Tatiana Batova

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.

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.

Component Content Management and Quality of Information Products for Global Audiences: An Integrative Literature Review

Research problem: For many organizations, high-quality technical information products for global audiences are becoming an increasingly important part of doing business. Component content management attempts to facilitate the creation of such information products. A growing number of technical communication groups are adopting the strategies, standards, and technologies of component content management. This integrative literature review examines the impacts of component content management on the quality of multilingual information products. Research questions: How are the impacts of component content management on multilingual quality conceptualized? How do best practices address the impacts of component content management on multilingual quality? Literature review: Two divides characterize component content management and multilingual quality. The divide between the academy and industry is marked by different levels of interest in quality, particularly its practical aspects. The divide between technical communication and technical translation and localization is defined by the lack of communication between the representatives of each field that leads to a narrower understanding of multilingual quality. Therefore, a comprehensive picture of the impacts of component content management on multilingual quality requires combining the perspectives of scholarly and industry authors in technical communication and technical translation and localization. Activity Theory provides an approach for bridging the divides and creating such a comprehensive picture. Methodology: To provide such a comprehensive picture, I systematically reviewed literature sources on component content management and multilingual quality in scholarly and trade sources in technical communication and technical translation and localization, then classified all selected publications by their relationships to the research questions, themes within them, and characteristics of the source. Results and conclusions: Contradictory conceptual understandings exist on the impacts of component content management on multilingual quality. While some sources praise benefits of component content management, particularly increased consistency and the promise to provide additional adaption possibilities, other sources focus on the challenges of using it, especially a lack of context, text segmentation, and human resources. Although best practices offer some suggestions for overcoming these challenges, the suggestions do not resolve them sufficiently and do not reconcile the contradiction between consistency and adaptation of information products based on the different expectations of audiences around the globe. This study is limited by the fact that it primarily focused on English language publications. Future research needs to be conducted collaboratively by stakeholders in academia and industry and from technical communication and technical translation and localization.

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.

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.

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.

Negotiating Multilingual Quality in Component Content-Management Environments

Introduction: This case study examines the impacts of component content management (CCM) on the ways global technical communication (TC) stakeholders practice multilingual quality. About the case: The case study is based on the results of a 12-month qualitative case study of global technical communication stakeholders at DreamMedi, a Fortune 500 manufacturer of medical devices. Situating the case: Three areas of inquiry informed the study. Academic and trade literature from technical communication and technical translation revealed disagreements and contradictions that surround multilingual quality in CCM environments. Rhetorical genre theory allowed analyzing multilingual quality by distinguishing content components as a new genre, a unit of analysis, and a mediator of global technical communication. Activity theory provided the theoretical foundation for examining a global TC activity system at its nodes and then elucidating the contradictions within these nodes. Methods/approach: The case study was a multiple-method research project that included observations, in-depth interviews, questionnaires, document collection/content analysis, and software exploration. The Institutional Review Board-approved study focused on technical communicators, translators, and bilingual reviewers. Results/discussion: Relying on thick descriptions of the storylines of global TC stakeholders, this paper pinpoints contradictions in how stakeholders understand and approach multilingual quality. These contradictions are rooted in stakeholders’ backgrounds and experience, and become more dramatic after the transition to CCM. Conclusions: Global TC stakeholders lacked strategies for negotiating their understandings of and approaches to multilingual quality in the new information development and management paradigm. Developing such strategies is the key prerequisite for effective cross-functional and cross-cultural collaboration in multilingual CCM environments. Technical communicators are well-positioned to take on leadership roles in developing such strategies.

Work Motivation in the Rhetoric of Component Content Management

This article describes a 12-month qualitative study that analyzes how a company’s transition to component content management (CCM)—a set of methodologies, processes, and technologies that allows working with texts as small components rather than complete, static documents—influences the work motivation of its technical communicators. The analysis is based on actor-network theory and the theories of work motivation from economics. When technical communicators felt that CCM’s only focus was efficiency and savings and that they were not recognized and connected to the fruits of their labor, their motivation decreased. But their motivation increased when they were engaged in job crafting—reshaping their understanding of the fruits of their labor and gaining recognition through prosocial behavior.

Extended abstract: Lean UX and innovation in teaching

This extended abstract describes lean UX methodology and explains its benefits for innovation in technical and professional communication teaching.