Improving the effectiveness of information

How to write effective articles? We can’t possibly answer that question if we don’t specify what we want to achieve. As mentioned in my previous post,  if you simply write an article because you feel the urge to do so, you will at best amuse your audience with an intriguing story. But to be effective, you need to know what you want to achieve. A goal-driven approach to writing Writing articles is – or at least should be - a goal-driven activity. You are trying to achieve ‘something’ with your audience and that something is not passive reading. An effective article is in my opinion an article that persuades the reader: • to perform an action • to change his or her opinion • to share your ideas with others If you look back upon the articles that you have read, which ones would you still consider to be worth reading? Exactly: the ones that changed your opinion on a topic, that helped you in your work or that motivated you to discuss the topic with others. So simp...

I am a writer. I have been all my life and I wouldn’t know what to do if I would ever lose this talent. I have been writing about many topics: from welding procedures and high tech greenhouse technology to  software implementations and the use of semantic technology.  Apart from the writing I enjoy digging into these topics and finding out how things really work and what the benefits are of these new technologies or approaches. But is a talent for writing in combination with an interesting topic enough to form the basis for a successful and effective article? Or do we need more? In this series of blog posts I will explore the criteria for a successful article, not necessarily providing you with a fix set of rules but rather focusing on best practices, lessons learned and examples from my own work. On the cover of a magazine One example from my own work. In 2008 I wrote an article called “The Flexible Intranet” about using semantic technology to create smarter Intranet sites...

As mentioned in my previous post, my carreer at Be Informed ended a couple of weeks ago, offering me the opportunity to rethink my professional goals and ambitions. As a result I made the decision that being a product marketer - focused on 'pushing' a product - was not the way to go for me. I would rather work again as a business consultant, closer to the business and working with a customer - really helping a customer - to improve a company's agility, efficiency and results. In Accenture I have found an employer that offers me the opportunity to use my > 15 years of experience with enabling performance improvements for organizations in interesting national and international projects for renowned customers. It will give me the great opportunity to develop myself further as an expert in translating complex organizational goals and processes to clear and innovative ICT solutions and making knowledge applicable. In this blog I will conti...

The last three years I worked as a (senior) business consultant and information architect at software company Be Informed in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. We worked on an amazing product, a ground breaking model-driven business process platform. And my job was to explain the possibilities of this platform to various audiences. The Be Free program, which I launched in September 2013 was a marketing campaign that targeted on making a wider group of people familiar with the product. The campaign was a great success and I had the feeling that I was really helping people in proving their ideas to their customers and managers. But the interaction was on-line and from a distance, never close enough to really understand their business goals and issues.  The sudden end of my contract with Be Informed, forced me to rethink my professional goals and ambitions. What do I really want? Do I want to be a product marketer, focused on 'pushing' a product? Or do I want to be a business cons...

Lessons learned from working on instructional videos For a technical communicator, writing instructions is often still the core business. At least, that is how it was for me. No matter the changes in presentation - printed documentation versus smart documentation - the process of creating the documentation remained for me unchanged over the years. Until recently... This is what my process used to look like: Define the goal, audience, and context Analyze processes and activities Create the overall documentation model Write! Test and improve A line of tutorials At Be Informed I am responsible for Be Free, the community of Be Informed users. We offer the a free version of our semantic toolbox  - the Personal Edition - to users worldwide. To support these users I have developed a line of short tutorials that support users in performing basic tasks like setting up the work environment, start modeling and use domain specific modeling constructions. These instructions ar...

For most product manufacturers, delivering adequate documentation is a constant challenge. The increasing complexity of products and the stricter regulations for product documentation often lead to extensive documentation sets with 500+ pages manuals online or in print. The question is: how effective is all this documentation? During the STC Summit 2013 in Atlanta I have demonstrated how you can use semantic technology to create process-driven documentation. The session was well visited and evaluated, resulting in numerous questions on how writers could use this technology immediately in their own situation. For everyone that wasn't able to attend this session in Atlanta - and everyone that did attend it but wants to see it again - the Society for Technical Communication organizes the web seminar "Using semantic technology to create process-driven documentation". The session will be highly interactive, with plenty of opportunities to influence the modeling proc...

Technical communication has in my opinion never been limited to writing only. As I wrote before technical communicators can act as usability expert, business modelers and information architects. With the launch of Be Free, the, the worldwide community of Be Informed Personal Edition users, I find my self in a new role: managing the community. To do so, I write, teach and present, constantly adapting my outgoing information and message to the reactions that come from my community. Building up the community For years now I am writing and presenting about using semantic technology in a model-driven environment. This technology offers great advantages opposed to more traditional development methods and it also offers opportunities to create smarter documentation. One of the main obstacles in my story was always that in order to work with this technology, a company would have to invest in a full-blown implementation featuring both the workstation ánd the server side of the software. Wi...