Enterprise Portals: Tip of Which Iceberg?

Summarizing recent CMS Watch research on portal software, Janus Boye finds that portal technology represents just the tip of the enterprise information iceberg. But given the diversity of portal scenarios, you should ask yourself which iceberg you're on.

Boye, Janus. CMSwatch (2006). Articles>Web Design>Content Management

Enterprise Profiling  

Documents play a vital role in Enterprise Content Management. Unlike other content sources, 'document' creation and capture can occur at every desktop, in every process, and by every on-line application.

Strong, Karen V. KMworld (2001). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Essential Ingredients for Success in a Quality Improvement Program  

This paper describes what we learned during the development and implementation of a quality improvement program in the Documentation Development Division at SAS Institute Inc. Our division includes 48 writers and 12 editors. What we learned is that a quality improvement program needs to preserve collegiality, be repeatable and improvable over time, and be part of an integrated effort to create and maintain documentation standards and guidelines.

House, Ken and Dan Harrell. STC Proceedings (2005). Articles>Management>Quality

Estimating Scope and Schedule for a Help Project  

During this session, we will learn how to create a topic list to determine project scope, and then we will begin to calculate how long it will take produce all of these topics. When we’re done, you will have a methodology for doing this for your own project.

Deaton, Mary M. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>Project Management>Documentation>Help

Estimating Scope and Schedule for Help Projects  

Three steps to a more accurate Help schedule.

Deaton, Mary M. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Project Management>Documentation

Estimating Time and Cost for Policies and Procedures Projects  

Estimating time and cost for a policies and procedures project can be an adventure in guessing and a ticket to grief. However, planning with a detailed checklist and list of assumptions can you help create a more realistic estimate, please your client, and protect your sanity and pocketbook.

Escoe, Adrienne. STC Proceedings (2003). Articles>Documentation>Project Management

Ethics and Rationality in Information-Enriched Decisions: A Model for Technical Communication  

Although experienced decision makers depend on valid and reliable information, exactly how information plays into decisions is not always clear. Because decision making is an information function, technical communicators can make important contributions in decision-support roles. Decisions that are effective, efficient, and ethical must be rational. That is, we must be able to determine and present good reasons for our actions. Information relates to good reasoning and thereby affects the best decisions.

Carlson, Patricia A., Susan B. Dressel and M. Jimmie Killingsworth. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Management>Ethics

An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Automated Templates  

Automated templates are an alternative to traditional supporting information for helping users perform complex tasks. In this study users performed tasks with and without wizard to trial and error, printed manuals, and online the use of automated templates. Results suggest that if fakes help, and examined the use of supporting information some time for users to learn to use automated templates, but in performing complex tasks. We also considered once they do, the templates help users perform tasks more whether automated templates serve an educational successfully and more quickly.

Bayer, Nancy L., R. Darren Carleton, Susan Goetchus, Robert Krull and Rick S. Sapir. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Document Design>Content Management

Everything in Moderation: Using Content Units to Manage UX

I’ve found that separating client requests into content units removes uncertainty and offers clearer direction, while helping your client recognize each individual request as a deliverable, requiring assignments and responsibilities. To do this, I follow a four-step process that helps delineate what content units each section of a Web site must cover—as opposed to content that acts as filler, or filler units.

LaFerriere, Keith. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Project Management>Planning>User Experience

Everything is Connected

These are exciting times and we have a great opportunity to finally leverage technical communications into the spotlight. The value of information is finally being properly realised, and we are ideally placed to help any organisation make the most of what information they have and help them understand and create the information they really need.

McLean, Gordon. One Man Writes (2008). Articles>Content Management>Content Strategy

The Evolution of Knowledge Management within NCR Corporation  

As information is requested and accessed more and more frequently, we search for better/quicker ways to share knowledge; particularly within the corporate Information Technology environment. One new initiative which is beginning to receive a lot of attention at NCR Corporation is Knowledge Management. This paper will examine Knowledge Management as an internal business process for information management, specifically for capturing best practices within the Information Technology division, from a process improvement approach. This paper is geared toward technical communicators with little or no experience in Knowledge Management as a business process.

Babilon, Maria Guiao and Mary Ann Kabel. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Knowledge Management

Exactly What Is Content, Anyway?

Not too long ago, one of the key people behind a substantial e-commerce operation confidently assured me, 'Content is not a consideration for our site. We just sell stuff – we don't publish content.' CRINGE!!! This statement reflects a sadly limited understanding (a profound misunderstanding, actually) of the nature and role of content in online media. Content is a broad term, with broad implications. It includes far more than article-style material.

Gahran, Amy. Contentious (2001). Articles>Content Management>Theory

Executive Dashboards

Contrary to first impression, an 'executive dashboard' is not found in a CIO’s car. Rather, an executive dashboard, also known as a manager dashboard, executive cockpit, or digital cockpit, is a child of what in the 1980s was referred to as the Executive Information System (EIS).

Kirtland, Alex. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Articles>Management>User Interface>EPSS

Review: Exploring Leadership Conversations  

Gail Fairhurst's book (2007) on discursive leadership is a highly welcome Gcontribution to the endeavor of establishing discourse analysis as a substantial approach to management communication. It presents a range of theories and methodologies for doing research on the central topics of leadership and on the crucial activities in management, such as instruction, mentoring, and performance appraisals. As a linguist doing research on management meetings, I would like to comment on the contribution that the book may make to theory and training in the fields of communication and management, and I wish to make some suggestions about the way forward for empirical research on discourse in management settings.

Svennevig, Jan. Management Communication Quarterly. Articles>Reviews>Management

Extensible Markup Languages and Traditional Abstracting and Indexing Strategies      

Object oriented coding languages are used to more accurately label and search for content embedded in electronic texts. An object can be a graphic, a row of specific data housed in a table, a written text, or any other piece of information that conveys meaning. XML, XLink and RDF are second-generation object-oriented coding languages and tools derived from SGML. I illustrate how these object-oriented languages can effectively deploy the indexing techniques and systems traditionally used by information professionals.

Applen, J.D. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication (2001). Articles>Content Management>Knowledge Management>XML

Extracting Content

How to extract content from a portion of a PDF document.

Baker, Donna L. PlanetPDF (2004). Articles>Content Management>Document Design>Adobe Acrobat

Facets Are Fundamental: Rethinking Information Architecture Frameworks    

This article presents three problems with existing information architecture frameworks. First, they are too focused on organizing information based on topic. Second, they treat facets as a supplemental form of classification. Third, they conflate the organization and representation of information. Analysis of these three problems suggests that information architects should provide navigation systems and user interfaces'based on an underlying framework of faceted classification'that allow users to flexibly navigate through complex information spaces in the service of particular tasks and goals. To this end, this article introduces a faceted classification framework, and provides an example of a model framework, called 'Facets are Fundamental' (FaF). The purpose of the FaF framework is to explicitly designate faceted classification (rather than a hierarchical classification) as the starting point of the IA development process. Both of these approaches encourage information architects to employ non-topical methods for organizing and representing information.

Crystal, Abe. Technical Communication Online (2007). Articles>Information Design>Project Management

Family Business Members' Narrative Perceptions: Values, Succession, and Commitment    

The purpose of this article is to investigate the values, succession, and commitment issues found in a convenient sample of 26 family-owned businesses. An organizational commitment scale is used to determine the level of commitment of family members and its relationship to specific demographics variables. Family business stories were also developed using Narrative Paradigm Theory and then evaluated by this sample. Significant relationships were found between commitment and the variables Studied. Content analysis of the story evaluative narratives suggests similar content themes across family-owned businesses.

Barker, Randolph T., George W. Rimler, Evandro Moreno and Thomas E. Kaplan. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2004). Articles>Management

FC.Net - Getting Started

Born to lead or learn to lead? Truth is -- no one knows for sure. But there is a small industry of writing, teaching, and speaking built on the proposition that you can at least talk about it. Studies by the Center for Creative Leadership and the Honeywell Corporation suggest that, after direct experience, the second source of learning about leadership is conversation with others.

Breen, Bill. Fast Company (1996). Articles>Management>Collaboration

Featuritis (or Creeping Featurism)

Featuritis or creeping featurism is the tendency for the number of features in a product (usually software product) to rise with each release of the product. What may have been a cohesive and consistent design in the early versions may end up as a patchwork of added features. And with extra features comes extra complexity.

Soegaard, Mads. Interaction-Design.org. Articles>Usability>Interaction Design>Project Management

A Few Good RSVP Tools: Online Registration Options for Free Events

When you're planning a free event, it's hard to justify paying a lot of money for online registration software--but email or Evite can be frustrating. Happily, other choices exist. We talked to seven nonprofit technology experts about useful and affordable (or free!) options for collecting RSVPs for free events.

IdealWare (2006). Articles>Project Management>Software

Fifteen Steps to Select a Content Management System

These are suggested steps to research Content Management System options for your organization, large or small. They can take you from knowing nothing about CMS to final vendor and product selection. Even if you are replacing a CMS with a new tool, you should follow these steps in the CMS lifecycle.

Doyle, Bob. CMS Review (2004). Articles>Content Management>Assessment

Fight the Unbeatable Foe: Challenges in Implementing Single Sourcing  

Single sourcing documentation is a hot topic among technical writers these days, but very few organizations have implemented single sourcing strategies or solutions. This session presents the problems faced by organizations that want to move towards single sourcing and steps to successfully implement a single sourcing strategy and solution in your organization.

Sukach, Rebecca, Robert Kennedy and Marie Devine. STC Proceedings (2003). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Filling Knowledge Gaps    

Knowledge gaps arise when a small team in an organization creates or compiles a body of knowledge that needs to be deployed to a larger group of people. A gap then exists between the small team that has the knowledge and the larger group of people who need it. In the normal course of doing business, healthy organizations naturally create knowledge gaps, and the healthiest organizations create the most knowledge gaps.

Reid, Clifford A. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Collaboration>Communication>Knowledge Management

The Five Biggest Mistakes in CMS Selection

Describes the big 'gotchas' in choosing a web content management system.

Welchman, Lisa. CMSwatch (2003). Articles>Content Management>Assessment