Helping Eli Lilly Adopt Structured Content To Improve Customer Experience And Automation
Helping Eli Lilly Adopt Structured Content To Improve Customer Experience And Automation
Insights, lessons, and practical advice for teams planning to move from traditional desktop publishing-based content creation approaches to structured authoring
In this column, I introduce you to John April, Senior Director, Adaptive Content Strategy at Eli Lilly and Company. April shares insights, lessons learned, and practical advice for teams planning to move from traditional desktop publishing-based content creation approaches to structured authoring.
SA: John, thanks for speaking with me about your experience moving to structured authoring. Your Linkedin profile indicates you have deep experience helping your organization tackle complex content challenges.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself — who you are, what you do, and why you do it?
JA: I was trained to be a journalist. Over the past two decades, I've focused my skills on scientific communications supporting Lilly, mostly on regulatory content intended for study sites, regulatory bodies, or both. Nearly everyone I collaborate with is scientifically trained. In other circumstances, my input might not have been considered. But Lilly has leveraged my differences to help change how it creates content.
I currently lead the implementation of structured authoring in Lilly's development organization. I also lead a team responsible for deploying content reuse software. The software will enable Lilly to increase its information integrity and save time and cost. I hope to honor and further Lilly's mission by making the content development process more efficient.
SA: When organizations understand the value of investing in structured content, it’s often because they recognize the benefits of doing so can provide them. One of the main reasons organizations start creating structured content is to develop new capabilities that will allow them to overcome impediments preventing them from accomplishing business-critical work. Help our audience understand the conundrum facing your authoring team.
What types of content-related challenges was your team facing?
JA: The initial challenge was to improve the user's experience with our content. The unstructured writing methods most of us were using didn't make the mental process of consuming content easy for our customers. Unstructured writing methods result in long, dense documents with repetitive content, important messages buried, numbers within copy that are difficult to interpret, parenthetical content that interrupts sentences, topic changes within a paragraph, different terms for the same concept, complex grammar, missing subjects, and other problems. These problems lead to a poor user experience where the customer wastes time reading and must re-read or ask questions about the content to understand it.
SA: I have found that selling the value of structured content to leaders usually involves more than just convincing them to buy new software. Often, it requires helping them appreciate the capabilities that adopting structured content can provide their organizations.
What capabilities are you aiming to develop by creating structured content?
JA: I advocated that the organization use structured authoring to improve the user experience with our content and as a step of standardization necessary to achieve future automation.
Structured content is not only easier for machines to consume but also to model, review for quality, translate, componentize, tag with metadata, associate with a unified taxonomy, and repackage for multiple channels. In a word, structured content is easier to reuse.
SA: Moving to structured authoring is a change management issue as much as anything else.
Can you talk a bit about the types of change challenges that our readers might face as they attempt to move their writers to a structured authoring environment?
JA: We started by training the organization's content development experts. At Lilly, these experts are medical writers. While medical writers are often scientifically trained, their primary expertise is the ability to write content well. Trainers must take these writers' skills apart and retool them so that their new reflex instinct is to adapt their writing to their audience's needs. I'd estimate it takes a good writer 6 to 12 months to become proficient in structured authoring.
Once an organization's writing experts understand the methods and can advocate for their use, you can begin to train people in other functions on the basics of structured authoring to support the writers better.
The biggest challenge in this transition is getting people who have been using unstructured writing methods all their lives to see the value in changing their ways. But isn't this the issue at the heart of all changes? Changes must be implemented in a particular order, and everyone goes through the change at their rate.
First, you must make individuals aware of the problem or opportunity. Only once they have this awareness can they desire to participate in or support the change. Once they have the desire, the training effort is relatively straightforward. Most organizations won't have an in-house structured authoring trainer. Instead, they may leverage the vendor market's rich offerings. After training, constant reinforcement is necessary so people adhere to the standard.
SA: When content teams adopt structured authoring and start practicing it daily, they almost always report experiencing a few a-ha moments — sudden realizations, inspirations, insights, recognitions, or comprehensions.
Can you share with me one of your team’s biggest a-ha moments?
JA: Once we began applying structured authoring methods, we saw massive page reductions in some documents. The content was much more valuable and fit for purpose. People enjoyed reading the content because it was consistently structured and easy for their brains to process.
SA: Common challenges can be difficult to avoid if you don’t have a content expert to guide you toward best practices and away from painful mistakes made by others who came before you.
Did you bring an external consultant to help your team develop your structured authoring program? If so, can you tell us about that experience and the benefits and drawbacks of working with an outside advisor?
JA: We hired a vendor specialized in structured authoring to design and deliver our training program. The main drawback was their lack of expertise in our field. That resulted in the initial workshop being rather generic, particularly the training exercises, which focused on content our participants had no experience with.
However, the benefit of using an experienced trainer far outweighed the drawbacks. Subsequent training workshops were more accessible for participants to consume because the vendor was willing to put in the time to work with us to tailor the training materials to our content.
SA: There’s no shortage of best practices sessions at content conferences and online events. These types of sessions are popular with practitioners and usually provide some guidance on how to achieve success.
It’s also important to understand what not to do.
Can you share any lessons learned from your adventures leading to the adoption of structured authoring?
JA: I think it's a good idea to train people to structure content before deploying a content management system.
Getting people to follow structured authoring methods in an authoring environment they're accustomed to, such as Microsoft Word, might be a smoother ride than trying to introduce two significant changes simultaneously: a change in the writing method and the authoring environment.
SA: Structured authoring adoption is more likely to be successful when those impacted understand what needs to change — and how to make those changes successfully, with as little friction as possible.
What educational resources would you recommend to content teams considering moving to structured authoring?
JA: Hire a structured authoring trainer who has codified their methods into a manual they give to workshop participants. That manual should remain on the writer's desk and be their go-to resource daily.
SA: Hindsight is, as they say, twenty-twenty.
If you could start your project all over again from scratch, knowing what you know now, would you do anything differently, and if so, what?
JA: Many of the concepts offered by engineers of content management systems are not ready for scale, or organizations are not ready to scale with them. I would have performed more proof-of-concept testing and empathy sessions in my organization's current authoring environment to understand the users' perspectives and needs better.
I also would have assembled a more comprehensive program strategy with a clear roadmap showing me everything I needed to change to ensure the project's success. Content strategists must change people's mindsets and can't do that overnight.
SA: We’ve talked a lot about structured authoring in this interview. Let’s switch gears for a moment and chat about the most exciting thing you see in the information and knowledge management world.
What are you most excited about?
JA: I'm looking forward to more intuitive authoring systems employing gamification principles to make content development fun. We need to expend more mental energy on design thinking and data interpretation and remove some of the stress that arises when we write. If reuse systems and automation tools could be more playful and approachable, I think people would be able to relax a bit at work and become more effective at their jobs.
SA: I want to thank you on behalf of our readers for taking time out of your schedule to share your insights, advice, and lessons learned about structured content. You've been very generous with your time, and I appreciate you sharing your expertise. Thanks!
JA: Thank you for the chance to discuss these matters with you and address your readership.
Originally published in “Meet the Change Agents” column in the July 2021 issue of Intercom, a publication of the Society for Technical Communication.