Pulling it all together

Towards the end of last year I started to see how several related, but disparate, strands of work would start to come together. The information produced by my team, the training collateral, the partner focussed material, is all focussed on the product and this coming week will see the first step towards the realisation of all that hard work coming together into a cohesive story.

The final push comes in the form of a content audit, which will allow me to see where the gaps are, and where rework is required, to complete all the ‘stories’ that run from the main product messaging, down through our information strategy pyramid.

At present we have successfully moved to a single source/content re-use system which allows us to publish content to a knowledge centre hosted on our developer community website, that content is also used by the sales/pre-sales department who receive it in a different format.

The developer community website will be used by partners to both learn and keep up to date with product developments, and reduce the burden on our Support team (something that is already happening with call numbers going down since we introduced our new knowledge centre). The website also means we can look at producing our forms of content for information delivery, videos, screencams, example tutorials and such like.

This is an area where the training team and publications team will come together and which the content audit will help drive.

On a personal note it’s nice to be on the final straight of some ideas I’ve had brewing for a couple of years now. I’ve been lucky that I work with a team of guys who I trust completely to do a good job and who’ve never let me down regardless of the challenge.

It’s going to be an exciting few months, with much to learn and many hurdles to be overcome but once complete I think we will have an excellent, information focussed culture throughout the company.

Buy-in for the information strategy will be re-enforced by the content audit as I’ll need to talk to everyone who could/should be involved, but it is noticeable that there has been a shift in understanding throughout our company with the realisation that information will play a larger and larger role in driving us forward.