Consistency of Message

The main aims are to provide a consistent set of information to our customers, throughout their relationship with us. So from initial contact right the way through to rollout and future upgrades, we will have a coherent set of information that is updated accordingly and a clear idea of how it will all be communicated to the customer.

One Man Writes (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Usability

Toward a Post-Technê: Or, Inventing Pedagogies for Professional Writing    

This article examines the concept of technê in relation to situatedness. Technê is conceived as techniques for situating bodies in contexts. Although many theorists and practitioners in technical communication are working from ecological and posthuman perspectives with regard to interface designs, this article argues for extending those perspectives to workplace and classroom situations. Starting from a Heideggerian reading of technê, the article moves toward the concept of post-technê, which remakes pedagogical techniques for writing and inventing in institutional contexts.

Hawk, Byron. TCQ (2004). Articles>Education>Business Communication>Technical Writing

Communicating Customer and Business Value with a Value Matrix

If you’re like me, you’ve always felt something was missing once you finished creating your personas and scenarios. They communicate the heart and goals of the user, but miss out on a lot of details. And while it’s the intent of both documents to do just that, neither personas nor scenarios succinctly communicates to your business what features a product or service should have and why it should have them.

Cecil, Richard F. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Assessment>Personas

Mind the Gap

Twitter and other social media give customers the potential to create their own models of customer service, their own expectations of how help and support might be provided. They will find gaps through which to force departments to talk to each other, erode lines between companies, and perhaps ultimately for companies unwilling to change they may bypass them altogether and look to each other for help through applications such as Twitter.

Online Help Two.Zero (2009). Articles>Business Communication>Documentation>Social Networking

Warning: Dependence on Facebook, Twitter Could Be Hazardous to Your Business

You've probably heard how much the micro-blogging service Twitter can help your business, or that being on social networking site Facebook can boost your company's profile. But what you might not have considered is the potential danger in over-relying on these startups that could go out of business, get bought out, or close your account if you aren't familiar with their Terms of Service.

Glaser, Mark. PBS (2009). Articles>Business Communication>Online>Social Networking

Save the Touchy-Feely for the Redwoods

When you lay your feelings out to people, it can be cathartic for you, but it also places a weight on those around you. Learning when, where, and how, to talk to someone about your feelings is tricky. Sometimes it’s okay, and sometimes it’s not.

Powazek, Derek. Powazek.com (2009). Articles>Business Communication>Collaboration>Emotions

UBL and the Colombian Connection

This session provides a realistic tour of the process of implementing and customizing UBL, through the study of our implementation of UBL for the ministries of agriculture and commerce of the Republic of Colombia. Both through general tools (xmlroff as modified by Fabio to support UBL pdf output) and through custom made, open source software, XML-based technologies are effectively bridging the gap of B2B commerce between the United States and the rest of the world. UBL Capture, Presentation, Storage, Transfer software custom made by UBL voting member Fabio Arciniegas is demonstrated and dissected within the context of a real life example of implementation for the colombian government.

Arciniegas, Fabio. IDEAlliance (2004). (Spanish) Articles>Business Communication>XML>Case Studies

Using XSL-FO 1.1 for Business-Type Documents

In addition to the powerful features available now, the upcoming XSL-FO 1.1 will bring several new features. In the world of business-type documents, marketing material and forms, there is currently a need for end-of-page subtotals, multiple flows, easier page number citation, things that will be possible with XSL-FO 1.1. This presentation will cover the features of XSL-FO that are needed for this type of documents. Formatting objects and properties of both XSL-FO 1.0 as 1.1 will be covered, as well as how to combine these things to create a good-looking business-type document, because these types of documents need have the perfect layout.

Bals, Klaas. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Business Communication>XML>XSL

Visually Modelling Business Processes

Learn how to visually design and implement process definitions using BPSS V2 including the use of context mechanisms and workflows, signals and joins. A selection of sample industry and government applications will be provided from automotive, financial, homeland security and healthcare applications.

Webber, David. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Business Communication>Technical Illustration>Workflow

The Benefits of ebXML for e-Business

The ebXML specifications have matured rapidly over the past year. New components and capabilities have extended the architecture for service oriented architectures (SOA). Learn about this new comprehensive release of ebXML that is available from OASIS.

Webber, David. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Business Communication>XML

Large Scale Validation of Millions of UBL Invoices with XML Schema and Schematron

Since February 1st 2005, millions of invoices have been exchanged between the private sector and the public sector in Denmark. This paper focuses on real life problems, experiences and solutions with syntactical and semantical validation of millions of electronic invoices. Localization and documentation for regional and national use is a massive and important assignment. I.e. decisions on the use of identifiers have to be specified and local payment methods must be mapped to the international standard. The result is a message with many internal integrity constraints that cannot be validated with the UBL schemas alone. In order to provide even stronger validation, non-normative supplementary schemas have been developed. These schemas perform stronger validation based on decisions about the use of national identifiers for companies and persons. In addition to the use of XML schema – Schematron is used for the validation of internal referential integrity constraints. Experiences and theoretical considerations on the localization of international vocabularies are discussed.

Brun, Mikkel Hippe, Brian Nielsen, Christian Lanng and Bryan Rasmussen. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>Business Communication>XML

Policies and Procedures Communication Becoming More Suitable for Learning

Three workplace trends are driving policies and procedures (P&P) communication to be more suitable for learning than classroom training: changing workforce needs; e-content availability; and changing organizational needs.

Urgo, Raymond E. Policies and Procedures Authority, The (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Policies and Procedures>Education

Policies and Procedures for Training and Reference: One Source?

Should an organization maintain two sets of policies and procedure (P&P) information—one that is developed for training and another that is developed for on-going reference?

Urgo, Raymond E. Policies and Procedures Authority, The (2008). Articles>Documentation>Business Communication>Policies and Procedures

Ten Ways to Make Social Media Matter to Skeptical CEOs  

Not embracing conversational marketing and letting go of some control is reckless because it puts a barrier up between you and your customers, I reminded some executive clients. Change that makes a big difference, however, requires just a small bit of courage.

Kelly, Lois. Beeline Labs (2009). Articles>Management>Business Communication>Social Networking

Return on Investment (ROI) on XBRL

Our initial effort at tagging and furnishing an XBRL document to the SEC consumed approximately 80 hours of an employee’s time. But to adequately evaluate this commitment, it is necessary to understand the scope and context of the effort. The hours included not only the time to tag the underlying document, but also the time to learn how to use the tagging tool, understand the requirements for filing under the SEC’s VFP, create tags that did not exist in the standard taxonomy, and to build a process that would allow the ongoing tagging and filing of documents. Our current effort to tag and file an 8-K earnings release is down to approximately four hours now that the learning curve has been eliminated.

Stantial, John. XBRL.us (2007). Articles>Business Communication>Case Studies>XBRL

Don't Waste Money On A Business Blog

Don't waste your money on a business blog (unless search engine marketing is an important piece of your overall marketing efforts and you're going to invest the time and effort into making it work).

Jehring, Ben. SmallBox (2009). Articles>Web Design>Business Communication>Blogging

Your Agency's Clients Deserve the Truth -- Can You Handle It? The Digital Age Will Force You to Give Up Pseudo-Science and Rules of Thumb

If you aren't yet, get really digital, really fast. Don't just hire some kid out of college that knows .NET or PHP and talks of something called Cold Fusion. No, go find one of those really expensive geeks that has been in the biz for a while. Then get out of their way.

Martin, Tom. Advertising Age (2009). Articles>Business Communication>Management>Marketing

The Perils of Our Digital Communications

When 90% of what you do for work is based online, there are bound to be some glitches, and not just the technical ones. How do you handle the inevitable misunderstandings that come with today’s rapid-fire digital conversations and communications in the workplace? I’ve put together a few ideas for how we can all minimize misunderstandings or at least diffuse the fallout.

Sherman, Aliza. Web Worker Daily (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Collaboration>Online

Talking 'Bout My Generation: The Evolution of Online Marketing Research

Utilizing reliable market research on an ongoing basis is the most effective way to ensure a successful marketing campaign. Nevertheless, for many companies, the benefits of conducting marketing research and the costs of conducting marketing research always seem to be at odds. Marketing research can be expensive. Not knowing your customer's needs can be costly.

Janisch, Troy. Icon Interactive (2007). Articles>Business Communication>Marketing>Research

Collaborative ICT for Indian Business Clusters  

Indian business clusters have contributed immensely to the country’s industrial output, poverty alleviation and employment generation. However, with recent globalization these clusters can lose out to international competitors if they do not continuously innovate and take advantage of the new opportunities that are available through economic liberalization. In this paper, we discuss how information and communication technologies (ICT) can help in improving the productivity and growth of these clusters.

Roy, Soumya and Shantanu Biswas. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Business Communication>Regional>India

Summarizing Email Conversations with Clue Words  

Accessing an ever increasing number of emails, possibly on small mobile devices, has become a ma jor problem for many users. Email summarization is a promising way to solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a new framework for email summarization. One novelty is to use a fragment quotation graph to try to capture an email conversation. The second novelty is to use clue words to measure the importance of sentences in conversation summarization. Based on clue words and their scores, we propose a method called CWS, which is capable of producing a summary of any length as requested by the user. We provide a comprehensive comparison of CWS with various existing methods on the Enron data set. Preliminary results suggest that CWS provides better summaries than existing methods.

Carenini, Giuseppe, Raymond T. Ng and Xiaodong Zhou. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Business Communication>Email

Strictly Business: Marketing With Social Networking Sites

For writer, photographer, and video producer David Chandler-Gick, Facebook is a practical tool. "On a recent cross-country excursion to work with Cathy Steffan of Parallel Media Productions, Facebook served as a central hub to keep me in contact with friends and colleagues," he writes. "Accessing Facebook kept me in touch with what was going on, last-minute changes, and more."

Yankee, Steve. Event DV (2009). Articles>Business Communication>Marketing>Social Networking

XML-Based Multimodal Interaction Framework for Contact Center Applications  

In this paper, we consider a way to represent contact center applications as a set of multiple XML documents written in different markups including VoiceXML and CCXML. Applications can comprise a dialog with IVR, call routing and agent scripting functionalities. We also consider ways how such applications can be executed in run-time contact center environment.

Anisimov, Nikolay, Brian Galvin and Herbert Ristock. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Business Communication>Information Design>XML

Three Reasons to Love the Twitter Hate

Twitteurs are in a hyperventilating snit over the ridicule being heaped on their plaything by, among others, the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau. I’m a longtime Twitteur, semi-evangelical and pretty well engaged with it on a daily basis. By this point it is as integrated in my being as lymph. But I think the ridicule is a delightful, even important development.

Stoltz, Craig. 20hReally (2009). Articles>Business Communication>Software>Social Networking