Globalizing Content in a Down Economy

Instructor: Tim Bombosch (Bombosch Consulting)

Monday, August 3, 8:30–12:00

Even in a down economy, when IT investments are difficult to fund, it is possible to lower the overall cost of content globalization by identifying what content is most valuable to your organization and targeting resources to it. Learn how to identify your organization's most valuable content and how to develop and maintain it as efficiently as possible. Learn how to make the business case for what content to develop and what not to develop. Be prepared and act quickly when the day comes and you can afford to adopt content management practices that will lower your globalization costs even further.

Specific topics to be discussed include:

• How to make sure you are delivering high value content to your audience for the lowest possible costs
• How to use content development best practices to lower eventual L10 costs
• How to prepare your content for the day when you want to migrate to content management, even if you cannot make that jump now
• How to accomplish these tasks without requiring an IT intervention

Who Should Attend?

• Localization Project Managers responsible for authoring projects that will be localized
• Documentation Managers working on international projects
• Technical Writers who wish to understand how to facilitate downstream processes and make their work more valuable
• Localization Specialists who want to understand the entire content production chain

Agenda

• Understanding Your User
  • Who are your audiences?
  • Task analysis: What is done by whom when and where?
  • Information needs analysis: What information is needed by whom when and where?
• Design Information to Serve Your User
  • Information Architecture
    • Map information needs to specific deliverables
    • Identify what content is shared between deliverables
    • Identify what content is unique to each deliverable
  • Current Content Analysis
    • Map current content to required information as identified in information architecture
    • Eliminate as much of the remaining content as possible
  • Develop Reuse Model
    • Create model to show what content will appear in multiple deliverables
    • Decide how to "chunk" content for reuse
    • Decide how to share and manage shared content
    • Decide on how to implement shared content
• Processes and procedures
  • Define and enforce a style guide to help standardize content
  • Define and enforce terminology guidlines to restict variation of terms
  • Develop and enforce review procedures
  • Train team to follow new guidelines

About the Presenter

Tim Bombosch, PhD is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with 10+ years of managing projects for Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Genentech, Iridex, IBM, Kaiser Permanente, and Mindjet. His areas of expertise include life science industries, enterprise collaboration, and data management software. Tim speaks frequently about project management, content management, and content globalization. He is a respected leader in the Society for Technical Communications and teaches at the University of California Extension. He received his PhD from Stanford University.

About LISA Workshops

LISA Workshops make use of presenters with real-world experience in the subjects they teach about. Workshops do not pitch any products or services, but instead provide a general overview with candid and practical evaluations of tools and products that impact your business.