Dave Clark

Content Management and the Separation of Presentation and Content

The importance of separating presentation from content is taken as a given in many kinds of publishing, despite the fact that the notion of separation has received little critical scrutiny. I provide a closer look at the separation, first by providing contemporary and historical context, then by laying out key distinctions in the ways the separation argument is used in Web design versus Web content management versus full-featured content management systems (CMSs). I suggest that these distinctions are critical in how we should view the separation and the implications of the separation for the work of technical communicators.

Content management and the production of genres

In this paper, I suggest that granularized content management introduces as-yet-unexplored issues to genres of technical communication. I argue that content management, while it can, as advertised, free content and make it easy to reuse that content in multiple genres, that flexibility can create new problems for genres and genre systems, leading to problematic reuse, inflexible genre systems, rigid and proprietary genres, and uncritical internationalization.

Content Strategy: An Integrative Literature Review

Research problem: Content strategy, whether narrowly focused on the production of web-based materials for customers or managing the data, information, and documentation of an entire enterprise, has become the latest in a series of movements and methods that have sought to improve the integration of professional and technical communication with the marketing, training, and business processes of organizations. Research questions: How is content strategy defined and described in professional and scholarly literature? What do these definitions and descriptions suggest about the direction of the field of professional and technical communication? Literature review: The theoretical foundation of this study is Classical Rhetorical theory which, for thousands of years, has provided critical methods and vocabularies for the analysis of discourse; my purpose in using it here is to rely on a consistent lens that has served professional and technical communicators well. Classical rhetorical principles can give us useful insight into content strategy, the latest in a series of movements that have captured the attention of professional and technical communicators because they have promised to expand the scope of the work and move the work from the fringes of organizational activity to the center. Previous movements include knowledge management, single sourcing, and content management. Methodology: Because content strategy is an emerging area, I conducted an integrative literature review to characterize this emerging field. This involved a systematic search of peer-reviewed and professional literature on content strategy that met specific qualifications, reading and collecting information from each source about its answers to the research question and its authorship, and analyzing those data to find patterns in them. Results and conclusions: Because only two peer-reviewed sources existed on content strategy, the majority of the literature reviewed emerged from the trade press. I survey the definitions of content and content strategy provided by this literature, and found that almost every definition uses content as part of the definition, leading to some lack of clarity in all of those definitions. But three areas of consensus exist among the definitions: that content strategy is: (a) more inclusive of the lifecycle of content (addressing the processes of creating, revising, approving, publishing, and revising material), (b) integrated with technical and business requirements, and (c) largely focused on material used by customers and, therefore, focused on marketing and support documents. It primarily focuses on traditional genres of content and overlooks emerging genres. The literature suggests that content strategy provides a pathway to make the work of technical communicators more central to organizations. But the literature offers only broad advice for doing so, with few examples (other than some specific templates, which primarily benefit those who already have experience with content strategy). The advice primarily comes from authors working in consulting firms and, as a result, might not reflect the challenges that professional and technical communicators who work internally experience.

The Complexities of Globalized Content Management

This article provides a critical overview of the challenges that content management poses for technical communicators who work on multilingual projects. These issues include determining whether to translate or to localize, resolving the problems presented by the decontextualizing and repurposing of text, managing the complexities of the localization industry’s work practices and tools, and handling the linguistic idiosyncrasies of particular languages. The authors draw on their experience with content management and the translation–localization industry in seeking to problematize increasingly standardized practices that deserve further investigation.

Open research questions for academics and industry professionals: results of a survey

To identify some of the research questions and needs of most importance to industry professionals and academics, we conducted a Technical Communication Industry Research Survey that posed a common set of questions about research. Here we report the results, which suggest some differing priorities for academics and industry professionals, but also some shared priorities that might help guide disciplinary research, including content strategy, user behavior, metrics/measurements, and process/practices.

Challenges of lean customer discovery as invention

The lean startup approach to developing products and businesses has become central to entrepreneurial culture. Touted as a scientific approach to creating successful startups, the lean approach relies on customer discovery-a process in which entrepreneurs validate hypotheses about their business models via a rhetorically specific model of interviews with potential customers. In this article, we examine canonical texts of the movement and our own experiences in three lean startup boot camps, in the process exploring the notable absences and silences in the narrow range of texts that define Lean Startup. Lean methods as practiced by government agencies tend to exclude research on user experience design, technology transfer, and qualitative research methods, and foster an underlying suspicion of academic expertise in favor of relying solely on the self-reporting from potential customer segments.

Rhetorical Challenges and Concerns in Enterprise Content Management

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) can present intriguing new opportunities for organizations’ writers, but it also poses significant challenges to the rhetorical assumptions that underlie how writers design, work, and train. In this chapter, I suggest that designers and implementers of ECM consider the rhetorical changes ECM brings in terms of sales and implementation, component-based writing, and training and development.

Book Reviews : Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Con tent Strategy Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, and Steve Manning. Indi anapolis, IN: New Riders Publishing, 2002. 592 pages

By the time this review is published, I will be enjoying an eightweek hiatus from classes, during which I will design my teaching materials for the next academic year. However, as I finish this review, I am in the middle of the Spring semester, teaching four sections of a course devoted to upper level business writing, speaking, and group process. Teaching classes consumes most of two days each week, and communicating up, down, and across the population that supports these classes consumes most of the other days. The requirements of my day-to-day existence remind me that &dquo;[clommunication competency is indispensable for successful participation in the world of work,... [and that m]ost people are not effective communicators&dquo; (p. 3). For that reason alone, I recommend Berko, Wolvin, and Wolvin’s text. Not only is it a highly flexible text; it also offers specific methods that I can use to improve the effectiveness of the vastly important interpersonal interaction that supports my teaching. In a world where informa-