As companies strive to deliver more personalized and engaging user experiences, they face the growing challenge of making content more findable, readable, and adaptable across multiple channels. Many businesses assume that to achieve this they first need to implement structured content authoring, choose a Content Management Solution, and migrate all of their existing content.
The reality is, you don’t need to rearchitect your content from the ground up in order to improve your user experience. Surprisingly, the most efficient path forward for a modern and dynamic content delivery experience — which doesn’t involve so many content migration headaches — is by first setting up your new delivery system, like a Content Delivery Platform (CDP). Then, once it’s in place, you can adapt your tools and writing processes at your own pace, reducing costs and risk typically associated with large-scale content migration.
Let’s explore why this approach works with four insights for managing a modern content workflow.
Insight 1: How You Write Doesn’t Really Matter to Others
Whether you use a super advanced DITA or simply use Word makes no difference to your users. All that matters is they can easily find and read the information they need, when they need it. This is twice as true for top executives who are more concerned with your outcomes than the tools or processes used to achieve them. Hence, you should focus on the elements that deliver rapid benefits for the user experience.
Implementing a CCMS is the sort of project that definitely brings value to your team and company. But it is a complex and time-consuming process to achieve. It includes many steps including the following:
- Develop a content model and define a taxonomy and metadata
- Select a tool that has the right features
- Install the tool so it works seamlessly within your tech stack
- Train your writers to use the CCMS Migrate existing content onto the CCMS, and adapt content for structured text
- Ramp up work with the CCMS to improve team autonomy, productivity, and content velocity
This process may take months or even years of project work, and millions invested. What’s more, after investing all that time and money into switching authoring systems, your new tool won’t even contribute to real change or valuable business transformation. Yes, your teams can now write in DITA, but if you’re still publishing content as PDFs, users will continue to struggle with finding the information they need. On the other hand, if you invest in a modern delivery solution, it can process and render a Word file as if it were structured, topic-based content and provide an engaging user experience.
Insight 2: Dynamic Delivery Brings Fast Results
There are several benefits to integrating a Content Delivery Platform into your workflow regardless of the current state of your content:
- CDPs have an immediate impact on your company. They offer dynamic delivery, which changes how people find the information they need. By always providing the most updated information to any endpoint, they enhance the user experience for various teams, including customer support and field operations, whatever the state of your content.
- These platforms work with the content that you already have. Good CDPs ingest structured and unstructured content alike. They can process unstructured documents to make that content look like topic-based content by automatically chunking it.
- They combine content from multiple sources in multiple formats and create a single source of truth. This unified repository of information enriches and normalizes content. CDPs are highly interoperable, meaning even if your company has a wide variety of diverse content tools, your CDP will still be able to gather your content from each source.
- Finally, these platforms adapt to your IT landscape. With seamless omnichannel connections, they feed content to all endpoints and applications so users can access the information from any device.
Moreover, implementing one of these platforms is quick and easy! You can have your CDP up and running in just weeks, or a few months for the most complex projects.
For example, Darwinbox, a leading provider of cloud-based Human Resources Management Software, partnered with Fluid Topics, a top CDP provider, to enhance their content experience. Fluid Topics helped them get their help portal up and running within a month. This quick set up allowed Darwinbox to streamline their content delivery to their diverse user segments.
“We want the writers to do what they do best. Write, not publish.“
Sagar Garuda, Senior Director of Learning, Darwinbox
Transitioning from traditional, static content delivery to dynamic content delivery means you can offer visible and valuable results to your company quickly, while buying time to upgrade writing tools, processes, and strategies.
Insight 3: Starting with Delivery Optimizes Content Restructuring
Choosing a delivery-first approach is a strategic way to secure, accelerate, and reduce the costs of restructuring and migrating your content.
1. Starting with delivery helps uncover the improvements you have to make to your content.
This approach helps you define a clear target and avoid unnecessary hurdles in re-architecting your content.
It enables you to pinpoint the necessary updates to improve your content’s findability and accessibility. Additionally, it helps you identify the right metadata to include, ensuring your content is properly indexed and easy to search.
On the other hand, if you begin by switching authoring tools, you risk diving into content re-architecture without a clear direction. By choosing a delivery-first strategy, you gain the insights necessary to define your goals and prioritize the right updates.
2. CDPs provide dedicated documentation metrics that help prioritize content restructuring tasks.
- Track metrics such as most and least read content, searches with no results, user journeys, and more.
- Create a direct line of communication between users and documentation teams with direct user feedback and content ratings.
- Use the metrics to schedule and optimize your content migration investments based on where you can add the most value.
3. You don’t have to migrate all of your documentation.
- CDPs can natively integrate all types of content in any format without requiring you to migrate content to new authoring tools.
- When a CDP gathers content into a central repository, the platform harmonizes all formats, hiding the myriads of file types. This creates a seamless user experience from the start.
- Prioritize your content migrations. Keep documentation for current or soon to be discontinued products in their legacy formats, so the information remains available without spending excess time and resources.
Insight 4: Embracing Dynamic Delivery is a Scalable, Future-Proof Choice
If one thing is certain, it’s that your content strategy, your environment, and your constraints are going to evolve with time. You need to be ready to adapt smoothly and efficiently to unexpected changes. Dynamic content delivery makes it easy to scale content operations no matter the challenges you’ll face in the future.
New Documentation Tools are Constantly Emerging
New content production tools are constantly emerging. Technical content is complex and rich, and user format preferences for product documentation continue to evolve with technology innovations. Beyond text, audio, video, 2D, and 3D have become the norm, and open Content Delivery Platforms such as Fluid Topics are designed to flexibly integrate all sources and prepare the future of technical communications.
The Challenge of Multiplying Documentation Contributors
As you scale your documentation, the diversity of contributors will increase. With an accelerating pace of product releases, customers, partners, OEMs, and wider community ecosystems will become more willing to contribute to knowledge production. When this happens, it becomes more complicated to have a single, centralized team of writers to produce all technical content.
Teams will need new ways of working that promote agility, collaboration, and the distribution of work. Success requires engaging more stakeholders in the process, each of them having their own tools and ways of writing. Imposing a single structured authoring tool on all SMEs and contributors is impossible, even with lightweight interfaces.
We must accept that multiple systems will exist simultaneously and allow each team to write with their preferred tool: sales using Word, developers in Markdown, support agents with wikis, and so on. Meanwhile, CDPs will continue to be the solution to deliver content to users across a growing variety of sources.
The Difficulties of Navigating Organizational Change
Mergers and acquisitions can change the game overnight. Even in the most stable organizations that have managed to align their stakeholders and streamline their content production, a merger or an acquisition can disrupt the best laid plans. New tools and formats suddenly add new complexities and the ability to integrate them into an existing, working solution is critical to a smooth continuity of business.
Under many circumstances, dynamic content delivery provides the flexibility and security needed for any unforeseen or unpredictable changes to your content environment.
Businesses like the multinational leader of smart building technology, Johnson Controls International, have navigated this shift amidst organizational change with great success. After acquiring security systems company, Tyco, JCI used this transition period as a catalyst to implement a modern, cohesive content strategy that allows them to seamlessly manage their growing portfolio.
“Fluid Topics enhanced our operations by unifying our content and centralizing our publishing, allowing us to instantly communicate about 1 million products across 60 websites and 25 portals. The time saved and the improved user experience? That’s true value.“
Nelson Abbey, Principal Information Developer, Johnson Controls International
Revolutionizing Dynamic Delivery with Generative AI
Emerging Generative AI (GenAI) solutions are reshaping the business world across industries with new tools and applications that create long-term value. This transformation calls on knowledge teams to step up and lead their companies in navigating trends and adopting AI-powered tools for content operations. The benefits of this are clear as GenAI tools are only as good as the content they are fueled by, and scattered content is difficult for AI algorithms to access and use.
Content Delivery Platforms like Fluid Topics play an important role in preparing content for future GenAI projects by consolidating organizational product knowledge from any source and in any format and unifying it into a central knowledge hub. By first focusing on content unification and dynamic delivery, your organization will seamlessly be able to leverage the full potential of its content when building AI or Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models. Fluid Topics acts as an AI Gateway, which is a bridge and orchestration layer between content authoring tools, content repositories, and Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini. Using a CDP as an intermediate layer allows businesses to offer modern, dynamic delivery, as well as the core capabilities needed to deploy GenAI projects that deliver accurate, relevant, and personalized experiences.
Leave Content Migration Headaches Behind
The benefits of focusing on setting up a Content Delivery Platform before migrating content or adopting new writing tools are clear. At Fluid Topics, we invite you to come as you are, with the tools and sources you have and your content as it exists. Our four insights for avoiding content migration headaches will save you money and time, deliver immediate benefits to your company, and prepare the future of your content strategy.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in May 2021. It has been completely edited and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
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