Engineering Content?

The Road Less Travelled is also the Road Ahead

Cue the eyerolling. I have been thinking about content again. I have been thinking about the engineering of content and about what content, specifically, I am thinking about engineering.

Granted, this opening bristles with both visible and latent complexity. Sorry about that. But I have my reasons.

I have been working on a book. (Now we can cue the gasps of horror and dismay.) As part of this effort, I have been assembling and analyzing dozens upon dozens of project case studies - diligently looking for reusable patterns and practices that can be surfaced and made useful for others. The good news is that I have mountains of material to work with, in part because I have always kept detailed notes, along with all the deliverables and team exchanges, for each and every project. Soberingly, these project records go back well over 30 years. The supplemental good news is that I also have a history of writing articles and making conference presentations based on these experiences and that reflect upon the lessons buried within them. Best of all, I have digitized a lot of this and continue to add to the ‘soapbox archive’ as I call it. The digital assets are in DITA XML and they have been used to orient an AI chatbot and several text analytics tools so I can interrogate them to discover, as I said, reusable patterns and practices.

One of the things that has emerged is that many of my project experiences are different than what I typically see others doing. This may be a bad thing. Or it may be a very good thing, good in that it might tell us something important.

I will cut to the chase. Many of my projects would not probably be called “content management” projects at all. They would not be seen as efforts to implement an efficient Content Operations (Content Ops) environment. Or at least not directly. Not predominantly. My projects have typically been systems in which digital content is but one of the many moving pieces. In these projects, I have worked on making digital content a vital part of mission critical systems often on a monumental scale - where precisely specified and managed structured content moves between dozens of business applications and across sprawling supply networks. In these solutions, there was never just one content management system, or publishing system. There were always many of them. Some were commercial products, some were custom applications, and some were a strange fusion of both mixed with one or more legacy systems. These projects were harrowing, to say the least (aka one of the reasons I am bald). But these projects were something else as well.

Elsewhere I have spoken about, and mused about the differences between, content that is either contained in information products or contained in information experiences. The projects I am referring to here point elsewhere. They point to cases where the content in question is what is ‘contained’ in the system. The projects I am referring to here showcase the fact that when we focus on, and activate, the digital content of systems then many of the challenges people speak about in the ‘content industry’, like tenuous executive support or weak connections with parallel departments, simply vanish. Instead we see obvious and unquestioned value and impact. We see overt pressure to do more and to do it faster. We experience the ‘delight’ (if we can call it that) of executives not only being supportive but being annoyingly interested and demanding.

So when I talk about ‘engineering content’ (as I incessantly do), it is about engineering the content that lives inside, and animates, large integrated systems - the systems that do big things by mobilizing a multitude of organizations and capabilities into a cohesive whole. This is different that automating the workflows in a typical Technical Communication group and thereby instituting a modern ‘Content Ops’ regime and infrastructure. It can include elements of that, obviously, but its center of attention is on cross-system content flows instead of the efficiency of just one group.

So to return to my obscure opening. I am focused on the content of engineering - what lives inside the process of engineering integrated systems that in turn can do big things. This shift in perspective changes how we think about content. It forces us to reconsider what we do, how we do it, and what tools and standards we leverage. This is very therapeutic. It is also very timely.

This reminds me of an experience from a couple of years ago. I was on an academic writing retreat (more eyerolling is appropriate). The retreat had provided a scholarship to one young person, in this case a young woman from Denmark. This young person was, shall we say, politically active and one night the retreat participants were out at a pub and the topic being discussed was climate change. After listening to many academics blame this or that economic factor or practice, I unleashed a bit of a torrent. I come from the world of ‘big engineering’, I said, and I see absolutely nothing that approximates that discipline or ambition in anything being discussed about climate change. Lots of people are worried and angry, I said, but interestingly no one is ‘doing anything’ that merits the name of action, that we could call a plausible response. The next day, the Danish young person confronted me. By her expression, I figured I was about to be cancelled and I admitted to myself that I probably deserved it. But the youth surprised me because instead of reproaching me she demanded that I bring whatever it was I was referring to as ‘big engineering’ into the larger conversation about climate change. She said, “my generation needs what you were talking about and those in power today are not doing anything along those lines…they are not doing anything that counts as a concrete response.” She was right. Unfortunately, she continued that this meant that there would be “no retirement for you” as it meant I had a lot of work still to do.

It is for this reason, engineering the content within large integrated systems is important. It follows then that engineering content, in all its senses, is timely, needed, and important. It means that we have our work cut out for us.