How to get the most out of your content, Nolwenn Kerzreho, IXIASOFT speaking at LavaCon, May 22nd

By @SimonCocking Great interview with Nolwenn Kerzreho Technical account manager for @IXIASOFT in #Europe dealing with #partners & clients for their #DITAxml and #techcomm projects. Nolwenn  will be appearing at LavaCon in Dublin. The LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and UX is coming to Dublin on May 22nd, see more here.

LavaCon takes place 22-24 May, Croke Park Conference Center

1 min pitch for what you are doing now?

IXIASOFT is sponsoring and exhibiting at LavaCon Dublin next week. We are a global company that develops a Content Management System focused on the specific aspects of DITA content. We cover all aspects of technical documentation for manufacturing content, from its creation, to translation and final transformations.

In case your readers are unaware of it, DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an open standard for creating and publishing content. Recognized and used worldwide by almost 700 companies, DITA is spreading across Europe and into many industries outside of the core software sector, such as medical devices, learning, electronics, semiconductor, energy and machinery.

Organizations deploy our DITA CMS to make their content production more efficient and cost-effective, and to better organize their teams and their workflows. By reusing content, tracking the impacts of reuse, creating detailed reports, the tech pub teams can improve the quality of their content.

We are convinced that we should involve more than just the traditional tech pub teams and offer an easy tool for engineers, support staff, and any experts that must perform reviews, annotate content or even create new topics in a fast and easy manner. The focus on collaboration for this conference is thus perfect for us!

How were the last 12 months, what worked well, what didn’t move as quickly as you would have liked?

I have been travelling all over Europe to meet customers and attend shows, but the most interesting journeys are those of the customers who are challenging their current processes and taking their content to the next level. The best reward is of course to see how much adopting our tool has helped our customers, including their tech pub teams, subject matter experts, and users.

What are your plans for the future?

The LavaCon theme is “Spanning Silos, Building Bridges”— and I believe our product and DITA can help a lot with this goal. Producing technical content these days involves multiple teams, with very different skills. In response to this we are launching our Web platform tool to help maintenance technicians, support engineers, healthcare professionals, and other experts to contribute their knowledge in the content in a faster and easier way, all without having to know anything about DITA.

What will you be talking about at this event? 

I am hosting a workshop on Collaborating with Subject Matter Experts on the first day. The goal of this interactive workshop is to better prepare project plans through gaming and collaboration. This “Snakes and Ladders” workshop was co-created with Joe Gollner, an experienced content practitioner, and has already been tried and tested with leading experts and senior documentation managers. It is a low-cost and very effective way to identify risks and prepare tactics to circumvent them when planning your project.

What inspired you to attend it?

I was very happy to hear that Jack Molisani was indeed keen on starting a conference in Europe – especially in Ireland, a country brimming with high-potential professionals and organisations. The LavaCon conference is packed with thought-provoking information and effectively brings down the content professional barriers—web, marketing, technical—by bringing us all together.

Spanning Silos and Building Bridges with Jack Molisani at LavaCon, 22-24 May, Dublin

Which influencers and websites do you follow to keep up to date with the latest developments?

To remember why technical content needs good professionals, I always recommend following @uselessassist. This Twitter account talks about mishaps and customer frustration with technical information. I like keeping up-to-date with the DITA industry with the DITAWriter.com blog hosted by my IXIASOFT colleague Keith Schengili-Roberts.

For varied information, I attend conferences such as this one, but I also read tech comm association journals such as those produced by ISTC, STC and Tekom. On the web, I’d recommend some of our partner’s blogs, webinars, and Twitter accounts. Several are speaking here at this conference, including our technical partners Antidot, Congility, DeltaXML, oXygen, STILO, Zoomin, and service partners Comtech, Gnostyx, Mekon, and Scriptorium. There are also multiple groups on LinkedIN and other social networks that are worth joining for information on technical, web, and marketing communication.

How can people find out more about what you are working on?

If you are attending, meet us in the exhibitors’ hall! For those on the virtual track, you can read our blog onhttp://www.ixiasoft.com/en/news-and-events/blog. Our customers’ use cases are the best testimonies of what can happen when adopting structured content and the DITA CMS. Of course, you can also follow me at@nolwennIXIASOFT and our company at @IXIASOFT.

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking