Intelligent Content, A Three Hour Tour. Or, What Content would you want to have with you if you were stranded on a desert island?

Wednesday, Sessions for Intelligent Content 2011 started with an intro from IC guru, Ann Rockley. She defined Intelligent content and what makes content truly intelligent; it is highly structured and semantically tagged. She provided a disclaimer up front. The 1.5 hours that she spoke in the morning session would be attempting to get a high level overview of the 3 day session that she normally undertake with a client looking to assess their organization for the move to intelligent content. The summation of her remarks is simple: Analyze, Model, and Structure.

But what does this mean? What is the business case? Where is the ROI? My mind hooked on one specific story that Ann shared about a client who did a review of their content back in 2001. Actually, September 11th, 2001. Bad timing. When the world changed, their focus changed and they determined that they could not afford to implement Intelligent Content at that time. Within a few years, a discrepancy in the content that was delivered to customers and content distributed to vendors resulted in a customer injury and a multimillion dollar lawsuit. They lost. The application of Intelligent Content could have saved this company the trouble.

Well implemented IC ensures consistency through automatic reuse. This kind of reuse allows for a change once, populate everywhere editing model. This helps highly timely content stay timely, relevant and accurate. If you are delivering this kind of content you need Intelligent Content methodologies.

One thing that is obvious is that the idea of Intelligent Content engages a lot of variable environments. There is no one size fits all solution. Ann’s talk dealt with how companies can approach their content and figure out what they need, what they have time and money to achieve, and how to overcome objections and get it done.