I have 2 very big dogs. Combined, they weigh more than I do. They’re young dogs, too, so they have a lot of energy and, like all young creatures, they fall over where they are when they get tired.

Typically, they like to fall over near me or my husband, usually me. Which is fine with us – we like them very much and like having them close. We don’t think anything about having a very large pile of very large dogs in the middle of the room. Or right under my feet.

They’re our dogs

However, when people are at our house, inevitably someone comments on the big pile of large dogs in the middle of the room. “Really?” we say. “You think it’s hard to step over/around/between the large dogs to move anywhere in the room? No, you just step over them here and then wind around there and…”

We don’t notice how difficult it is to step over and around the pile of large dogs because it happens all the time. When someone points it out, my husband grouses that we should teach the dogs to lie elsewhere. And then we forget about it until we fall over one of them.

Your dogs

I suspect that you have business content issues that are big dogs spread out in the middle of the floor. You’re used to stepping over and around and sometimes falling. It’s normal to you.

But it doesn’t have to this way. You can still have your dogs and you don’t have to trip over them all the time.

For example, if you’re trying to manage business documents in Word, you (or your content developers) know you as a company spend roughly 50% of the time trying to make Word do that which it’s not designed to do.

Don’t believe me? Go ask. I’ll wait.

Reusing content is called copying and pasting in your company. And when things get out of synchronization, you call it normal and hope the auditors don’t notice.

Repurposing content in your company is also called copying and pasting. No one likes doing it so a lot of content is simply not available to the people who need it.

Does this keep you awake at night?

If you’re responsible for business content in your company – maybe you’re an author, a director, or a C-level person – this should be keeping you up at night.

When is the lawsuit going to hit because you shipped some critical document that was wrong? When are the regulators going to ask for your Gulf of Mexico disaster plan and you discover it includes removing and caring for walruses? Who haven’t lived in the Gulf for 200 million years?

This “process” is also costing you a lot of money. If you’re paying your people up to 50% of their salary to fight Word, then what are you doing? That means you pay 4 people to do the work of 2. 8 people to do the work of 4. And so on.

Is your company doing so well financially that you can afford to waste this much money? How much more could your company do if you (or that team) could be twice as productive?

It doesn’t have to be this way. Many tools will help. I have a preference.

Contact us to find out just how we can help. We can probably get your RIO in the first 6 months. Seriously.

We’re starting a new Webinar series. Often, these will be about our products, but not always.

If you want to learn more about what Author-it does or how to use it in your environment, we’ve got you covered. But we’re also going to have webinars to just keep you educated in topics that you may be interested in around the content development space. And because these are live, you can ask questions.

We’re trying to schedule these so that they are available to as many people internationally as possible, given that the presenter – Sharon! – is based in the Pacific time zone and occasionally does sleep. If you can’t make the time or date listed, sign up anyway. We’re recording the webinars and you can get the link automatically the next day.

To see the current listings, click here.

What we do for a living – we being the field of people who develop information for others to consume – is educate people. We may teach them about the proper way to use our products, complete their vacation form, use that machine correctly, why they should buy our products, or many other things. But at the core, we educate people by giving them information they didn’t have before.

Driving on the left

I was thinking about this as I was driving to the Author-it office in Auckland the other day. I’m visiting New Zealand from the US and driving is a constantly attentive activity for me here. As with any attentive process, I can’t do anything but focus on driving because I’m on the wrong side of the car driving on the wrong side of the road. All my instincts, if you will, are completely wrong.

For most of us, by the time we’re 4 or 5, we’ve learned the proper side of the car and the road at such a level that we don’t think about it any more. We know what side of the car to get in, it’s instinct. This is called preattentive. It’s like muscle memory – you don’t think about it, it just happens.

This is very useful to us because it lets us (humans) function in the world. If we had to think about everything – walking, reaching for a cup, etc – then we couldn’t cope. When we’re learning something new, it’s attentive until we’ve mastered it and then it slips into the preattentive areas.

It’s all wrong

So what happens when you move a preattentive activity back to an attentive activity? You put your user under a lot of stress. Our brains want to function at that preattentive level for this activity and we’re forcing it to work at an attentive level.

We’re under a cognitive load. The entire activity has to be thought out at all times while our brain fights us, trying to drop back to the easier preattentive level. Our entire attention is taken with it. Cognitively, it’s really hard. Really hard.

This is where those we educate get cranky. They complain that it’s too hard, they don’t like it, and they don’t want to do it. It’s true for them: it is hard and their brains do hurt.

So how do we help?

Part of our job is to reduce the cognitive load for our users as we educate. We are more successful if our users don’t have the extra effort of trying to find what they’re looking for or if the information they need is right in front of them as they need it. Think of us as carrying the load for our users.

One of the ways we can carry that load is to not make our users stop their task and go find the information they want. I’ve read studies that show up to 30% of the day for knowledge workers is spent just trying to find the right information.

Where’s the metadata?

Metadata is lovely but it means you’re probably putting the burden on your overloaded user to go find what s/he needs. They are already unhappy because they don’t know something–why are you now forcing them to play Guess Our Metadata? There have to be better ways to reduce cognitive loads.

What are you doing to help? What have you tried that made a difference? Where are you not helping and the users are complaining?

I really like this post about smart content. Thought I’d share it with you all.

It’s true, we are. If you want to work at a company where everyone is really good at what they do, this is the company for you.

We’re hiring in the US and New Zealand.

United States of America

Senior Sales Executives x 2

1. California – Bay Area
2. U.S. East Coast (virtual)

As a Senior Sales Executive, you will assume a leadership role within assigned Fortune 1000 organizations within your territory.

Head Office, Albany, Auckland, NZ

Senior Web Developers x 2

Author-it are hiring two Senior Web Developers in their Albany office who can really hit the ground running. Are you a smart and hard worker, talented and passionate about cutting edge web development that makes a difference? Are you the kind of person who comes to work every day ready to “make it happen”?

Find out more at

http://www.author-it.com/index.php?page=careers

We have an SDK available that lets you (or a developer) create plugins and other wonderful things. If you know what an SDK is and why you want to use it, head over to devhub.author-it.com and get your hands on it.

But not all of us know what an SDK is or why we should care. In a nutshell, it’s a way for your developers to make your applications work automatically with our application.

For example, if your sales team uses Salesforce, you can use our products to create custom sales proposals and Powerpoint presentations and have those connected automatically to the customer info in SalesForce.

I asked one of our sales team fellows, Matt Armstrong, to help me come up with a story that makes sense for those not super technical in the programming area.

This is his story. He’s sticking to it.

Why everyone should be excited about the Author-it SDK…  A colourful metaphor

Imagine you have a model car made out of those truly awesome Lego Technics blocks – it’s fun to use and does many cool things, but the individual blocks have been stuck together so tightly you can’t pull them apart.  And even if you could, there’s no instruction manual to show you which piece does what and how to put it all back together again.  There are lots of other people in your street who also have Lego cars.

Then one day the Lego head office posts every single Lego owner in the world instructions for not only how to pull the car apart and put it back together, but also what each piece does, which other pieces it works with, and how you can make new bits for your model car.

In the parcel, Lego has also included a handful of other Lego models, completely free, that you can use and pull apart and join onto your model car or make into completely new Lego models.  The instructions also tell you how to Lego can connect with fun toys from other manufacturers.

Fun times.

At first, everyone looks at the instructions and the new pieces and puts them on the shelf.  After all, the model car is already pretty cool.

And then one day your next door neighbour’s older brother is playing with a Lego boat he build from the pieces Lego sent him.  Even better, he can tow the boat with his original model car because all the model cars have tow bars, but you’d never noticed that before.

The next day your cousin shows you how he can remote control his Lego car from a cell phone and uses it to walk the dog.  He’s pretty pleased because he still gets pocket money for walking the dog.

A week later your sister shows you the Lego aeroplane she made using the engine out of the original model car.  It’s really cool and everyone in the street thinks so, too.  Your sister writes down how she made the plane and the next day everyone in the street has a Lego aeroplane.

Best of all, every couple of months Lego send everyone in the world a new engine.

So, that’s what an SDK can do

I urge you to point your developers (or you, if you’re good at that) to our website and have them get the download. They can do amazing things with it and make all your lives easier. You may be spending hours every week doing something that your programmers can automate in 30 minutes.

You can also create and release plugins for others to use. So it’s worth checking back occasionally to see what other people have contributed, or contribute yourself!

What things would you like to use a plugin for? What doesn’t Author-it do that you’d like it to do?

When I was documentation manager at a large company in So Cal, we had a lot of sales guys (guys here being gender neutral) who did lots of presentations. They were supposed to use the official Powerpoint templates and approved content but they did what they wanted.

Things got out of synch. They showed product information that was out of date on templates that were no longer the official designs. Worse than this, they also reused a lot of content so there was a lot of copy and paste between presentations but not between sales guys.

It got messy

Additionally, we had a training department that took our user manual FrameMaker files and pulled them apart to create the training manuals and e-learning. The trainers then created their own Powerpoint slides, with the same resulting issues the sales guys had.

This all looked bad to the potential and current customers because we lacked a consistent brand. And for a 300 million dollar company to show customers that we had no real process for ensuring a brand looked very bad. We looked like we were running the whole thing out of someone’s garage.

Worse, there was so much content that people were trying to reuse but the tools didn’t let us. So we brute forced it with the predictable results.

We looked dumb. And we spent a lot of time trying to correct wrong information.

This is where…

This is where I could tell you how wonderful Author-it is and how it would save your day if this is your current workflow. But for that information, read the rest of the site or request a demo from me. I have something small and exciting to tell you about in this post:

Author-it has a free plugin that publishes to Powerpoint.

So, you can write your user docs, reuse that content into your training manuals and e-learning, and get sales and training Powerpoint slides from one library.

No more out of date information or slide designs. No more paying people to waste time finding and changing all the places where you mentioned a feature that got pulled at the last minute. Everyone is working from the right information and the right templates, all the time.

This is a happy thing

This alone makes me very happy. If any of the tasks I listed above are things your group is doing, you need to look into Author-it. If you already use Author-it, get the plugin here.

If you need Author-it to do something that it currently doesn’t do, we have a new SDK that I’ll be talking about in another post later this week. It’s available now if you want to poke at it. Go to devhub.author-it.com.

When you get a group of professional writers – or programmers, or project managers, or any one else, really – we love to talk about the projects that went south and the craziness that ensued. There’s a certain Can you believe this? that needs to be shared.

I heard a story recently. Names are not disclosed to protect the guilty.

Process=good

We’ve all heard that having a stable, repeatable process is a good thing. I’ve taught that you need one to get quality documents. But I was told this story about a process:

1. A person in the company wants content created (perhaps a customer has expressed a need) and enters the request in DatabaseA. That request is sent to Writer, who analyzes the need, and agrees. Writer changes the status of the request, adds his comments and sends it to Editor.
2. Editor evaluates the request, agrees with Writer, updates the request with the location(s) Editor wants to see the new content in the existing content organization.
3. The request is sent back to Writer. Writer agrees with the location and number of topics. Or Writer changes and sends back to Editor for further discussion.
4. Writer creates the shell topics one by one, by hand.
5. Then Writer enters these topic names in DatabaseB, including suggested index words, meta tags, and so on. Writer send the new structure to Editor for review.
6. Editor agrees or not, and approves or not.
7. Assuming it is finally approved, Writer starts writing. When writer is ready with a topic, he updates databaseB with the status of the topic and send it to Editor.
8. Editor reviews for language, conforming to standards, etc, and suggests or demands changes. No technical content is reviewed at this time.
9. The change request is logged in DatabaseB and sent back to Writer. Rinse and repeat until Writer and Editor finally agree.
10. In DatabaseA, Writer now marks that the content is ready for first technical review, including the location and name of the topic. This information is sent to the initial requestor for First Technical Review.
11. A process similar to, but slightly different from, the Writer/Editor thing happens until Requestor is happy.
12. Then Writer updates DatabaseB and sends the topic back to Editor. Because the topic changed and has to be approved by Editor.
13. You know what happens next, as it’s similar to what happened before.

Continue on, adding databases and reviewers until the content is considered “ready.” It can take months for 100 new words to appear out of this group. Months.

You don’t even want to know how this group goes about publishing content but I think we can all guess that it involves a lot of homegrown scripts no one understands anymore and a lot of machine time in some magical process that involves elves weaving straw into gold.

Did I mention they then probably localize the content? What are the odds that process goes any better than this one?

Bad process=Bad

When I was told this story over a beer, I shook my head and declared this to be the most broken process I’ve seen in a long career of broken processes. As a process, it’s certainly repeatable and has steps and all the other stuff we expect in a process. The most important point was missed, tho.

It’s a bad process.

Content that takes months to get in the customer hands is a broken process. It doesn’t matter that we have a process if it ignores the reason we have the group in the first place – to support the users. This process seems to exist for the sake of a process, which I think is wrong. It’s focusing on the wrong stuff.

It’s your turn

Pull up a chair and share your best bad process story. Don’t name names, just share the fun. Tell the story so we can all share in the head shaking. I may give away a t-shirt or something to the best story.

Author-it has a new employee – me!

My name is Sharon Burton and I’m the new product evangelist for Author-it. I’m looking forward to getting to know all of you and finding out what you want in our products, how you use them now, and showing you exciting things you may not have known about.

As part of getting to know you, I thought I’d introduce myself and then you can introduce yourself in the comments below. If we know more about each other, then I can better help you.

About me

I’ve been in the Technical Communication field for nearly 20 years. I, like most people, fell into this field and discovered I loved it. I love providing the right information to people at the right time. This field is always interesting to me and it’s never been boring!

I’ve been a sole writer, a documentation manager, a highly paid consultant, owned my own outsourcing business, and a contractor. I’m most interested in workflow problems the last few years – the How do we make the process of developing user assistance more efficient? stuff.

I want us to spend more time developing useful content and less time fiddling with our tools. Our value to our companies and our users lies in the content we develop and not in the time we spend reformatting the same stupid document for the 3rd time this week.

Other stuff I do

I live in Southern California with my journalist husband and 2 large young dogs. When I’m not working on Author-it stuff, I teach technical communication to undergraduate and graduate engineering students at the University of California, Riverside with my best friend. I simply love teaching these bright baby engineers things I want all engineers to know. Essentially, we’re trying to grow the engineers we want to work with.

I also occasionally teach for the Society for Technical Communication as part of the online certificate program. I like doing this because I’m teaching my peers and making a difference in the lives of working professionals. And that makes me feel very good.

When I’m not buried in technical communication stuff, I hang out with my husband, play with the 2 large young dogs, knit and crochet, design knitting patterns, ride my bike, write creative non-fiction, read, and garden. Occasionally, I do standup comedy, which is fun and terrifying.

It’s your turn

Now that you know about me, it’s your turn. Tell me about you. I’m so excited to learn about the Author-it community and what excites you about our field!

Congratulations to Teina Stewart from Mercy Hospice Auckland and Tamara Siekmann from Spendvision.

They both won Author-it Enterprise Authoring Platform licenses, a 12 month maintenance plan and free Author-it Core Training.

Congratulations again and hope to see everyone again next year.