Conference Program Abstracts
Welcome Address, Critical Conversations
JoAnn Hackos – Center for Information Management-Development
At the 2008 Best Practices Conference, hear CIDM presenters talk about the Critical Conversations they have to spur innovation and advocate for changes that benefit their content consumers. Learn what managers mean when they discuss “changing the language of engagement.” Hear the stories our members tell about the critical conversations they hold with
- team members who must embrace new ways of engaging with content customers
- customers who must tell us about the content they most value
- colleagues through the global enterprise who are responsible for creating content
- senior management who must recognize that content is a marketable asset
- information technologists who understand that content is more than data
At the center of our Critical Conversations is the value proposition for content development. In September, you learn how to
- create and communicate a comprehensive value model for content
- measure productivity and effectiveness
- establish a service model for content development
- develop the right skills to move our organizations forward
As we are challenged with global change—recognizing the impact of reorganizations, offshore development, mergers and acquisitions, new delivery methods, and more—we come together to offer support, knowledge, and experience to our management community.
Beyond Succession Planning
Janna Patee – Sybase Inc.
How do you measure the business value of your content? Is it a challenge to convince your company’s executives that your publications contribute to return on investment (ROI)? Content is often considered an intangible asset that cannot be measured in monetary terms. Learn how a team of content publishers at Microsoft developed a business value “kit” that provides multiple options for determining, in measurable ways, the value proposition for content publishing.
Content and the Bottom Line: Defining the business value of your publications
Suzanne Sowinska, Barbara McGuire, & Alan Theurer – Microsoft Corporation
How do you measure the business value of your content? Is it a challenge to convince your company’s executives that your publications contribute to return on investment (ROI)? Content is often considered an intangible asset that cannot be measured in monetary terms. Learn how a team of content publishers at Microsoft developed a business value “kit” that provides multiple options for determining, in measurable ways, the value proposition for content publishing.
Critical Conversations with Colleagues
Eileen Jones & Jamie Roberts – IBM Corporation
Dean Easterlund – John Deere
IBM's information strategy is focused on excellence in the Total Information Experience (TIE), by "delivering the right content to the right person at the right time." Information excellence is the shared responsibility of an IBM-wide community of content producers. To deliver their TIE strategy, they created an IBM Content Board. This presentation will discuss how they created the Content Board, its key responsibilities, and how the Board operates across content domains, from pre-sales to Support.
Critical Conversations with Customers ... Are We Asking Questions That Lead to Answers We Need?
Bob Beims – Freescale Semiconductors Inc.
Daphne Walmer – Medtronic CRM
blogs ... wiki’s ... RSS ... social networking ... online collaboration ... tagging ... social bookmarking ... what do any of these exciting Web 2.0 technologies have to do with the way your customers tackle their enormously complex jobs? And how will they change life for the Information Development community? In this lively panel discussion we'll dive into ideas about how we can all create more "user friendly" technical information, delivered the way the Digital Native wants it ... the right information at the right time via the right delivery channel.
Critical Conversations with IT
Ron Watson – ITT Fluid Technologies
Description coming soon.
Critical Conversations with Management—Negotiating vs. Building a Vision
Chona E. Shumate – Cymer, Inc.
How do Tech Com managers “negotiate” for what the resources they need? The issue is that we should not be negotiating, but rather, building a compelling argument that becomes part of a proposal for your “vision.” Key to this strategy is thinking ahead, being persuasive in your communications, and presenting effective data. Your team plays an important role in your vision-building. This presentation describes how and what to communicate, provides five examples of data collection, and shows you how to demonstrate the leadership your manager wants to see so that you get what you need.
Critical Conversations with Staff—Choosing Your Words Carefully…
Catherine Lyman – Network Appliance, Inc.
Colleen Smith – Teradata Corporation
You have the perfect plan, the funding, and a great team, but your project isn’t progressing the way you expected. What’s missing? Maybe you and your team can benefit from changing the language you use to interact, set goals, and work through daily challenges. Join Colleen and Catherine as they illustrate some common team challenges and how language can help you work with individual contributors to reach your goals. They may make you laugh a bit at the same time!
Lessons Learned: Documentation and courseware working together
Wanda Applegate – Siemens PLM
Traditionally, documentation and courseware have been authored separately with little shared planning or content development. However, the overlap of both customer needs and topics is often significant. This presentation provides lessons learned from a team in the process of bringing together the planning and content development for documentation and courseware.
New Delivery Methods
tbd – Symantec Corporation
Description coming soon.
Promoting the Value of Technical Publications by Focusing on Solutions Documentation
June Loy & Helen Shaw – Juniper Networks
In 2005, the Infrastructure Products Technical Publications group at Juniper Networks proposed a strategy for creating solutions documentation for specific applications of their networking products. They verified their strategy with customers through their usability program and released their first solutions documentation in 2007. In addition to providing documentation that focuses on how customers use our products, the strategy has resulted in benefits such as the reuse of information for sales and training and career development for employees. The strategy has also been a consideration in the creation of a portfolio of Technical Publications services that Juniper can offer to product teams. June and Helen will share their experiences and the challenges they encountered in developing and implementing their strategy.
Strategies for Applying a Global Service Model to Content Development
Denise Kiser –VMware, Inc.
JoCarol Gau – BMC Software, Inc.
Renu Bhargava – Juniper Networks
The panel discusses innovative best practices in creating and managing dispersed teams that are collaborative, productive, supportive, and motivated. Join this diverse group as they talk about how they measure productivity and effectiveness, and the special skills and processes required to make dispersed teams more effective.
Useful Metrics for Measuring the Success (or Failure) of Reuse
JoAnn Hackos & Bill Hackos – Comtech Services, Inc.
As we plunge into the realm of content reuse, we must find ways to give management accurate estimates about our costs to implement, our expected savings, and what the time table will be. We must also determine if we are on track during the implementation project. In this session, we discuss meaningful metrics to measure quantitatively the reuse of XML modular content, the cost structure of an XML reuse project, the value of documentation produced by your group using modular XML, and the increased company profitability created by group using modular XML.
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