Every year, LavaCon sparks some of the most exciting conversations and ideas in the content industry. An increasingly popular topic of discussion has been centered around
intelligent content strategies and
applied content engineering principles. Intelligent enterprises are finally investing in
intelligent content.
Organizations are encouraging members in all areas of content to expand their skill set to include strategic modeling and delivery of intelligent content. This is because ROI hinges on content being unified, personalized for the needs of each audience segment, nimble enough for reuse, and adaptable to future devices and channels.
Many of the same thought leaders who spearheaded this movement, along with fresh voices in the industry, continue to evolve this conversation at LavaCon 2018.
Here are the speakers we’re most excited to learn from and exchange ideas with this year.
Featured Content Engineering and Intelligence Speakers:
Andrea Ames
Founder and CEO, Idyll Point Group
Design Thinking Workshop
Join Andrea for a half-day, experiential tour of several techniques used in Design Thinking. Using one or more sample problems, workshop participants will work together to develop solutions following a Design Thinking framework. Because we’ll be face-to-face, we’ll go low-tech and focus on the framework and techniques using flip-chart paper and sticky notes. Andrea will also discuss how to get the most from the process across geographically distributed teams using online tools.
Gavin Austin
Principal Technical Writer, Salesforce
Rebels with a Cause: How Marcomm and Techcomm United at Salesforce to Create Trailhead
In this session, attendees will learn:
- Why customers want more interactive content.
- How to reuse content to build memorable experiences.
- How to turn boring old content into something new and exciting.
- Why different teams across a huge company are creating content together.
Marcus DeHart
Program Manager Change Management, Amazon
Managing Change with Content Development: You Can Teach an Old Dog a New Trick
In this session, attendees will learn:
- How to identify risks that come with change and prevent or mitigate them.
- How to develop a communication plan to keep your team aware of and looking forward to change.
- How to leverage early adopters and skeptics as evangelists for change.
- How to engage stakeholders so they understand the benefits and disruptions of change.
- How to equip your team to be successful and thrive through change.
Jim Edmunds
CEO, Ingeniux
Creating Unified Content Portals: The Key to Competitive Advantage
In this session, attendees will learn:
- Definition of a Unified Content Portal – and what a successful one looks like in the real world.
- Case studies and examples of ways in which Unified Content Portals are being adopted and used throughout a diverse range of organizations.
- Core business drivers, ROI, and competitive advantages.
- How a Unified Content Portal breaks down content silos – using hands-on exercises and workshopping.
- Best practices for attaining buy-in from key stakeholders.
Content Experience Manager, Windows & Experiences Design Group, Microsoft
Designing Personality in Conversational UI
This presentation will explore personality within conversational UI as everything from voice & tone to creating an independent identity – from the perspective of the writers who brought it to Cortana. You’ll see how it relates to the core standard voice & tone principles for products and services, and might help you answer the question, “What’s the difference between a bot and a conversation embedded in a product?
Joe Gelb
President and Head of Business Development, Suite Solutions
A Journey to Intelligent Content Delivery
Presented with Pam Goodrich, Technical Documentation Manager, Cherwell Software
Learn how Cherwell Software used a digital experience platform (DXP) to implement a world-class Documentation Portal with minimal staffing and a condensed time frame. Learn how we consolidated documentation for multiple products, versions, and languages into single consolidated platform. We’ll discuss how we sold the project to Cherwell leadership, how we selected our vendor, and the challenges we faced during implementation.
Stefan Gentz
Global TechComm Evangelist, AdobeSystems
Implementing a Customer-Driven Transition to DITA Content
A Step-by-Step Journey to Success
As the Worldwide Evangelist for Technical Communication at Adobe, Stefan’s mission is to inspire enterprises and technical writers around the world and show how to create compelling technical communication content with the Adobe TCS tools.
Stefan is also a certified Quality Management Professional (TÜV), ISO 9001 / EN 15038 auditor, ISO 31000 Risk Management expert and Six Sigma Champion.
Stefan is a popular keynote speaker and moderator at conferences such as tekom, tcworld, Information Energy, Intelligent Content Conference, Congility, LocWorld, TCUK, STC, GALA, ELIA, TTT, Translation Forum Russia and many others. He is also a member of the Conference Advisory Board of the world’s biggest TechComm event, the tekom / tcworld Conferences and member of the iiRDS working group for Intelligent Information. He is also an active social networker on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Megan Gilhooly
Sr. Manager of Content Management, Amazon
The Power of Learning You Were Wrong
Being right feels good. But great things happen when we prove ourselves wrong. In this talk, Megan will tell stories that illustrate the power of learning you are wrong.
Eeshita Grover
Senior Manager, User Content, Cisco Systems
Context for Content? It Depends.
Let’s delve into the details of creating a wide-reaching content strategy that builds from various aspects of the content ecosystem. We factor in the role of marketing, R&D, sales, user documentation etc and how these moving content parts co-exist to address various needs and audiences.
Rob Hanna
President, Precision Content Authoring Solutions
Cowabunga! Surfing the Crest of the New Content Revolution
Our profession is on the precipice of something very new and very disruptive. What does the next step really mean for us? Will we adapt or will it spur on another new industry of content professional? How will we produce content for a new medium and still keep the lights on with continued needs for traditional channels of delivery?
Adopt too slowly and you’ll miss the wave. Adopt to quickly and you run the risk of the wave dashing onto the sand. In this session, Rob Hanna will explore how to ride the crest of the new content wave.
Toni Mantych
Director of Information Experience, ServiceNow
Building and Implementing an Experience-Focused Content Organization
How to adapt UX and IxD practices to identify the audiences for their content, understand users’ content needs and preferences, and develop and validate customer-centric content and content delivery channels, including:
- How to recognize both the value and the limitations of second-hand user feedback (from internal partners, for instance) and uncontextualized quantitative data.
- How to develop a program to continuously collect and analyze content feedback and metrics.
- How to use Lean UX and Design Thinking approaches to develop and rapidly test content innovations.
Alex Masycheff
CEO, Intuillion Ltd.
Navigating the User through the Knowledge: Structured Content Is Good, But Not Enough
In this session attendees will learn:
- Why one of the major challenges of the information age is that we don’t know what we don’t know and how it may affect the user experience
- How a knowledge map can address this challenge and help us provide users with precise, relevant, and complete information that addresses their needs
- What a knowledge map is and how it differs from metadata
- How a knowledge map can be integrated into structured content and content delivery channels, such as chatbots
- What business value a knowledge map creates and how you can utilize the knowledge map that currently exists in your company
Hilary Marsh
President and Chief Strategist, Content Company, Inc.
Managing the Politics of Content
Hilary Marsh, the President and Chief Strategist of Content Company, will discuss a new way of thinking about content that will help Content Strategists bring people together to make better content and more effective results.
Karen McGrane
Managing Partner, Bond Art + Science
Content in a Zombie Apocalypse
A content zombie apocalypse is upon us! An onslaught of new mobile devices, platforms, and screen sizes, hordes of them descending every day. We’re outmatched. There aren’t enough designers and developers to battle every platform. There aren’t enough editors and writers to populate every screen size.
Surviving the content zombie apocalypse is possible. In this talk, Karen will explain how.
Pam Noreault
Technical Documentation Manager, SDL
Content 4.0: Actions for Today and a Plan for the Future
Presented with Chip Gettinger, VP Global Solutions Consulting, SDL
In this session, attendees will learn actionable ideas, how to plan your content strategy for the future, while taking advantage of existing content investments, and how the content strategy landscape is shifting. This interactive session aims to get attendee creative juices flowing in the following areas:
- Contextualization
- Content Mashups
- Artificial Intelligence
- Chat Bots
- Neural Machine Translation
Sarah O'Keefe
Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Scriptorium Publishing
Minimum Viable Infrastructure for Enterprise Content
As we begin to coordinate content across the enterprise, we need to re-examine our content infrastructure. Will we have a single, unified workflow for everyone creating customer-facing content? If not, what is the minimum viable infrastructure needed to make enterprise content a reality?
Irina Pashina
Senior Director, Customer Experience and Content Strategy, SAP SE
UX Strategy Spanning Marketing and Technical Content at SAP
Join this session to hear about the lessons learned from establishing and implementing a unified UX and content strategy to product pages at SAP, the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software serving more than 365,000 customers in 180 countries. Explore results with before-and-after comparison and get actionable tips you can consider and implement in your organization.
What’s the role of UX and content strategy in the digital customer experience for products?
How to translate customer insights and business goals into compelling product pages with relevant and consistent content through an integrated UX approach?
How to reflect constantly changing customer preferences and business transformation in your content?
Collaboration, change management, enablement: why and how? Best practices for bringing a front-end content strategy spanning marcomm and techcomm to life.
Alan Porter
Director of Content Intelligence Strategy, [A]
Engineering the Content Convergence Across Silos
The convergence of Marcomm and Techcomm is a new reality driven by the needs of the evolving customer experience. But how do you prepare for that and leverage your content assets to deliver the greatest value?
This session will discuss how to apply Content Engineering techniques to enable Content-as-a-Service pipelines that unlock the potential of content assets across the enterprise, no matter where they were created, or in which system they are stored in.
Are You a Content Engineer?
In this session, attendees will learn:
- Improve discoverability of content, enable reuse.
- Assign value to content assets with a content valuation process.
- Engineer intelligent content, content reuse and streamline content publishing.
- The concept of the standard Master Content Model™ (MCM).
Cruce Saunders
Founder, [A]
Hacking the Enterprise: The Continuing Emergence of the New Content Order
We are at a critical moment in history, with knowledge bursting at the seams of our organizations. Many of us still struggle to manage numerous modes of omnichannel content engagement: published, interactive, and automated. The solution requires vision to move towards a new order of content intelligence encompassing our organization’s entire knowledge graph. It requires spanning silos, especially between marcomm and techcomm.
Join Cruce Saunders as he explores the new content stack, and how to future-proof content assets to meet the demands of ever-evolving customer experiences.
Dustin Vaughn
Head of Solutions Consulting, Adobe
Give 'em What They Want: Delivering a Consistent Content Experience
Join Dustin Vaughn, Head of Solutions Consulting at Adobe, as he discusses the shift to digital experience and how tech pubs can drive this critical organizational change.
In this session, attendees will learn:
- The shift in consumer demand and how that is forcing a digital transformation.
- How DITA/structured content is not enough by itself to deliver on this vision.
- How tech pubs can drive organizational change through collaboration with marketing to deliver a compelling digital experience.
We’re sad to announce that Joe Gollner, Managing Director of Gnostyx Research, Inc. and Master Architect at [A], will not be able to attend LavaCon 2018. On behalf of [A] and the greater content community, we’d like to wish him and his family the best.