experience in publishing operations, consulting, and software development, with hand-on expertise in ECM, knowledge management, search, technical publishing, localization, collaboration, user interface design, learning technologies, and information worker productivity. Paul is a frequent contributing writer and speaker for industry publications and events, and maintains a blog at thecontentguy.net. Paul earned an MBA from the William E. Simon School of Business, and holds a bachelor degree in Psychology from the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY.