Defining Intelligent Content (J Gollner Mar 2015)

Defining Intelligent Content
“When you are finished changing, you are finished.”
Benjamin Franklin
Joe Gollner, M.Phil.
Managing Director
Gnostyx Research Inc.
21 March 2015
This material is provided under the following Creative Commons license:
Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
Preface
This paper attempts to define intelligent content in a new and hopefully fresh way. While
still compatible with previous efforts to define intelligent content, and to describe its utility,
this attempt consciously adopts new language in the hope that doing so will provide
practitioners with some novel tactics for explaining the nature, purpose, and value of
intelligent content.
This paper emerged in response to, and in conjunction with, discussions that occurred in
early 2015 between Ann Rockley, Scott Abel, Charles Cooper, and Joe Gollner on the topic
of how intelligent content might be repositioned so to resonate with a wider audience. The
imprint of those exchanges can be seen throughout this paper.
For another perspective on the subject, see the whitepaper “The Emergence of Intelligent
Content: The Evolution of Open Content Standards and their Significance” (2009).

Defining Intelligent Content 2
Copyright © 2015 Joe Gollner www.gollner.ca
INTELLIGENT CONTENT DEFINED
Let’s jump right in and see what a new definition of intelligent content might look like:
Intelligent content is digital, data-driven, and dynamic.
 Digital in being designed and built for a connected world.
 Data-driven in being meaningful to both people and machines.
 Dynamic in being responsive to different user needs.
Today, organizations create, share, and publish information in many ways. At any one time, these
organizations will be engaging their audiences with email campaigns, social media interactions, digital
catalogues, online information sessions, advertisements of various forms, educational and promotional
videos, user support information, and yes even good old fashioned printed manuals, collateral, and books.
In order to do all this, these organizations need to prepare their information content differently than they
have in the past. It is no longer practical to work in channel-specific content creation tools and then spend
a lot of time manually reformatting and tailoring that content to fit other channels. Today, they need to
prepare their content in a way that will let them do everything they need to with that content and to do it
as quickly and efficiently as possible. Today, they need intelligent content.
When we use the word intelligent to describe this type of content, we are keying on the definition of
intelligent as “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge” (Oxford English Dictionary). Intelligent
content, then, refers to how organizations articulate, share, and leverage what they know about their
business, products, and customers. It’s how they create, manage, and publish this knowledge when they
don’t know beforehand what format, or sequence, the knowledge will be most usefully communicated in.
So let’s take a closer look at what we mean with each of the terms we are using to define intelligent
content: digital, data-driven, dynamic.
DIGITAL CONTENT
Working with computers, of course, is not particularly new: the desktop publishing revolution took
place way back in the 1980s. Communicators quickly became adept at using various computer programs
to prepare and layout content. Production processes also moved more and more to being digital, and today
non-digital processes are a rarity. But all of this is only the first step into the digital domain.

Ever since the World Wide Web appeared in the early 1990s, there has been a growing awareness that
information content needs to be distributed online as well as in print. And in recent years, the explosion in
social media channels and in mobile devices has flipped the publishing business on its head. Today,
content must first be prepared for a mobile user – and this mobile user must be equipped with the ability
to interact with, and to personalize, the content itself. This leads inevitably to a “digital first” mode of
thinking about content assets.
In being digital, intelligent content is optimized for automation. Automation is used to locate content,
filter it, sequence it, and format it to suit the highly specific needs of a given user, in a given location, at a
given time, and with a specific objective.
Think of a buyer for a typical business who has been given a deadline to find and purchase a specific
type of device. The buyer is away from the office and needs to do this research and make a selection
using a smartphone. The product supplier whose content is easily found and viewed on this smartphone
will be the one that gets a closer look. And the supplier whose product catalogue provides content that is
clear, complete, and useful – and which answers the key questions the buyer might have – will be the one
that wins the business.
As we can see from this brief example, the information that a product supplier provides needs to fit into
an online, mobile, and connected marketplace. It is also important to highlight that there is probably more
to this story: perhaps the buyer needed input from an engineering team in order to finalize the purchase
decision. The buyer locates a technical specification for the device, available online as a carefully laid-out
Portable Document Format (PDF) file, filled with tables and illustrations and supported by a three-
dimensional model. If the buyer can send this PDF and model to the engineering team along with a link to
the user documentation that is available online, then this part of the buying cycle can be kept short and
sweet. If these stakeholders like what they see, then the green light will be given and the first purchase
will be made. We can only hope that the product itself lives up to the expectation of quality that this
supplier’s content has established.
So this is what we mean when we say that intelligent content must be digital. Throughout its life,
intelligent content must be handled in a way that facilitates its publication, maintenance, discovery, and
use by leveraging automated processes. This automation will further make it possible for teams of content
experts to collaborate on the design, creation, and publication of the content – and to ensure that it is
continually synchronized with the products and services of which they are a part. This points us to the
next dimension of intelligent content, to the fact that intelligent content must be data-driven.

DATA-DRIVEN CONTENT
In an earlier time, content was handled as something separate, self-contained, and isolated. All eyes
were on how the content looked when published. Think of a team of technical communicators preparing
user documentation, for example, with proprietary layout tools into which they copy and paste essential
product details. Through this painstaking and time-consuming process, product part numbers become
table entries and feature descriptions become list items. But no matter how good the resulting publication
looks, you can just tell that there is going to be trouble when the time comes to update some of the
product details. The copying, pasting, and formatting will need to be done again – and hopefully done
correctly. For more complex products, ones associated with numerous replacement parts and
troubleshooting steps, this update exercise becomes both expensive and frustrating. And this exercise is
not limited to the technical documentation team. Down the hall in marketing, the very same thing is
happening. Even worse, these two groups share each other’s content, again using the time-honoured
practice of copy and paste. Before long we find ourselves in a situation where the marketing materials no
longer jive with the user documentation, and neither line up with the details provided in the product
catalogue or with the product itself.
Clearly this makes no sense at all. Organizations need their content assets to be data-driven. They need
their content to be intelligent. This means that the content will incorporate the data resources that an
organization maintains about its products or services, and will do so in a way that maintains an active
connection with the master sources of that data. If the content includes part numbers then it needs to
include the actual part numbers in a way that can be automatically kept in sync with the product design. If
certain procedures in the user documentation are helpful as illustrations in a piece of marketing collateral
or in a training module, then it should be reused in a way that can be managed and updated. This is a large
part of what we mean when we say that intelligent content must be data-driven. It is driven by updates
from live data sources.
Of course, there is more to intelligent content being data-driven than this, important as it is. In being
data-driven, intelligent content comes to life as a data source in a way that was never possible with those
large and impenetrable document files that we all remember so fondly. Intelligent content is consciously
designed to showcase its structure and the meaning of its components in such a way that both people and
machines can make sense of and can do something with. So rather than a proprietary file what can only be
read by the desktop publishing software that created it, and then only insofar as is needed to print out
pages, intelligent content can be read by anyone and can be prepared for use by any piece of software. If it

isn’t obvious enough already, we will draw a line under this and stress that this is radically different. It is
also a major advance over what we used to do.
So you will notice that we tend to talk about intelligent content in ways that are very similar to the way
the information technology professionals talk about databases. We define the structure that the content
will exhibit, the relationships that will be observed, and the metadata that will be applied to different
components. To recall an earlier example, it may be important that part numbers are captured as part
numbers, and that features descriptions remain identifiable as such instead of becoming simple list items.
This way specific details from the master product database can be pushed into the documentation at the
right places, and a technical communicator can be prompted to write feature descriptions and
troubleshooting procedures following the applicable style guidelines. Looking downstream, validation
software can check these details against the applicable rules and the formatting software can render them
in the right way for each channel. And the mobile application used by field technicians can leverage the
part numbers to issue an order to the inventory system and the diagnostic wizard can walk the user
through the right troubleshooting steps for a given situation. When both people and machines can
understand your content magic happens – and this is no exaggeration.
If that were not enough, there is even more. In being data-driven, intelligent content becomes a resource
that can be tailored very precisely to fit whatever is known about a given user. When the data showcased
within the content is compared to the data available about a user, such as location, device, and even
activity, we get a result that lines up nicely with what the user will find valuable.
Think back to the beautifully laid out publication or product catalogue that the technical communicators
had produced and we notice just how important the layout became for people trying to find information.
Users with questions needed to find what they were looking for by traversing the way the content had
been laid out. What content was relevant to the question would be found essentially by reading the text.
First, the user would start with the Table of Contents, or perhaps consult the index, and then, based on
that guidance, the user would scan a specific section of the document for the right information. As you
can tell, this is essentially a manual process. And it’s a manual process that is unbearably tedious when
attempted on a smartphone and especially when you are in a hurry.
In the age of big data, when so much is known about people and their activities, one of the better
outcomes is that organizations can provide information that is individually prepared to fit peoples’
situations so they are in and out as quickly as possible. With all this data at our disposal, we will be
increasingly able to answer people’s questions before they ask for them. So, again, it’s time to say

goodbye to imagining that users want to click, scroll, and scan in the vain hope of finding the one detail
that is relevant to them.
With intelligent content, we can do so much better.
DYNAMIC CONTENT
Content that is both digital and data-driven is poised then to be highly dynamic. This means that the
content can be adapted quickly and efficiently to exactly suit the needs of different users. It is
fundamentally responsive, which is much more than simply adapting to different viewing dimensions.
Intelligent content that is genuinely dynamic can be programmatically adapted to reflect specific product
versions, to incorporate customer-specific details, and to take into account a user’s location and even
background. It can be adapted to work optimally in different formats, themselves produced automatically.
For electronic delivery channels, it can parcel out the details in a progressive disclosure experience –
where information details are provided as they are requested or as they demanded by a situation, instead
of simply being dumped on the user at the outset.
A high quality print product can, with intelligent content, continue to be offered. And these print
publications can be much better than their predecessors. For one, they can made very specific to what
applies to an individual prospect or customer. No longer do readers need to guess what product version
number applies to them, as most of us need to do when we open our car driver’s manual. This is a good
thing but we all know that our primary interest has moved well beyond print. Electronic documentation
that knows what version and configuration of the product you have is going to be infinitely more useful
than printed manuals. Today, car manufacturers provide technicians, and even users, with augmented
reality enabled tablets that literally show them what to do when there is a problem. Powered by intelligent
content that is digital, data-driven, and dynamic, these tablets will tap into the experiences of thousands, if
not millions, of other users in order to recommend the action that is statistically most likely to solve the
problem. And as technician work through the problems, the tablet based application dynamically interacts
with the online catalogue of spare parts to order replacements and automatically updates the vehicle
maintenance records as well as the auto-shop’s work management system.
Now we can see how intelligent content brings together these three key attributes of digital, data-driven,
and dynamic in order to provide users with a fundamentally superior experience. This improved
experience stretches across the complete customer experience lifecycle from pre-sales encounters through
to customer retention efforts. Taken to its fullest realization, intelligent content comes to play a critical
role in a complex, dynamic system that is the integrated product lifecycle. Intelligent content captures and

incorporates the feedback of customers distilled from their experiences as users of the product. It thereby
engenders a learning process that supplies the grist to the mill of product innovation. So it is that
intelligent content not only improves with time (as opposed to degrading, which is a distinct feature of
past approaches), but it leads directly to better products and therefore better organizational performance.
It is in this way that it becomes possible to talk about content, when it is intelligent, as a strategic asset.
We can also see that organizations benefit in other ways as well. The discipline and automation that
comes with intelligent content delivers efficiencies and improvements across the board. These
organizations see their update cycle times reduced to an absolute minimum, the consistency of their
branding messages maximized, and their content positioned to rapidly reach new audiences in new ways.
There are savings to be sure, for example by containing localization costs, but the bigger story focuses on
what now becomes possible. In the battle to find, convert, and satisfy customers, intelligent content is one
weapon organizations can no longer do without.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joe Gollner is the Managing Director of Gnostyx Research Inc. (www.gnostyx.com), a company
focused on advancing open content standards and on helping organizations leverage applied content
technologies to realize concrete business benefits. Previously he was the Vice President and Chief
Solution Architect at Stilo International where he led a world-class team of specialists in the design,
development and delivery of state-of-the-art content processing solutions that leveraged the proven
OmniMark platform. Prior to that, Joe had been the founder and president of XIA Systems Corporations,
a firm that he had built up into a leading XML solution integrator and that he sold, in 2004, to Stilo. He
has worked in the content management market, with an emphasis on open standards and large-scale
systems, for 25 years and he has implemented dozens of systems across a variety of industry sectors.
He was educated in a wide range of subjects at Queens University (Bachelors of Arts, Mathematics and
Literature) and the University of Oxford (Masters of Philosophy) and has completed graduate programs in
project management, business analysis and knowledge management. His blog, together with a selection of
his whitepapers, can be found at www.gollner.ca.

Defining Intelligent Content (J Gollner Mar 2015)

Recommandé

Recommandé

Contenu connexe

Tendances

Tendances (20)

Similaire à Defining Intelligent Content (J Gollner Mar 2015)

Similaire à Defining Intelligent Content (J Gollner Mar 2015) (20)

Plus de Joe Gollner

Plus de Joe Gollner (14)

Dernier

Dernier (20)

Defining Intelligent Content (J Gollner Mar 2015)