Friday, November 22, 2013

Playing with the future - Part 5 - Any tool can create content


Today, we all are Information Architects. The average number of documents, presentations, emails, blogposts, and the myriad information sources we have to cope with daily continues to grow exponentially, with no end on sight.

So we all come up with nice little tricks to organize our content. Some go for the "all in one folder approach" (works with good search), others go for the super-structured approach for content management (folders upon folders of content hierarchies), and others (if your company's smart enough about knowledge management) go for the Enterprise Search approach. "Dump it in any of our document repositories, and go to this url to find it back".

Coveo nod: I really like their tagline of "Stop searching and start finding".



So, as part of our daily job as information architects (for our own information, not for your organization's), we work with a lot of tools, and very often the tool you use is determined not by your preferences but by the intended audience of the content you're creating:

  • Microsoft Word for the audit report
  • Microsoft PowerPoint for the roadmap or visionary statement
  • Blogger/wordpress for your personal blogpost
  • Email for the quick communication
  • Twitter for the even quicker communication
  • Tridion / CQ / SiteCore / Sharepoint for your company's official blog
  • Visual Studio or Eclipse for the really cool stuff
  • OneNote (or EverNote or Google Keep) to take notes during meetings
  • Prezi for the "I'm cool" effect (nope, doesn't work that way anymore, you're 3 years late)
  • Confluence for requirement gathering and roadmap grooming
  • Jira for backlog management
  • Facebook for the family/friend hugs
  • [list goes on]
Many years ago I remember thinking that, perhaps, the browser would be the tool of the future. Nope, that didn't really work either - yes, you do use your browser to do a lot of your work today, but you're not really using a browser - you're using the application behind the browser.

And another thing that is happening is that we're losing the W in WCM. Content that is not web accessible is not really content anymore, is it?

Hence my prediction... tools that can handle content transformation easily and can abstract the delivery mechanism are the tools we're going to use for everything. CM will eventually become a standard set of APIs (yeah, yeah, CMIS is an effort in that direction... but not really there yet, and too enterprise-y) and the tool you use to create content won't matter anymore. Because there will be enough intelligence behind the tool to "understand" what you're talking about (see part 1 and part 4 of this series) there will also be enough intelligence to understand how to transform that content to your required delivery format. And the tool(s) of the future will be born to address this requirement - hide all information architecture complexity from me, let me create content as content, and then help me deliver the content to my audience. And don't make me think.

2 comments:

Jesse Kanclerz @ Coveo said...

Hi Nuno - Thanks for the nod to Coveo in your post, and we’re in total agreement with you on the future of CM. The traditional approach to CM - which attempts to organize content into hierarchies and folders, or other manual organization processes - simply won’t work as the volumes and diversity of content continues to grow. Content creators should focus on creating content, in whatever format optimal for the audience, and the knowledge this content represents should be able to be navigated, engaged, and transformed without burdening the content creators. Forward thinking organizations are doing this…utilizing search-powered knowledge management tools to provide their employees, partners, and customers with the content they need, wherever it resides. It’s truly an exciting time to be in the information discovery business!

Nuno said...

Thanks Jesse. Interesting to see how this pans out over the next couple of years, loads of potential there for _real_ improvements on how information is managed in the (W)CM world (both for delivery and management).