How can global brands use AI in localization without losing accuracy, cultural nuance, and brand integrity? In this podcast, host Bill Swallow and guest Steve Maule explore the opportunities, risks, and evolving roles that AI brings to the localization process.
The most common workflow shift in translation is to start with AI output, then have a human being review some or all of that output. It’s rare that enterprise-level companies want a fully human translation. However, one of the concerns that a lot of enterprises have about using AI is security and confidentiality. We have some customers where it’s written in our contract that we must not use AI as part of the translation process. Now, that could be for specific content types only, but they don’t want to risk personal data being leaked. In general, though, the default service now for what I’d call regular common translation is post editing or human review of AI content. The biggest change is that’s really become the norm.
—Steve Maule, VP of Global Sales at Acclaro

Related links:

* Scriptorium: AI in localization: What could possibly go wrong?
* Scriptorium: Localization strategy: Your key to global markets
* Acclaro: Checklist | Get Your Global Content Ready for Fast AI Scaling
* Acclaro: How a modular approach to AI can help you scale faster and control localization costs
* Acclaro: How, when, and why to use AI for global content
* Acclaro: AI in localization for 2025

LinkedIn:

* Steve Maule
* Bill Swallow

Transcript:
Introduction with ambient background music
Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.
Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.
SO: Change is perceived as being risky; you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.
Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and processes that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.
End of introduction
Bill Swallow: Hi, I’m Bill Swallow, and today I have with me Steve Maule from Acclaro. In this episode, we’ll talk about the benefits and pitfalls of AI in localization. Welcome, Steve.
Steve Maule: Thanks, Bill. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
BS: Absolutely. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work with Acclaro?
SM: Yeah, sure, sure. So I’m Steve Maule, currently the VP of Global Sales at Acclaro, and Acclaro is a fast-growing language services provider. So I’m based in Manchester in the UK,

AI, self-paced courses, and shifting demand for instructor-led classes—what’s next for the future of training content? In this podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Kevin Siegel unpack the challenges, opportunities, and what it takes to adapt.
There’s probably a training company out there that’d be happy to teach me how to use WordPress. I didn’t have the time, I didn’t have the resources, nothing. So I just did it on my own. That’s one example of how you can use AI to replace some training. And when I don’t know how to do something these days, I go right to YouTube and look for a video to teach me how to do it. But given that, there are some industries where you can’t get away with that. Healthcare is an example—you’re not going to learn how to do brain surgery that someone could rely on with AI or through a YouTube video.
— Kevin Siegel


Related links:

* Is live, instructor-led training dying? (Kevin’s LinkedIn post)
* AI in the content lifecycle (white paper)
* Overview of structured learning content
* IconLogic

LinkedIn:

* Kevin Siegel
* Sarah O’Keefe

Transcript:
Introduction with ambient background music
Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.
Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.
SO: Change is perceived as being risky; you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.
Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and processes that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.
End of introduction
SO: Hi, everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe. I’m here today with Kevin Siegel. Hey, Kevin.
KS: Hey, Sarah. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
SO: Yeah, it’s great to see you. Kevin and I, for those of you that don’t know, go way back and have some epic stories about a conference in India that we went to together where we had some adventures in shopping and haggling and bartering in the middle of downtown Bangalore, as I recall.
KS: I can only tell you that if you want to go shopping in Bangalore, take Sarah. She’s far better at negotiating than I am. I’m absolutely horrible at it.
SO: And my advice is to take Alyssa Fox, who was the one that was really doing all the bartering.
KS: Really good. Yes, yes.
SO: So anyway, we are here today to talk about challenges in instructor-led training, and this came out of a LinkedIn post that Kevin put up a little while ago, which will include in the show notes. So Kevin, tell us a little bit about yourself and IconLogic, your company and what you do over there.
KS: So IconLogic, we’ve always considered ourselves to be a three-headed dragon, three-headed beast, where we do computer training, software training, so vendor-specific.

What if you could escape copy-and-paste and build dynamic learning experiences at scale? In this podcast, host Sarah O’Keefe and guest Mike Buoy explore the benefits of structured learning content. They share how organizations can break down silos between techcomm and learning content, deliver content across channels, and support personalized learning experiences at scale.
The good thing about structured authoring is that you have a structure. If this is the concept that we need to talk about and discuss, here’s all the background information that goes with it. With that structure comes consistency, and with that consistency, you have more of your information and knowledge documented so that it can then be distributed and repackaged in different ways. If all you have is a PowerPoint, you can’t give somebody a PowerPoint in the middle of an oil change and say, “Here’s the bare minimum you need,” when I need to know, “Okay, what do I do if I’ve cross-threaded my oil drain bolt?” That’s probably not in the PowerPoint. That could be an instructor story that’s going to be told if you have a good instructor who’s been down that really rocky road, but again, a consistent structure is going to set you up so that you have robust base content.
— Mike Buoy


Related links:

* AEM Guides
* Overview of structured learning content
* CompTIA accelerates global content delivery with structured learning content (case study)
* Structured learning content that’s built to scale (webinar)

LinkedIn:

* Mike Buoy
* Sarah O’Keefe

Transcript:
Introduction with ambient background music
Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.
Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.
Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky; you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.
Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and processes that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.
End of introduction
Sarah O’Keefe: Hi everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe. I’m here today with Mike Buoy. Hey, Mike.
Mike Buoy: Good morning, Sarah. How are you?
SO: I’m doing well, welcome. For those of you who don’t know, Mike Buoy is the Senior Solutions Consultant for AEM Guides at Adobe since the beginning of this year of 2025. And before that had a, we’ll say, long career in learning.
MB: Long is accurate, long is accurate. There may have been some gray hair grown along the way, in the about 20-plus years.
SO: There might have been. No video for us, no reason in particular. Mike, what else do we need to know about you before we get into today’s topic, which is the intersection of techcomm and learning?
MB: Oh gosh,

Every time someone views your product content, it’s a purposeful engagement with direct business value. Are you making the most of that interaction? In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, special guest Patrick Bosek, co-founder and CEO of Heretto, and Sarah O’Keefe, founder and CEO of Scriptorium, explore how your techcomm traffic reduces support costs, improves customer retention, and creates a cohesive user experience.
Patrick Bosek: Nobody reads a page in your documentation site for no reason. Everybody that is there has a purpose, and that purpose always has an economic impact on your business. People who are on the documentation site are not using your support, which means they’re saving you a ton of money. It means that they’re learning about your product, either because they’ve just purchased it and they want to utilize it, so they’re onboarding, and we all know that utilization turns into retention and retention is good because people who retain pay us more money, or they’re trying to figure out how to use other aspects of the system and get more value out of it. There’s nobody who goes to a doc site who’s like, “I’m bored. I’m just going to go and see what’s on the doc site today.” Every person, every session on your documentation site is there with a purpose, and it’s a purpose that matters to your business.

Related links:

* Heretto
* Contact Heretto to walk through their support evaluation sheet with an expert!
* The business case for content operations (white paper)
* Curious about the value of structured content operations in your organization? Use our content ops ROI calculator.
* Get monthly insights on structured content, futureproof content operations, and more with our Illuminations newsletter

LinkedIn:

* Patrick Bosek
* Sarah O’Keefe

Transcript:
Introduction with ambient background music
Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.
Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.
Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.
Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.
End of introduction
Sarah O’Keefe: Hi, everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe and I’m here today with our guest, Patrick Bosek, who is one of the founders and the CEO of Heretto. Welcome.
Patrick Bosek: Thanks, Sarah. It’s lovely to be here. I think this is may be my third or fourth time getting to chat with you on the Scriptorium podcast.
SO:  Well, we talk all the time. This is talking and then we’re going to publi- no, let’s not go down that road. Of all the things that happen when we’re not being recorded. Okay. Well we’re glad to have you again and looking forward ...

In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow unpack the promise, pitfalls, and disruptive impact of AI on multilingual content. From pivot languages to content hygiene, they explore what’s next for language service providers and global enterprises alike.
Bill Swallow: I think it goes without saying that there’s going to be disruption again. Every single change, whether it’s in the localization industry or not, has resulted in some type of disruption. Something has changed. I’ll be blunt about it. In some cases, jobs were lost, jobs were replaced, new jobs were created. For LSPs, I think AI is going to, again, be another shift, the same that happened when machine translation came out. LSPs had to shift and pivot how they approach their bottom line with people. GenAI is going to take a lot of the heavy lifting off of the translators, for better or for worse, and it’s going to force a copy edit workflow. I think it’s really going to be a model where people are going to be training and cleaning up after AI.

Related links:

* Going global: Getting started with content localization
* Lessons Japan taught me about content localization strategy
* Conquering content localization: strategies for success (podcast)
* The Scriptorium approach to localization strategy
* Get monthly insights on structured content, futureproof content operations, and more with our Illuminations newsletter

LinkedIn:

* Sarah O’Keefe
* Bill Swallow

Transcript:
Introduction with ambient background music
Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.
Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.
Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.
Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.
End of introduction
Sarah O’Keefe: Hey, everyone. I’m Sarah O’Keefe, and I’m here today with Bill Swallow.
Bill Swallow: Hey there.
SO: They have let us out of the basement. Mistakes were made. And we have been asked to talk to you on this podcast about AI in translation and localization. I have subtitled this podcast, What Could Possibly Go Wrong? As always, what could possibly go wrong, both in this topic and also with this particular group of people who have been given microphones. So Bill.
BS: They’ll take them away eventually.
SO: They will eventually. Bill, what’s your generalized take right now on AI in translation and localization? And I apologize in advance. We will almost certainly use those two terms interchangeably,

Is AI really ready to generate your training materials? In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle tackle the trends around AI in learning content. They explore where generative AI adds value—like creating assessments and streamlining translation—and where it falls short. If you’re exploring how AI can fit into your learning content strategy, this episode is for you.
Sarah O’Keefe: But what’s actually being said is AI will generate your presentation for you. If your presentation is so not new, if the information in it is so basic that generative AI can successfully generate your presentation for you, that implies to me that you don’t have anything interesting to say. So then, we get to this question of how do we use AI in learning content to make good choices, to make better learning content? How do we advance the cause?

Related links:

* Synthetic audio example: Strategies for AI in technical documentation (podcast, English version)
* LearningDITA: DITA-based structured learning content in action (podcast)
* How CompTIA rebuilt its content ecosystem for greater agility and efficiency (webinar)
* Transform L&D experiences at scale with structured learning content (podcast)
* Overview of structured learning content
* Get monthly insights on structured content, futureproof content operations, and more with our Illuminations newsletter

LinkedIn:

* Sarah O’Keefe
* Alan Pringle

Transcript:
Introduction with ambient background music
Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.
Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.
Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.
Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.
End of introduction
Alan Pringle: Hey everybody, I am Alan Pringle, and today I’m talking to Sarah O’Keefe.
Sarah O’Keefe: Hey everybody, how’s it going?
AP: And today, Sarah and I want to discuss artificial intelligence and learning content. How can you apply artificial intelligence to learning content? We’ve talked a whole lot, Sarah, about AI and technical communication and product content, let’s talk more about learning and development and how AI can help or maybe not help putting together learning content. So how is it being used right now? Let’s start with that. Do you know of cases? I know of one or two, and I’m sure you do too.

Tempted to jump straight to a new tool to solve your content problems? In this episode, Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow share real-world stories that show how premature solutioning without proper analysis can lead to costly misalignment, poor adoption, and missed opportunities for company-wide operational improvement.
Bill Swallow: On paper, it looked like a perfect solution. But everyone, including the people who greenlit the project, hated it. Absolutely hated it. Why? It was difficult to use, very slow, and very buggy. Sometimes it would crash and leave processes running, so you couldn’t relaunch it. There was no easy way to use it. So everyone bypassed using it at every opportunity.
Alan Pringle: It sounds to me like there was a bit of a fixation. This product checked all the boxes without actually doing any in-depth analysis of what was needed, much less actually thinking about what users needed and how that product could fill those needs.

Related links:

* How humans drive content operations (recorded webinar & transcript)
* Brewing a better content strategy through single sourcing (podcast)
* The Scriptorium approach to content strategy
* Get monthly insights on structured content, futureproof content operations, and more with our Illuminations newsletter

LinkedIn:

* Alan Pringle
* Bill Swallow

Transcript:
Introduction with ambient background music
Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.
Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.
Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.
Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.
End of introduction
Bill Swallow: Hi, I’m Bill Swallow
Alan Pringle: And I’m Alan Pringle.
BS: And in this episode we’re going to talk about the pitfalls of putting solutioning before doing proper analysis. And Alan, I’m going to kick this right off to you. Why should you not put solutioning before doing proper analysis?
AP: Well, it’s very shortsighted and oftentimes it means you’re not going to get the funding that you need to do the project to solve the problems that you have. And with that, we can wrap this podcast up because there’s not a whole lot more to talk about here, really. But no, seriously, we do need to dive into this. It is very easy to fall into the trap of taking a tool’s first point of view. You’ve got a problem, it’s really weighing on you. So it’s not unusual for a mind to go, this tool will fix this problem, but it’s really not the way to go. You need to go back many steps, shut that part of your brain off and start doing analysis. And Bill, you’ve got an example, I believe, of how taking a tool’s first point of view didn’t help ba...

Struggling to get the right content to the right people, exactly when and where they need it? In this podcast, Scriptorium CEO Sarah O’Keefe and Fluid Topics CEO Fabrice Lacroix explore dynamic content delivery—pushing content beyond static PDFs into flexible platforms that power search, personalization, and multi-channel distribution.
When we deliver the content, whether it’s through the APIs or the portal that you’ve built that is served by the platform, we render the content in a way that we can dynamically remove or hide parts of the content that would not apply to the context, the profile of the user. That’s the magic of a CDP. It’s delivering that content dynamically.
— Fabrice Lacroix

Related links:

* Scriptorium: Personalized content: Steps to success (white paper)
* Scriptorium: AI in the content lifecycle (white paper)
* Fluid Topics, an AI-powered content delivery platform
* Fluid Topics: What is Content Operations and Why is it Important?
* Get monthly insights on structured content, futureproof content operations, and more with our Illuminations newsletter

LinkedIn:

* Sarah O’Keefe
* Fabrice Lacroix

Transcript:
Introduction with ambient background music
Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.
Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.
Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.
Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.
End of introduction
Sarah O’Keefe: Hi everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe and I’m here today with the CEO of Fluid Topics. Fabrice, Lacroix. Fabrice, welcome.
Fabrice Lacroix: Hey. Hi Sarah. Nice being with you today. Thanks for welcoming me.
SO: It’s nice to see you. So as many of you probably know, Fluid Topics is a content delivery portal or possibly a content delivery platform. And we’re going to talk about the difference between those two things as we get into this. So Fabrice, tell us a little bit about Fluid Topics and what that content delivery portal or maybe platform. Which one is it? What do you prefer?
FL: For us, it’s platform definitely. But you’re right, depends on where people are in this evolution process, on how they deliver content. And for many, many customers, the piece stands for a portal. You’re right, because that is the first need. That’s how they come to us, because they need a portal.
SO: Okay, so in your view, the portal is a front end, an access point for content, and then what makes it a platform rather than a portal?
FL: Probably because the goal that many companies have to achieve is delivering that content where it’s needed. It’s many places most of the time.

Are you considering a structured approach to creating your learning content? We built LearningDITA.com as an example of what DITA and structured learning content can do! In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe and Allison Beatty unpack the architecture of LearningDITA to provide a pattern for other learning content initiatives.

Because we used DITA XML for the content instead of the actual authoring in Moodle, we actually saved a lot of pain for ourselves. With Moodle, the name of the game is low-code/no-code. They want you to manually build out these courses, but we wanted to automate that for obvious reasons. SCORM allowed us to do that by having a transform that would take our DITA XML, put it in SCORM, and then we just upload the SCORM package to Moodle and don’t have to do all the painful things of, you know, “Let’s put a heading two here with this little piece of content.” And the key thing is that allowed us to reuse content.
— Allison Beatty


Related links:

* Self-paced, online DITA training with LearningDITA.com
* Structured authoring and XML (white paper), which is also included in our book, Content Transformation
* Confronting the horror of modernizing content
* The benefits of structured content for learning & development content
* Get monthly insights on structured learning content, content operations, and more with our Illuminations newsletter

LinkedIn:

* Sarah O’Keefe
* Allison Beatty

Transcript:
Introduction with ambient background music
Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.
Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.
Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.
Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.
End of introduction
Sarah O’Keefe: Hi everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe.
Allison Beatty: And I’m Allison Beatty.
SO: And in this episode, we’re focusing in on the LearningDITA architecture and how it might provide a pattern for other learning content initiatives, including maybe the one that you, the listener, are working on. We have a couple of major components in the learningDITA.com site architecture. We have learner records for the users. We have e-commerce, the way we actually sell the courses and monetize them. That is my personal favorite. And then we have the content itself and assorted relationships and connectors amongst all those pieces. So I’m here with Allison Beatty today, and her job is to explain all those things to us because Allison did all the actual wo...

In this episode, Alan Pringle, Bill Swallow, and Christine Cuellar explore how structured learning content supports the learning experience. They also discuss the similarities and differences between structured content for learning content and technical (techcomm) content.
Even if you are significantly reusing your learning content, you’re not just putting the same text everywhere. You can add personalization layers to the content and tailor certain parts of the content that are specific to your audience’s needs. If you were in a copy-and-paste scenario, you’d have to manually update it every single time you want to make a change. That scenario also makes it a lot more difficult to update content as you modify it for specific audiences over time, because you may not find everywhere a piece of information has been used and modified when you need to update it.
— Bill Swallow


Related links:

* Structured authoring and XML (white paper), which is also included in our book, Content Transformation
* Confronting the horror of modernizing content
* The challenges of structured learning content (podcast)
* Self-paced, online DITA training with LearningDITA.com
* Get monthly insights on structured learning content, content operations, and more with our Illuminations newsletter

LinkedIn:

* Alan Pringle
* Bill Swallow
* Christine Cuellar

Transcript:
Introduction with ambient background music
Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.
Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.
Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.
Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.
End of introduction
Christine Cuellar: Hey, everybody, and welcome to today’s show. I’m Christine Cuellar, and with me today I have Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow. Alan and Bill, thanks for being here.
Alan Pringle: Sure. Hello, everybody.
Bill Swallow: Hey, there.
CC: Today, Alan, Bill, and I are going to be talking about structured content for learning content. Before we get too far in the weeds, let’s kick it off with a intro question.
Alan, what is structured content?
AP: Structured content is a content workflow that lets you define and enforce consistent organization of your information. Let’s give a quick example in the learning space. For example, you could say that all learning overviews contain information about the audience for that content, the duration, prerequisites,

In this episode, Alan Pringle, Gretyl Kinsey, and Allison Beatty discuss LearningDITA, a hub for training on the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). They dive into the story behind LearningDITA, explore our course topics, and more.
Gretyl Kinsey: Over time that user base grew and grew. And now it boggles my mind that it got all the way up to 16,000 users. I never expected it to grow to that size.
Alan Pringle: Well, we didn’t really either, nor did our infrastructure. Because as of late 2024, things started to go a little sideways, and it became clear our tech stack was not going to be able to sustain more students. It was very creaky. The site wasn’t performing well. So we made a decision that we needed to take the site offline, and we did, to basically redo it on a new platform.

Related links:

* Check out our self-paced online DITA 1.3 training.
* Open-source DITA training project GitHub files

LinkedIn:

* Alan Pringle
* Gretyl Kinsey
* Allison Beatty

Transcript:
Introduction with ambient background music
Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.
Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.
Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.
Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.
End of introduction
Alan Pringle: Hey, everyone, I am Alan Pringle, and today I am here with Gretyl Kinsey and Allison Beatty. Say hello, you two.
Gretyl Kinsey: Hello.
Allison Beatty: Hello.
AP: We are together here today because we want to talk about LearningDITA, our e-learning site for the DITA specification because we have just moved it to a new platform. So we want to give you a little background on what went on with that decision. So first of all, Gretyl, you and I were at Scriptorium when we kicked off this site, and I just went back and looked at blog posts. We announced it via blog post I wrote in July of 2015. So we have had this site up and running for 10 years, which absolutely blows my mind.
GK: It blows my mind too. It’s hard to believe that it’s been that long because it does seem like it got launched pretty recently in my memory, but it has been through a lot of changes and so has the entire landscape of content creation as well. So yeah, it’s really cool that now we can look back and say it has been 10 years of LearningDITA being on the web.
AP: For those who may not be familiar with the site, give us a little summary of what it is.
GK: Sure. So LearningDITA is a training resource on DITA XML and it’s developed by Scriptorium, and it covers a lot of the main fundamentals of DITA. So we have some courses on basic authoring and publishing. We also have a couple of courses on reuse and one course on the DITA learning and training specialization. So you get a good overview of a lot of different areas of DITA XML. And all of the courses are self-guided e-learning.

In our last episode, you learned how a taxonomy helps you simplify search, create consistency, and deliver personalized learning experiences at scale. In part two of this two-part series, Gretyl Kinsey and Allison Beatty discuss how to start developing your futureproof taxonomy from assessing your content needs to lessons learned from past projects.
Gretyl Kinsey: The ultimate end goal of a taxonomy is to make information easier to find, particularly for your user base because that’s who you’re creating this content for. With learning material, the learner is who you’re creating your courses for. Make sure to keep that end goal in mind when you’re building your taxonomy.

Related links:



* Taxonomy: Simplify search, create consistency, and more (podcast, part 1)
* The challenges of structured learning content (podcast)
* DITA and learning content
* Metadata and taxonomy in your spice rack
* Transform L&D experiences at scale with structured learning content



LinkedIn:

* Gretyl Kinsey
* Allison Beatty

Transcript:
Introduction with ambient background music
Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.
Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.
Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.
Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.
End of introduction
Allison Beatty: I am Allison Beatty.
Gretyl Kinsey: I’m Gretyl Kinsey.
AB: And in this episode, Gretyl and I continue our discussion about taxonomy.
GK: This is part two of a two-part podcast.
AB: So if you don’t have a taxonomy for your learning content, but you know need one, what are some things to keep in mind about developing one?
GK: Yeah, so there are all kinds of interesting lessons we’ve learned along the way from working with organizations who don’t have a taxonomy and need one. And I want to talk about some of the high-level things to keep in mind, and then we can dive in and think about some examples there. One thing I also want to just say upfront is that it is very common for learning content in particular to be developed in unstructured environments and tools like Microsoft Word or Excel. It’s also really common that if you are working within a learning management system or LMS for there to be a lack o...

Can your learners find critical content when they need it? How do you deliver personalized learning experiences at scale? A learning content taxonomy might be your solution! In part one of this two-part series, Gretyl Kinsey and Allison Beatty share what a taxonomy is, the nuances of taxonomies for learning content, and how a taxonomy supports improved learner experiences in self-paced e-learning environments, instructor-led training, and more.
Allison Beatty: I know we’ve made taxonomies through all sorts of different frames, whether it’s structuring learning content, or we’ve made product taxonomies. It’s really a very flexible and useful thing to be able to implement in your organization.
Gretyl Kinsey: And it not only helps with that user experience for things like learning objectives, but it can also help your learners find the right courses to take. If you have some information in your taxonomy that’s designed to narrow it down to a learner saying, “I need to learn about this specific subject.” And that could have several layers of hierarchy to it. It could also help your learners understand what to go back and review based on the learning objectives. It can help them make some decisions around how they need to take a course.

Related links:

* The challenges of structured learning content (podcast)
* DITA and learning content
* Metadata and taxonomy in your spice rack
* Transform L&D experiences at scale with structured learning content
* Rise of the learning content ecosystem with Phylise Banner (podcast)

LinkedIn:

* Gretyl Kinsey
* Allison Beatty

Transcript:
Introduction with ambient background music
Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.
Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.
Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.
Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.
End of introduction
Gretyl Kinsey: Hello and welcome. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.
Allison Beatty: And I’m Allison Beatty.
GK: And in this episode, we’re going to be talking about taxonomy, particularly for learning content. This is part one of a two-part podcast.
AB: So first things first, Gretyl, what is a taxonomy?
GK: Sure. A taxonomy is essentially just a system for putting things into categories. Whether that is something concrete like physical objects or whether it’s just information. A taxonomy is going to help you collect all of that into specific categories that help people find what they’re lo...

Ready to deliver consistent and personalized learning content at scale for your learners? In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow share how structured content can transform your L&D content processes. They also address challenges and opportunities for creating structured learning content.
There are other people in the content creation world who have had problems with content duplication, having to copy from one platform or tool to another. But I will tell you, from what I have seen, the people in the learning development space have it the worst in that regard—the worst.
— Alan Pringle

Related links:

* The challenges of structured learning content (podcast)
* DITA and learning content
* Rise of the learning content ecosystem with Phylise Banner (podcast)
* Flexible learning content with the DITA Learning and Training specialization
* Building an effective content strategy is no small task. The latest edition of our book, Content Transformation is your guidebook for getting started.

LinkedIn:

* Alan Pringle
* Bill Swallow

Transcript:
Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.
Introduction with ambient background music
Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.
Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.
Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.
Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.
End of introduction
AP: Hey, everybody, I’m Alan Pringle.
BS: I’m Bill Swallow.
AP: And today, Bill and I want to talk about structured content in the learning and development space. I would say, the past two years or so, we have seen a significantly increased demand of organizations who want to apply structured content to their learning and development processes, and we want to share some of the things those organizations have been through and what we’ve learned over the past few months, because I suspect there are other people out there who could benefit from this information.
BS: Oh, absolutely.
AP: So let’s talk about, really, the drivers, what are the things that people, content creators in the learning development space, what’s driving them to it? One of them off the bat is so much content, so, so very much content, on so many different delivery platforms. That’s one that I know of immediately, what are some of the other ones?
BS: Oh, yeah, you have just the core amount of content, the number of deliverables, and the duplication of content across all of them.
AP: That is really the huge one,

In episode 179 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle share the inside scoop on how to write an effective request for a proposal (RFP) for content operations. They’ll discuss how RFPs are constructed and evaluated, strategies for aligning your proposal with organizational goals, how to get buy-in from procurement and legal teams, and more.
When it comes time to write the RFP, rely on your procurement team, your legal team, and so on. They have that expertise. They know that process. It’s a matter of pairing what you know about your requirements and what you need with their processes to get the better result.
— Alan Pringle

Related links:

* Survive the descent: planning your content ops exit strategy (podcast)
* The business case for content operations (white paper)
* Content accounting: Calculating value of content in the enterprise (white paper)
* Building the business case for content operations (webinar)

LinkedIn:

* Sarah O’Keefe
* Alan Pringle

Transcript:
Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.
Alan Pringle: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about writing effective RFPs. A request for a proposal, RFP, approach is common for enterprise software purchases, such as a component content management system, which can be expensive and perhaps risky. Hey everybody, I am Alan Pringle.
Sarah O’Keefe: And I’m Sarah O’Keefe, hi.
AP: So Sarah, we don’t sell software at Scriptorium, so why are we talking about buying software?
SO: Well, we’re talking about you, the client buying software, which is not always, but in many cases, the prerequisite before we get involved on the services side to configure and integrate and stand up the system that you have just purchased to get you up and running. And so, because many of our customers, many most, nearly all of our customers are very, very large, many of those organizations do have processes in place for enterprise software purchases that typically either strongly recommend or require an RFP, a request for proposal.
AP: Which let’s be very candid here. Nobody likes them. Nobody. 
SO: No, they’re horrible.
AP: Vendors don’t like them. People who have to put them together don’t like them, but they’re a necessary evil. But there things you can do to make that necessary evil work for you. And that’s what we want to talk about today.
AP: So the first thing you need to do is do some homework. And part of that homework, I think, is talking with a bunch of stakeholders for this project or this purchase and teasing out requirements. So let’s start with that. And this is even before you get to the RFP itself. There’s some stuff you need to do in the background. And let’s talk about that a little bit right now.
SO: Right, so I think, you know, what you’re looking to get to before you go to RFP is a ...

In episode 178 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Christine Cuellar perform a pulse check on the state of AI as of December 2024. They discuss unresolved complex content problems and share key considerations for entering 2025 and beyond.
The truth that we’re finding our way towards appears to be that you can use AI as a tool and it is very, very good at patterns and synthesis and condensing content. And it is very, very bad at creating useful, accurate, net new content. That appears to be the bottom line as we exit 2024.
— Sarah O’Keefe

Related links:

* Pulse check on AI: May, 2024 (podcast)
* AI in the content lifecycle (white paper)
* The future of AI: structured content is key (webinar)
* Savor the season with Scriptorium: Our favorite holiday recipes

LinkedIn:

* Sarah O’Keefe
* Christine Cuellar

Transcript:
Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.
Christine Cuellar: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, it’s time for another pulse check on AI. So our last check-in was in May, which in AI terms is ancient history, so today, Sarah O’Keefe and I are gonna be talking about what’s changed and how it can affect your content operations. Sarah, welcome to the show.
Sarah O’Keefe: Hey Christine, thanks.
CC: Yeah. So 2024, as we’re currently recording this 2024 is winding down. People are preparing for 2025. Throughout this year, we went to a lot of different conferences and events. Of course, everybody’s talking about AI. So Sarah, based on the events that you like just recently got back from, you finally get to be in your own house. What are your thoughts about what’s going on with AI in the industry right now?
SO: There’s, still a huge topic of conversation. Lots of people are talking about AI, a huge percentage of presentations, you know, had AI in the title or referenced it or talked about it. With that said, it seems like we’re seeing a little more sort of real world, hey, here’s some things we tried, here’s what’s working, here’s what’s not working. 
CC: Mm-hmm.
SO: And I’ll also say that we’re starting to see a really big split between the AI in regulatory environments, which would include the entire EU plus certain kinds of industries and the sort of wild, wild west of we can do anything.
CC: Yeah. So do you feel like it sounds like, know, when AI first came onto the scene, there was mostly, you know, let’s just all adopt this right now. Let’s go for it full steam ahead, especially marketers as a marketer. can I can say that because we’re definitely gung-ho about stuff like that. It sounds like, the perspective has shifted to being more balanced overall. Is that what you would say?
SO: Yeah, I mean, that’s the typical technology adoption curve, right? You know, have your your peak of inflated expectations, and then you have the I think it’s the valley.

Is it really possible to configure enterprise content—technical, support, learning & training, marketing, and more—to create a seamless experience for your end users? In episode 177 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow discuss the reality of enterprise content operations: do they truly exist in the current content landscape? What obstacles hold the industry back? How can organizations move forward?
Sarah: You’ve got to get your terminology and your taxonomy in alignment. Most of the industry I am confident in saying have gone with option D, which is give up. “We have silos. Our silos are great. We’re going to be in our silos, and I don’t like those people over in learning content anyway. I don’t like those people in techcomm anyway. They’re weird. They’re focused on the wrong things,” says everybody, and so they’re just not doing it. I think that does a great disservice to the end users, but that’s the reality of where most people are right now.
Bill: Right, because the end user is left holding the bag trying to find information using terminology from one set of content and not finding it in another and just having a completely different experience.

Related links:

* The business case for content operations (white paper)
* Replatforming an early DITA implementation (case study)
* Hear Sarah speak about The reality of enterprise customer content at tcworld 2024!
* Hear Bill speak about the The challenges of replatforming, also at tcworld 2024.

LinkedIn:

* Sarah O’Keefe
* Bill Swallow

Transcript:
Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.
Bill Swallow: Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about enterprise content operations. Does it actually exist? And if so, what does it look like? And if not, how can we get there? Hi, everyone. I’m Bill Swallow.
Sarah O’Keefe: And I’m Sarah O’Keefe.
BS: And Sarah, they let us do another podcast together.
SO: Mistakes were made.
BS: So today we’re talking a little bit about enterprise content operations. If it exists, what it looks like. If it doesn’t, why doesn’t it exist? What can people do to get there?
SO: So enterprise content ops, I guess first we have to define our terms a little bit. Content operations, content ops is the system that you use to manage your content. And manage not the software, but how do you develop it, how do you author it, how do you control it, how do you deliver it, how do you retire it, all that stuff. So content ops is the overarching system that manages your content lifecycle. And when we look at content ops from that perspective, and of course we’re generally focused on technical content, but when we talk enterprise content ops, it’s customer-facing content,

Whether you’re surviving a content operations project or a journey through treacherous caverns, it’s crucial to plan your way out before you begin. In episode 176 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Christine Cuellar unpack the parallels between navigating horror-filled caves and building a content ops exit strategy.
Alan Pringle: When you’re choosing tools, if you end up something that is super proprietary, has its own file formats, and so on, that means it’s probably gonna be harder to extract your content from that system. A good example of this is those of you with Samsung Android phones. You have got this proprietary layer where it may even insert things into your source code that is very particular to that product line. So look at how proprietary your tool or toolchain is and how hard it’s going to be to export. That should be an early question you ask during even the RFP process. How do people get out of your system? I realize that sounds absolutely bat-you-know-what to be telling people to be thinking about something like that when you’re just getting rolling–
Christine Cuellar: Appropriate for a cave analogy, right?
Alan Pringle: Yes, true. But you should be, you absolutely should be.

Related links:

* Nightmare on ContentOps Street (podcast)
* Enterprise content operations in action at NetApp (podcast)
* Content creature feature

LinkedIn:

* Alan Pringle
* Christine Cuellar

Transcript:
Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.
Christine Cuellar: Welcome to the content strategy experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. this episode, we’re talking about setting your ContentOps project up for success by starting with the end in mind, or in other words, planning your exit strategy at the beginning of your project. So I’m Christine Cuellar, with me today is Alan Pringle. Hey, Alan. 
Alan Pringle: Hey there.
CC: And I know it can probably sound a bit defeatist to start a project by thinking about the end of the project and getting out of a new process that maybe you’re building from the beginning. So let’s talk a little bit more about that. Why are we talking about exit strategy today?
AP: Because everything comes to an end. Every technology, every tool, and we as human beings, we all come to an end. And at some point, you are going to have tools, you’re gonna have technology and process that no longer supports your needs. So if you think about that ahead of time, and you’re ready for that inevitable thing, which will happen, you’re gonna be much better off.
CC: Yeah. So this conversation started around the news of the DocBook Technical Committee closing, and that’s kind of a big deal for a lot of people, and it kind of sparked this internal conversation about like, you know, what if that happened to you? How can people avoid getting caught by surprise? And of course, as Alan just mentioned, the answer to that is really to begin with the end in mind, to have an exit strategy because everything does end at some point. So this got me thinking about, you know, I don’t know, Alan, you’ve seen the horror movie The Descent,

Are you looking for real-world examples of enterprise content operations in action? Join Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Adam Newton, Senior Director of Globalization, Product Documentation, & Business Process Automation at NetApp for episode 175 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast. Hear insights from NetApp’s journey to enterprise-level publishing, lessons learned from leading-edge GenAI tool development, and more.
We have writers in our authoring environment who are not writers by nature or bias. They’re subject matter experts. And they’re in our system and generating content. That was about joining us in our environment, reap the benefits of multi-language output, reap the benefits of fast updates, reap the benefits of being able to deliver a web-like experience as opposed to a PDF. But what I think we’ve found now is that this is a data project. This generative AI assistant has changed my thinking about what my team does. Yes, on one level, we have a team of writers devoted to producing the docs. But in another way, you can look at it and say, well, we’re a data engine.
— Adam Newton


Related links:

* NetApp Product Documentation featuring Doc, NetApp’s GenAI-powered assistant
* AI in the content lifecycle
* Technical debt in content operations
* The business case for content operations

LinkedIn:

* Adam Newton
* Sarah O’Keefe

Transcript:
Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.
Sarah O’Keefe: Welcome to the content strategy experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about content operations with Adam Newton. Adam is the senior director of global content experience services at NetApp. Hi everyone, I’m Sarah O ‘Keefe. Adam, welcome.
Adam Newton: Hey there, how are you doing, Sarah?
SO: It’s good to see and/or hear you. 
AN: Good to hear your voice.
SO: Yeah, Adam and I go way back, which you may discover as we go through this podcast. And as those of you that listen to the podcast know, we talk a lot about content ops. So what I wanted to do was bring somebody in that is doing content ops in the real world, as opposed to as a consultant.and ask you, Adam, about your perspective as the director of a pretty good-sized group that’s doing content and content operations and content strategy and all the rest of us. So tell us a little bit about NetApp and your role there.
AN: Sure. So NetApp is a Fortune 500 company. We have probably close to 11,000 or more global employees. Our business is primarily data infrastructure, storage management, both on-prem. We sell storage operating system called ONTAP. We sell hardware storage devices, and we are most importantly, think, at this day and age, integrating with Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and AWS on first -party hyperscaler partnerships. My team at DENAP is… I actually have three teams under me. The largest of those three teams is the technical publications team. The other two teams globalization responsible for localization translation of both collateral and product.

In episode 174 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle explore the mindset shifts that are needed to elevate your organization’s content operations to the enterprise level.
If you’re in a desktop tool and everything’s working and you’re happy and you’re delivering what you’re supposed to deliver and basically it ain’t broken, then don’t fix it. You are done. What we’re talking about here is, okay, for those of you that are not in a good place, you need to level up. You need to move into structured content. You need to have a content ops organization that’s going to support that. What’s your next step to deliver at the enterprise level?
— Sarah O’Keefe


Related links:

* The business case for content operations
* Do you have efficient content ops?
* Technical debt in content operations
* Content Ops Forecast: Mostly Sunny With A Chance Of Chaos (webinar)

LinkedIn:

* Sarah O’Keefe
* Alan Pringle

Transcript:
Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.
Alan Pringle: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about setting up your content operations for success. Hey everyone, I am Alan Pringle and I am back here with Sarah O ‘Keefe in yet another podcast episode today. Hello, Sarah.
Sarah O’Keefe: Hey there.
AP: Sarah and I have been chatting about this issue. It’s kind of been this nebulous thing floating around and we’re gonna try to nail it down a little bit more in this conversation today. This idea of setting up your organization for success and their content operations. And to start the conversation, let’s just put it out there. Let’s define content ops. What are content operations, Sarah?
SO: Content strategy is the plan. What are we going to do, how do we want to approach it? Content ops is the system that puts all of that in place. And the reason that content ops these days is a big topic of conversation is because content ops in sort of a desktop world is, well, we’re going to buy this tool, and then we’re going to build some templates, and then we’re going to use them consistently. And the end, right? That’s pretty straightforward. But content operations in a modern content production environment means that we’re talking about lot of different kinds of automation and integration. So the tools are getting bigger, they’re scarier, they’re more enterprise level as opposed to a little desktop thing. And configuring a component content management system, connecting it to your web CMS and feeding the content that you’re generating in your CCMS, your component content management system, into other systems via some sort of an API is a whole different kettle of fish than dealing with, you know, your basic old school unstructured authoring tool. So yeah.
AP: Right. But in their defense, for the people who are using desktop publishing, that is still content operations.
SO: Sure, it is.