By Scott Abel| Senior Member
In the digital age, change happens quickly. This column features interviews with the movers and shakers—the folks behind new ideas, standards, methods, products, and amazing technologies that are changing the way we live and interact in our modern world. Got questions, suggestions, or feedback? Email them to scottabel@mac.com.
For over 20 years, Philip Wisniewski has developed and managed strategic relationships with premier brands to deliver content-centric digital marketing and Web development initiatives. Applying a mix of digital strategy, client service, and business acumen, Philip can often be found evangelizing the promise of one-to-one interactive relationships between brands and their audiences, enabled through a foundation of software development and content engineering. He has driven business impact for such notable brands as Aetna, AIG, Boost Mobile, Equinox, Ernst & Young, Gillette, Humana, Kaspersky Lab, MetLife, Nikon, T Rowe Price, Time, and TracFone Wireless. In this edition of Meet the Change Agents, Scott Abel interviews Philip on content engineering.
Content is king, but only if we manage to get the right piece of content to the right person, when, where, and how they need it. Philip Wisniewski has spent the better part of the past decade helping organizations choreograph the smooth flow of content through various computing systems. Wisniewski believes, as do I, that a new breed of content professional—the content engineer—is needed to help us solve the content challenges we face today and into the future.
Scott Abel: Philip, let’s start with a definition. What is content engineering?
Philip Wisniewski: In its simplest form, content engineering is the discipline of applying an engineering lens to content and a content lens to engineering. In The Language of Content Strategy, Joe Gollner does a very nice job of adding some details around this core principle.
Indeed, as just about every brand, and the many functions within those organizations, race to produce content as a means to service, sell and engage their customers, doing so at scale, across channels, efficiently and programmatically is proving to be very challenging.
Add to the mix the massive proliferation of tools and technologies that are in some way involved or touching content, and it is easy to quickly get overwhelmed and lose control. Content engineering, from my perspective, allows us to connect these often disparate systems with a single content thread.
SA: Why do we need content engineering?
PW: As humans, we thirst for knowledge and emotional connections. That’s been the case for thousands of years. In the digital age, everything we produce is boiled down to 1’s and 0’s, so those points of engagement are becoming blogs, PDFs, YouTube video’s, podcasts, pins, posts, shares, and tweets, etc. For that content to work in a digital world, we need to apply engineering principles.
SA: What are some of the main challenges content engineering can help technical communication professionals solve?
PW: Let’s imagine you are producing a specification document for a product your company manufactures. The specs have a dozen or more categories with accompanying diagrams. Years ago, you would create one large electronic file via some word processing software, generate a TOC based on the spec categories, and embed the images. Rinse and repeat for each language, print, bind, and shelve. We spent a lot of manual labor on maintaining those specs. Today, that same spec probably has a much shorter lifespan, meaning we are compelled to keep it current, because it’s much easier to do so. If we peel that back, maintenance includes things like translations. Leveraging certain aspects of content engineering, we should only need to translate the section of the spec that has been updated, rather than the whole document—that saves time and money. Another challenge for tech pub professionals is around delivery. We moved from one channel (printed spec) to dozens, so now that content should be available via a PDF on a website, the call center, an online forum, and via site search, where only the applicable category you search for appears in the result. Content engineering provides the structure, tools, and processes for those new channels leverage that spec.
SA: Of course, content engineering is not limited to technical communication solutions. Can you provide an example of two from other disciplines?
PW: Sure, the area where we see the most connection to content engineering is in marketing, where the value of content is well understood. Marketers face the challenge, with all the content that is being produced, of how to stand out from content “noise.” Personalization—being able to target a message to a specific segment, or even individual, based on what we know about them—will do a better job of breaking through the content clutter.
Personalization of content requires three elements: 1) content components that can be modified; 2) metadata for that content that describes the content, its ideal usage, and the target audience; and 3) the data/context that we key off of to connect the content to the audience.
Content engineering considers all of the complexities around personalization, connects different systems and data, and allows for the maintenance of very granular metadata. We are creating, enriching, managing, and publishing content programmatically at a massive scale in real time. This would not be possible without content engineering.
SA: Exceptional content experiences can have a positive impact on a brand. Of course, the reverse is true—bad experiences can negatively impact the brand, damage loyalty, and decrease revenue. How can content engineering help us create exceptional customer experiences with content? Can you provide some examples?
PW: We’ve already noted two examples, translation and personalization—both impact customer experiences. Another one is the notion of integration or unification of systems that each manage different aspects of an experience. Take commerce and content management systems, for example. Each may be managed by different corporate functions (marketing vs. eBusiness), and each may provide different types of content within an overall buying experience. Content engineering allows for both the commerce platform and the content management system (CMS) to deliver a seamless, content-rich experience that does not take away from the engagement, research, consideration, and purchase process. A Web “page” is really a hybrid of content and functions served up by many systems, and content engineering enables those pages to render as a unified, engaging experience.
Another great example is mobile. Your users won’t return to a Web page if it doesn’t load properly on their mobile device. Content engineering includes a focus on the tools and techniques required to optimize and adapt content, assets, and experiences for the vast variety of mobile devices. For mobile accessible sites, image size, page speed, and other factors can significantly impact usability and the overall experience.
SA: Operational efficiency is key in the ultra-competitive, content-driven world in which we live. Brands that waste time and money using outdated and time-consuming processes miss opportunities to innovate. How can content engineering help us become lean, mean, content-producing factories?
PW: Brands are now starting to realize the complexity of creating, curating, transforming, enriching, publishing, and syndicating content. No one tool can do it all, and many tools that are part of the content lifecycle overlap others with features and functions. Content engineers can help brand, determine the best technology or tool for each stage of the lifecycle, across each channel, and streamline the associated workflows and processes. If we remove the challenge of technical complexity and how to manage the audience touch points across channels, we can allow innovation of the content itself. The power of the story and content will differentiate winning brands from the has-beens.
SA: What improvements can content engineering help provide that may not be obvious to people who don’t work in the content engineering trenches?
PW: We’ve covered a number of improvements. To keep it simple, I like to say that content engineering will help your content be fast, flexible, and findable, or risk the fourth “f,” failure.
SA: Some technical communicators want to expand their skill sets and branch out into other roles. Usually these new roles require a slightly different skill set. What skills do content engineers need to be successful?
PW: Content engineering is an eclectic mix of skills applied in a cohesive and structured approach. Much like the recently cited and mythical “marketing technologist,” which is as rare as a unicorn, few individuals possess all the skills under the content engineering umbrella. Content engineering includes skills and expertise in systems integration, enterprise architecture, content strategy, content modeling and taxonomies, content management, data management, user interface development, user experience design, software engineering, and technology/business strategy.
SA: Skills are important, but what characteristics do you look for in prospective content engineers?
PW: One of the most important characteristics is collaboration. Since so many skills are important, we find ourselves often with a small team of experts working in partnership to solve a particular challenge. Collaboration drives innovation. Other characteristics include persuasion and executive presence, since these initiatives require budgets and support across the organization. Organizational silos are one of the biggest obstacles in the way of effectively applying content engineering.
SA: If you could provide one piece of advice for technical communication professionals who want to expand their careers into the content engineering discipline, what would that be?
PW: Don’t underestimate how applicable your skills may be. Find peers in your organization who share a common vision, formulate work groups, and don’t be afraid to bring your ideas and capabilities to other departments, especially marketing and IT. Both are desperate to augment traditional skill sets.
SA: If our readers would like to know more about content engineering, what resources for additional learning do you recommend?
PW: Google, the Intelligent Content Conference, Information Development World, and The Content Wrangler will be publishing a book on content engineering later this year.
SA: Thanks for sharing your expertise with our readers. I really appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to help us understand the basics of content engineering.
PW: You are very welcome, Scott. Thank you for the opportunity to spread the word and share my excitement about the content engineering discipline.
