A question came up recently in a conversation about structured authoring and a migration into a component content management system: “If we’re not going to reuse this content, and it is always entirely unique, do we still need to chunk it into components?”
Search and findability issues are the number one complaint that I hear from customers who realize they need a content strategy. Well over 50% of customers from our content strategy practice start conversations by telling me that their search is “broken.”
I recently came across a great commentary in the August 2021 issue of “Pharma Technology Focus.” The article is titled, “MDR set to transform how MedTech firms approach content management,” written by Barbara Peraltor, Director of Life Science Solutions at Amplexor.
EU Medical Device Regulation (2017/745) and In Vitro Diagnostic Regulation (2017/746) went into effect in May 2021, after about a year’s delay due to COVID-19. Medical device manufacturers have known about the new regulations for years and have been working to meet these new, more stringent standards.
I’ve started to notice a trend in structured authoring. In the past, almost all of our customers who implemented structured authoring were established companies with a lot of legacy content. And most of the writers were very technical. Rarely did I see young companies implement structured authoring from the beginning.
I’ve had more than one conversation over the past several years about whether pharmaceutical companies were “ready” for structured content. After all, many of the benefits of structured content roll up into one key business need: scale. And scale — the ability to produce a lot of content quickly, accurately,
Writing a book is not for the faint of heart. Or the easily distracted. It is a sizable undertaking. You have to make sure you have enough to say, in terms of quantity and value.
You manage a team of content creators and you’ve decided to embrace structured authoring. Congratulations! Perhaps you’ve heard that a structured environment will help your team create content that is consistent, modular, and reusable.
When you move from an unstructured authoring environment to a structured authoring environment, you have many decisions to make. Among those decisions is what you should do with your existing (legacy) content. You have three choices:
I’m a huge fan of structured content. However, I sometimes worry that structured content is my hammer and therefore all content problems look like nails.