Insights and Inspirations
Enjoy extended talks by industry leaders on critical issues facing technical communicators today. Each Insights and Inspirations session includes their presentation followed by a “Dialog with Dawn,” to delve further into their topic and pose questions from the audience.
| 11:00 – 12:30 EDT | 17:00 – 18:30 CEST | 16:30 – 18:00 EDT | 22:30 – 23:30 CEST |
How to Lead with Content Strategy |
The Secret Life of Content |
 Kristina HalvorsonCEO and founder of Brain Traffic |
 Joe GollnerManaging Director of Gnostyx Research |
| 05:30 – 07:00 EDT | 11:30 – 13:00 CEST | 11:00 – 12:30 EDT | 17:00 – 18:30 CEST | 16:30 – 18:00 EDT | 22:30 – 00:00 CEST |
Changing Your Management Style to Lead Effective Teams |
Building Information-Enabled Organizations |
What We Don’t Talk About: Unspoken Obstacles to Cross-Functional Content Efforts, and How to Overcome Them |
 Emily LuijbregtsProject Manager at Siemens PLM Software |
 Scott AbelThe Content Wrangler |
 Toni MantychSenior Director of Product Content at ServiceNow |
| 05:30 – 07:00 EDT | 11:30 – 13:00 CEST | 11:00 – 12:30 EDT | 17:00 – 18:30 CEST | 16:30 – 18:00 EDT | 22:30 – 00:00 CEST |
COVID Collaboration: The unforeseen effect |
Introducing the Content Services Organization |
It Takes a Village |
 Abi Bettle-ShafferProject Manager at IBM |
 Cruce SaundersFounder and Principal at [A] |
 Angela BrowneUser Assistance Manager and Design Thinking Coach at SAP SuccessFactors |
How to Lead with Content Strategy
Managing content is complicated, pricey, and often stirs up internal politics. Learn how to demonstrate leadership in this evolving field by applying the fundamental principles of content strategy to your day-to-day work.
Meet the presenter
Kristina Halvorson is the CEO and founder of Brain Traffic, the coauthor of Content Strategy for the Web, the founder of Confab Events, and the host of The Content Strategy Podcast. Her consultancy Brain Traffic is recognized as a global leader in content strategy and serves enterprise clients around the world.
Kristina is the founder of Confab, the first U.S. conference dedicated to the topic of content strategy. And as host of The Content Strategy Podcast, Kristina speaks with content experts from all over the world in lively conversations that explore how content strategy can help businesses in every industry.
Kristina’s passion for content strategy shines through in her writing and onstage, helping to educate and inspire audiences across every industry. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her two children, whom she often quotes on Twitter (@halvorson).
Introducing the Content Services Organization
Content is everywhere in an organization. It is the foundational raw material out of which any department builds customer experiences. But too often today, the way content gets done is messy, manual, and accidental. Therefore, attempting to introduce strategy, structure, or component-based reuse into such a mess sometimes ends up creating…more mess.
[A] research shows that certain organizational dynamics need to be in place before modular content can take root across teams. Enter the Content Service Organization. Orchestrating across the practices of strategy, engineering and operations, the CSO organizes content and processes in order to support teams and facilitate the creation of intelligent customer experiences across platforms. The CSO streamlines authoring and improves content management. It gives content strategy an operational reality, and improves velocity, quality, and policy adherence of content. It’s already in practice in multiple enterprises, and the results of CSO efforts have won over skeptics and earned increased investments.Let’s get intentional about content. Join Cruce Saunders, Principal at [A] (see simplea.com), and learn how the Content Service Organization works, and how it drives publishing performance and boosts team satisfaction.
Key Takeaways Include:
- Understanding key terms and definitions behind a Content Services Organization
- The shape of the CSO, where it fits, and the benefits of implementing the CSO
- Strategies for transforming teams and advocating for CSO practices in an organization
Meet the presenter
Cruce Saunders is the founder and principal at [A], the content intelligence service (simplea.com), and author of Content Engineering for a Multi-Channel World. Cruce and the [A] team work with content leaders driving change at the leading enterprise content publishers on Earth. Together with clients, they craft the next generation of the content supply chains and publishing architecture that powers intelligent customer experiences.
He regularly speaks on omnichannel customer experience, content intelligence, content models, AI, chatbots, personalization, content structure and semantic standards, and intelligence transformation.
Cruce also hosts a podcast, Towards a Smarter World, where he connects with leaders impacting global intelligence. Follow him on Twitter at @mrcruce.
COVID Collaboration: The unforeseen effect
The majority of people in our industry are working remotely because of the COVID-19 pandemic. If someone asked you “What is the most important thing you’ve learned from being forced to work at home?” – what would you answer?
- “I spend way too much money on coffee in the office!”
- “My dogs are really distracting when I’m trying to get something done.”
- “My internet connection isn’t as good as I thought it was.”
- “It’s really hard to keep in touch with everything my team is doing.”
These are general comments I hear from my colleagues on a regular basis. But from one small set of colleagues, there have been vastly different comments:
- “I can finally hear everyone on a video call!”
- “I feel so much more included.”
- “I know my team much better now than I did before the pandemic.”
Who are these people who are benefiting so much from lockdown?
We are the disabled community.
Join me for this session looking at the imbalance between people who work at home full- or part-time, and those who regularly work in an office. I’ll be looking at case studies, sharing my own lessons learned, and what we, as an industry, can do as we move forward.
Meet the presenter
Abi Bettle-Shaffer started working for IBM in 2013, and became a content developer in 2014. She has since worked on CICS and Bluemix, and is now working for CICS again as the team and delivery lead for content. She has cross-industry experience, and has previously run her own business. In her spare time, she runs marathons, makes clothes, rides horses, and writes fiction.
Changing Your Management Style to Lead Effective Teams
The world is becoming a difficult place to work as a Project Manager and leader. We’re working globally, across time zones and cultures, with new technology, and industries and projects are losing money at a staggering rate (Every 20 seconds, nearly $1 million is wasted globally due to poor implementation of strategy – PMI Pulse of the profession 2018). We need to adapt. As leaders, we are driving our initiatives forward to success or failure. What can we do to change the statistics? How can we buck the trend of poor performance and reoccuring issues?
We need to learn how to work in this environment and adapt our management style accordingly. It doesn’t matter whether you’re working virtually, on location, with one team or a dozen. The same rules still apply.
This session will provide practical examples for how you can become a chameleon and succeed with complex projects and teams. Gain an understanding of why it is important to have an adaptive management style; obtain some ideas for how you can change your management style towards your team; and define personal changes that you need to be a success.
Meet the presenter
Emily Luijbregts is a Project Manager at Siemens PLM Software who loves sharing knowledge with the community! As a blogger, presenter and mentor, I love connecting with the community and constantly learning how to be the best leader that I can be. I have been actively presenting for nearly 4 years and during that time have helped thousands of Project Managers, Scrum Masters and Leaders progress towards their goals.
I live in the Netherlands with my husband, two dogs and children. When I’m not managing Projects, I’m found out on the trails running with my dogs.
What We Don’t Talk About: Unspoken Obstacles to Cross-Functional Content Efforts, and How to Overcome Them
It’s now accepted wisdom that companies benefit from providing “unified content experiences” that allow users to easily access and navigate between different types of content. Creating such unified experiences requires us to work effectively across traditional functional boundaries. Understanding the roots of why cross-functional collaboration is difficult can empower us to be more successful at crossing the chasm between silos. Drawing on recent research about diversity, inclusion, and unconscious bias, as well as the presenter’s experience advocating for and leading cross-functional and enterprise content initiatives, this session will examine–and provide strategies for countering–some of the ways in which our behavior and even our language can unintentionally handicap our efforts to partner effectively.
This session aims to:
1. Help participants understand the roots of why cross-functional collaboration is hard
2. Raise participants’ self-awareness of their own behaviors, language, and mindsets that might be helping or hindering such collaboration
3. Provide some antidotes to some common root challenges
Meet the presenter
Toni Mantych is Senior Director of Product Content at ServiceNow, where she leads a large, globally distributed technical content group and drives product and cross-functional content experience initiatives. Before joining ServiceNow, she was Director of Content Strategy and Architecture at ADP and taught numerous graduate courses in the Technical and Professional Writing program at Portland State University. She frequently speaks and leads workshops on content strategy and content experience topics. In September 2017, she was recognized as a Top 200 Content Experience Strategist.
It Takes a Village
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you knew there was a problem but weren’t sure what to do about it? That was us. We knew the experience around our releases wasn’t as good as it could be, but we weren’t sure how to tackle it. As a content team, we had tried over the years to tweak the release notes here and there in reaction to specific feedback from customers. But it wasn’t really solving the bigger problem. Learn how we used Design Thinking to go from a general problem to a specific one and then to design an information experience that addressed that problem and improved customer satisfaction.
Attendees will get an overview of the Design Thinking process including empathy maps and current-future-barriers. You’ll also learn how we partnered with other teams throughout the process and how we sold the proposed changes not only to our customers but also to the rest of the business.
Meet the presenter
Angela Browne has been a technical communicator for 20 years and currently leads a team of writers at SAP SuccessFactors. As a design thinking coach, she works with teams across the organization to better understand their users and design solutions that meet their needs. On her own team, she’s spent the last few years driving strategic initiatives around content transformation, taxonomy, and conversational interfaces.
The Secret Life of Content
What is the journey that content follows in your organization? It sounds like a simple enough question. Even harmless. It turns out, though, it is a difficult question. It is a question that can lead us to open doors that may not have been opened in a long time and others that some might prefer not to see opened at all. But it is a question we must ask if we really want to improve how our organizations work and how we ultimately support customers on their journeys. This talk is about the opportunity that stands before us, as professional communicators, to start making a serious impact on how our organizations function. And amid the digital revolution that is heralding the fourth industrial age (and these forces are very real), we can see how fundamentally important it is to improve the flow of information content within organizations and between organizations and their suppliers, partners, regulators and customers. While this may all sound very futuristic and visionary, this topic could not be more practical or pressing. It is an opportunity that we cannot miss.
This talk will likely introduce a variation on the “journeys” concept – introducing the idea of “content journeys” as a way to think about the work of information development differently. It is a broadening of the landscape where the work of communicators should find application everywhere.
Meet the presenter
Joe Gollner is the Managing Director of Gnostyx Research Inc. (http://www.gnostyx.com), where he provides objective and research-based guidance on the strategic use of content technologies. A veteran implementer, he has overseen dozens of content management projects in a variety of industries and in organizations ranging in size from start-up ventures to global enterprises. He has been known to say that he is really a management consultant who happens to be having an illicit affair with DITA. He is a member of the CIDM Advisory Council, blogs as the Content Philosopher (http://www.gollner.ca), and is still working on a book about the effective and sustainable management of content and content technologies.
Building Information-Enabled Organizations
What do Airbnb, Amazon, Uber, Facebook, Netflix, and Spotify have in common? They are all information-enabled companies that grow at an exponential rate (up to ten times faster than the competition) and do so with appreciably fewer resources than their competitors. To protect their turf from a capable, innovation-powered adversary, forward-thinking leaders are looking to protect the organizations they serve from disruption. Attend this session led by content strategy guru, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, to discover the common characteristics and capabilities that allow exponential growth organizations to outperform and outmaneuver the competition. Find out how your information development management know-how can make you a superstar in the eyes of management.
Meet the presenter
Dubbed “The Content Wrangler,” Scott Abel is the Founder and President of The Content Wrangler Inc, a global content strategy consultancy. Scott Abel is a content management strategist and exponential growth evangelist. He specializes in helping content-heavy organizations improve the way they author, maintain, publish and archive their information assets.
Scott publishes a series of content strategy books for XML Press and is the producer of several content industry events including Technical Documentation Roundup and Information Development World.