Rebekka Andersen

Rhetorical Work in the Age of Content Management: Implications for the Field of Technical Communication

Drawing on a survey of the content management (CM) discourse, the author highlights CM trends and articulates best practices in content strategy that CM thought leaders are helping organizations adopt. These trends and practices are changing the nature and location of rhetorical work in organizations that produce intelligent content. In these contexts, rhetorical work is located primarily in the complex activity of building content strategy frameworks that govern text-making activities. The author highlights the need for a praxis-based collaborative model for technical communication education and research, and she offers some preliminary considerations for ways that the field might move in this direction.

Component Content Management: Shaping the Discourse through Innovation Diffusion Research and Reciprocity

Component content management (CCM) is profoundly changing technical communication (TC) work, yet TC scholars have been largely absent from the CCM discourse that is shaping that work. This article explores the notion of reciprocity as a way for scholars to gain agency in the CCM discourse. The author argues that innovation diffusion studies can provide rich opportunities for enacting reciprocity. She offers her own CCM diffusion study to demonstrate the potential value of this model.

The Current State of Component Content Management: An Integrative Literature Review

Research problem: The widespread adoption of component content management in organizations calls for a comprehensive summary of the territory of this phenomenon. A summary provides stakeholders in component content management with a sense of how the practice has evolved and its implications to research, theory, and future practice. The last such review was published in 2003. This integrative literature review is intended to fill the gap in the literature by describing the current state of component content management as presented in the current publications. Research questions: How is “content” currently defined, described, and approached in the component content-management literature? What processes and tools are organizations adopting to achieve the goals of component content management? Literature review: The theoretical orientation of this review is Rhetorical Genre theory, which allows for classifying individual components as a genre characterized by granularity, reusability, and potentiality. Component content management gained recognition in the mid-1990s when early adopter organizations were looking for more efficient and effective approaches to reusing information between similar products or versions of the same product. Developments in the 2000s include a surge of publications focused on defining and describing component content management; new best practices for implementing a component content-management initiative; evolving processes and technologies for creating highly engineered, modular content that can automatically adjust to specific user requests and device capabilities; and collaborative efforts to integrate content creation and management strategies across organizational units. Scholarly and trade publications increasingly explore different concerns; whereas scholarly publications tend to offer critical perspectives on component content management, trade publications tend to describe processes and technologies and articulate best practices. Both focus on the goals of component content management, such as single sourcing, content reuse, multichannel publishing, and the structured content components required to achieve these goals. Methodology: To answer the research questions, we reviewed the body of literature on component content management. To do so, we searched library databases, Google, and Amazon.com for articles and books in both the scholarly and trade literature; we also sought out publications by well-known voices in component content management who direct successful consultant and/or research organizations. We then classified selected publications in relation to research questions and identified themes within each research question. The review did not explore other types of content management. Results and conclusions: Current component content-management literature suggests that component content management has evolved from a practice focused on single sourcing and reuse strategies for product documentation to a mature discipline concerned with designing pre-sales and post-sales information products for a multitude of devices and delivery channels. In recent years, trade publications have led the way to standardizing the disciplines core concepts, methodologies, processes, and technologies, such as structured content, structured authoring, single sourcing, component-based content strategy, Extensible Markup Language authoring tools, and component-content-management systems. Scholarly publications, however, have had comparatively little impact on advancing the discipline of component content management because only a handful of publications have focused on the topic and almost no crosstalk exists between these publications and the trade literature. Several questions about the practices of component content management still need to be answered, particularly in the areas of multilingual communication and content quality and usability. Based on the results of the literature review, we call for a coherent, robust, and ambitious component content-management research agenda that addresses topics such as content quality and usability, the diffusion of content-management systems, and global content management and that leads to studies that both advance scholarship and improve component content-management practice.

Planning for the Shaping Force of Cultural Dynamics in a Component Content-Management System Implementation

Problem: This tutorial explains how technical communication organizations can improve their chances for a successful component content-management system (CCMS) implementation if they plan for the shaping force of cultural dynamics in the technology diffusion process. Many component content -management (CCM) thought leaders have identified people factors as a major barrier to successful CCMS implementation. They recognize the necessity of gaining buy-in from all stakeholders and persuading CCMS users to change their habits of practice, follow new processes, and learn new authoring tools and methodologies. This tutorial complements existing discussions of people factors by offering a more complex understanding of what these factors really mean and how to negotiate them. Key concepts: This understanding is articulated through three situated views of CCMSs and their diffusion in organizations: (1) CCMSs are social constructs; (2) CCMS diffusion is a multistage, perception-driven communication process; and (3) CCMS diffusion is mediated by different components of organizational culture. These situated views highlight the shaping force of cultural dynamics in CCMS diffusion projects, and they speak to some of the reasons why common information transfer approaches to diffusion do not work. Key lessons: Given these views, CCM initiative leaders should consider the following recommendations for carrying out a CCMS diffusion project: (1) assess cultural dynamics in the organization and (2) implement diffusion enablers to facilitate shared understanding and learning and to guide actions toward common goals. Key lessons offer a comprehensive set of sample research questions that can be used to assess cultural dynamics as well as three kinds of diffusion enablers that can be implemented: interactive communication channels, training programs, and collaboratively developed guides. Implications: CCM initiative leaders who understand and plan for the shaping force of cultural dynamics in the CCMS diffusion process and who follow best practices for transitioning to CCM will improve their chances for a successful CCMS implementation. Leaders are encouraged to use the research questions and diffusion enablers are articulated here as a starting point for negotiating people factors that can impede diffusion.

The emergence of content strategy work and recommended resources

In my last column, I wrote about the need for a more integrated view of the field of technical communication. I suggested that the more our field is able to collaborate and integrate with other fields that have a stake in content management (CM), the more our fields unique perspectives, knowledge, and strategies will be recognized for the value they add to the CM discourse. This discourse, which includes a collective of industry conferences, publications, blogs, online discussions and workshops and Webinars, focuses a great deal on how best to integrate organizational and user generated content as well as disciplines and departments, expertise and roles, and business processes and tools.

Toward a more integrated view of technical communication

For the past few years, I have attended a number of industry conferences focused on content management (CM); reviewed a wealth of CM-focused publications, including trade books, white papers, newsletters, and blogs; and followed numerous CM-focused online discussions. Through these experiences and readings I have learned a great deal about the affordances and challenges of CM. But the message that has most impacted my thinking about CM---and what it means for the field of Technical Communication (TC)---is this: the era of document-based information development (ID), which has shaped all aspects of TC research, training, and practice since the fields inception, is coming to an end.

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.

A Systematic Literature Review of Changes in Roles/Skills in Component Content Management Environments and Implications for Education

ABSTRACT Component content management (CCM) enables organizations to create, manage, and deliver content as small components rather than entire documents. As CCM methodologies, processes, and technologies are increasingly adopted, CCM is reshaping technical communication (TC), the roles of technical communicators, and the skills they need for career success. This article reviews scholarly and trade publications that describe changes in roles and needed skills in CCM environments and identifies implications of these changes for TC education.

Incorporating Component Content Management and Content Strategy into Technical Communication Curricula

Technical communication (TC) students who are familiar with component content management (CCM) and content strategy have better opportunities for job placement and for making carefully thought-through, rhetorically grounded choices in the workplace. In this article, we describe four ways of incorporating elements of CCM and content strategy into existing classes in TC. We demonstrate that even without a dedicated CCM/content strategy class, educators can help students gain familiarity with related methodologies, processes, standards, and technologies.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Content Strategy— A Unifying Vision

The papers in this special section focus on effective content strategies. As a unifying vision and action plan, content strategy brings together various specialized writing communities, including professional and technical communication, marketing communication, and web development, ideally breaking disciplinary silos and biases and promoting convergence of these four key dimensions of practice Component content management—an interdisciplinary area of practice that focuses on creating and managing information as small components rather than documents has brought significant changes to professional and technical communication work since 2008. One major change is the move toward integrating organizational and user-generated content as well as disciplines and departments, expertise and roles, and business processes and tools. As stakeholders with various backgrounds across organizational units increasingly work together to create and publish content components, they need a unifying approach that fulfills business goals, organization requirements, and user needs. Content strategy has been proposed as that unifying approach.