soap! 2023 theme
Content Operations
The call for speakers is open until February 14th
DevOps and ContentOps
DevOps practices have become mainstream in the IT industry over the recent years, no doubt about that. This perfect combination of collaboration, automation, continuous integration, and analytics significantly shortens the systems development life cycle and provides continuous delivery with high software quality. Its main benefit? Teams can update software in minutes rather than weeks or months. And once users get used to that, they expect other product deliverables to work the same way, including content.
ContentOps, also known as DocOps, is the content sibling of DevOps. It’s about implementing a highly-collaborative environment and infrastructure that lets you continuously develop and deliver product information, even after its release.
Based on a definition of DevOps, you can define ContentOps as follows:
“ContentOps is a set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that automate and integrate the processes between software development, support, product, and content development teams. It emphasizes team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration, and technology automation.”
But don’t trust the first impression that development, automation, and integration get the most spotlight in this approach. ContentOps is only powerful in its entirety. This includes monitoring, observability, continuous feedback, as well as people, processes, and tools.
ContentOps and Agile
Just like DevOps, ContentOps introduces more streamlined, agile practices.
Following Attlassian’s definition of DevOps and Agile, you can say that ContentOps “is an agile approach to organizational change that seeks to bridge traditional, siloed divides between teams and establish new processes that facilitate greater collaboration.”
So what does that mean for content developers? What benefits does it bring to us and the teams we work with? Is it always all roses? And above all, is ContentOps the ultimate means to a swift and smooth collaboration with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)?
ContentOps and People, Processes, and Tools
Creating, translating, updating, managing, delivering, and auditing content is not a piece of cake. It might seem relatively simple in the beginning, when you have one product, one language, one delivery channel, a simple workflow, and no personalization. The challenge is to keep up as one becomes multiple and the complexity increases exponentially.
How do we build our teams, what processes do we create, and what tools do we choose to keep up with the growing documentation needs? Surely, there is no one answer that satisfies all.
Content Ops and Customer Satisfaction
“A recent survey of 2,000 respondents says that a quarter of Americans would rather shave their heads than contact customer service. (…) Over half of respondents want to be able to solve their issues without talking to someone on the phone”. Source: Forbes.
The demand for content that meets high customer expectations is growing. Perhaps, since the pandemic and as the Fourth Industrial Revolution is happening (not to mention the looming recession), it’s never been higher.
Nowadays, teams that are shopping for a new product go to vendors’ help sites and make it the first qualifier. If product documentation is clumsy, they move on. There’s a demand for content to be delivered to multiple channels. A demand for content to be personalized. Modern. And more. Meeting this demand might be just what will help the organizations that value content survive or even thrive in these uncertain times.
What can we, content professionals, do to help our organizations and customers thrive? One thing to consider is having a strong foundation that we can rely on. That foundation might be ContentOps. After all, as they say, a happy customer is the best business strategy.
Flavors of ContentOps
Just like with DevOps, there is no one correct way of doing ContentOps.
For some organizations, it means setting up an infrastructure of, often, open source tools and having people responsible for the infrastructure and content on the team (docs-as-code). For others, it means working with a vendor whose one-stop-shop tool (CCMS) takes care of the infrastructure so the organization can focus on content. There are also organizations who decide to work with service providers who take care of both content and infrastructure (outsourcing).
All these are different approaches to ContentOps. The trick is to pick one that will serve the organization well today and for the years to come.
Summary
Agile, people, processes, tools, customer satisfaction – ContentOps is a busy topic. And we obviously just touched the tip of the iceberg.
We are excited at the opportunity of discussing it this year with our audience, speakers, partners, and sponsors. Hope you are too!
See you at soap! 2023!
Additional resources:
The call for speakers is open until February 14th