Demystifying Content Operations with Alan Pringle, COO of Scriptorium

In this episode, Phylise Banner interviews Alan Pringle, COO at Scriptorium. Starting with the definition of content operations, Alan explains how organizations can make sure they are making the most of their content by taking a strategic approach to content management, and building intelligence into their content. While considering how best to orchestrate that “single source of truth” with learning content, Phylise and Alan discuss approaches to serving up that single source to multiple audiences. Alan also shares his insights into the trends driving the evolution of content operations, and explains how to leverage technology to optimize content creation and delivery.

ABOUT ALAN PRINGLE
A pillar in the content industry, Alan Pringle is an experienced content strategist and the COO at Scriptorium. Driven by a mission to connect your content creators to your consumers, he pinpoints technologies and process improvements so your content accomplishes your corporate goals. He then guides your team through company culture and change management obstacles.

As a strategist, Alan identifies the technology that will do the heavy lifting of managing your content lifecycle. He shows your team how these advances make their professional lives better while allowing them to contribute to the growth of your organization. As part of his role at Scriptorium, he also: 

• Interviews a variety of content stakeholders to fully scope pain points and inefficiencies in current workflows.
• Calculates projected ROI.
• Evaluates software vendors and tools to recommend best-fit solutions.
• Provides practical guidance on minimizing change resistance.

His background in English and journalism helped him discover the world of technical communication (techcomm). His instinct for optimizing processes quickly led him into content strategy and operations. As a strong voice in all things content, his speaking engagements have taken him around the world. 

Outside of his work at Scriptorium, you can find Alan enjoying chocolate, pastries, and discovering new culinary delights anywhere he goes.  

Alan holds a BA in English from Wake Forest University. He lives in Cary, North Carolina, in the United States.

The Innovations in Training podcast is sponsored by Symtrain — an AI-training platform that automates time consuming role-play exercises required to prepare your employees for interactions with customers. Symtrain helps teams learn more, faster by creating an immersive CX training experience.

The Innovations in Training podcast is presented by Training magazine.

Transcript

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Demystifying Content Operations with Alan Pringle, COO of Scriptorium

Phylise Banner: Greetings, everyone and welcome to the innovations in training podcast. I am your host Phylise Banner. I'm a learning experience design consultant and Master Chef and Training Magazine's Innovations in Training Test Kitchen. In this episode, we're going to explore the areas of content strategy and content operations with Alan Pringle, COO of Scriptorium. I've known the folks at Scriptorium for more than a decade through my contributions in the fields of technical communication and content strategy. I'm always amazed at their ability to evolve and innovate in their work. And I'm so grateful that Alan has agreed to join us here to explore the past, present, and future of content operations. Welcome, Alan, it's great to have you here.

Alan Pringle: And it is great to be here. Thank you so much,

Phylise Banner: Alan, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do and how you came to be in this space.

Alan Pringle: I am, as you said, the Chief Operating Officer at Scriptorium. We are a consulting firm; we've been in business since 1997. And what we do is we look to see how we can improve your content processes; we will take a look at your company's business goals. And then take a look at your content operations and try to align those things. Because unfortunately, there are a lot of organizations out there, where they're doing a lot of manual work, copy and paste really not the best use of some of the content tools that are out there. And it is impeding what they should be doing and helping the company go to the next level.

Phylise Banner: So I did ask you how you got to be in this space, I want to know a little bit about you and your history here.

Alan Pringle: I actually have a background in English. Yes, I am a liberal arts English degree person, one of those, I also have quite a bit of background in journalism, I ran the student newspaper while I was in college as managing editor and editor in chief in my last year. And that was right at the time when desktop publishing was kicking in. So, we were doing, you know, making the move from lying to type machines into actually printing out and laying the pages out using things like PageMaker. And I'm dating myself horribly by mentioning these tools. But there you go. So, I have got that kind of writing background. And I fell into technical communication, frankly, kind of by accident, and worked as a technical editor as a technical writer, and then moved kind of more into the space now especially that I've been a Scriptorium since 1997, at this point, looking at how tools can be used to make content creation, and delivery and management as is as efficient as possible. That's kind of my sweet spot. Now, taking a look at where things are with your organization, making some recommendations on what you can do to go to the next level and then helping you get to that next level with the actual implementation.

Phylise Banner: Thanks, I want to dive into that a little bit more. And thanks for sharing that I love hearing people's stories. Because, you know, sometimes I listen to other podcasts, and someone tells their story. And I completely identify with them. Sure, right. And how we get from here to there, it gives me insight into where you might be going next, and where the company might be going next also, you talk about content operations. And I'd love to have you define that for our audience.

Alan Pringle: Content operations. This is kind of the Scriptorium point of view, I'm sure everybody has slightly different definitions. But it consists of the tools, the workflow, and the processes that you use to create your content, to distribute your content, and to manage it. And when I say distribute, that can mean multiple delivery targets. Old school may we'll say print PDF, but then you've also got, especially in the learning space, you've got learning management systems that you go out to, sometimes you may need to create materials for the classroom. So, what you want to do is write that content one time and what I'll call a format neutral way and then transform it into the different kinds of delivery targets you need. And a lot of times your end audience is not even a human being it may be a learning management system for example, so you need to basically think, outside of just the human realm, when you're talking about delivering content, how can I connect, connect this content to an LMS? is a little bit different than say, How am I going to create a PowerPoint slide deck from this content, those are two slightly different things. But they're both delivery targets. And you want to try to use a single source of truth to generate both of those things. So, you're not creating the same content twice in two different formats.

Phylise Banner: So, in the content, strategy, space, there's a lot of emphasis placed on governance. And yes, that’s up at all here. And I do want to integrate that into this. Because when you talk about the content operations, being in alignment or supporting business goals, there is a governance element in there. As to the you know, it just means the approval process, perhaps, or I'm thinking even of cybersecurity issues that get layered on top of this, you know, confidentiality of content.

Alan Pringle: Regulatory issues, as well, all come into play here. Yes, absolutely. And these systems, excuse me. And these systems can help you with a lot of the things that you just described, let's kind of dial back to just merely like workflow. There are a lot of content management systems that have role-based access, essentially, where based on “are you a content creator?”, “are you a reviewer?”, so even at that core level, you can set up who has access to content, who can look at certain bits, or even use certain bits of content. And this is just on the content creation side. Because you know, a lot of people want to have very codified workflows for approval processes, because sometimes regulations require that and you've got that basically have would say, paper trail, but these days is more of a digital trail. And the systems can help track that. So, there are these kinds of role based access situations on the source side. And then you start getting into the delivery. There are ways to set up intelligence in these systems were based on the people who are receiving the information. The consumers, say, the students, for example, or even an LMS, if you were selling your content to different organizations, and they are basically slurping your information into their LMS. And because you're, I guess, they're kind of like reselling your content, more or less, there are ways to control that access as well. So you do have kind of that regulation, this particular company has paid for this much. So the system tracks you up, it can be like a subscription model even. So yes, there are lots of ways that these systems both at the source level and the distribution level, can regulate and control things and basically backup the governance that you need to have in place for that content, both content both on the source side and on the delivery sides.

Phylise Banner: We've jumped right into the tools here and what they can do.

Alan Pringle: I know, it's such an easy trap to fall into, right?

Phylise Banner: So, I want to roll it back again, you talk about content management systems, learning management systems, and you know, where our content is being created, stored, distributed, controlled, right with this, these governance with any rules that are in place. And I would say most of us in the L&D space are familiar with maybe not specific tools, but something that has enabled us to create content to store content to distribute content to serve it up to our learners. And it is they are focused on just the that the content the evolution of learning management system comes, and you know, we can look at the huge dinosaurs and then the newer app, you know, mobile app-based tools and AI facilitated environment, we're moving towards the concept of learning experience platforms, and tracking and formal learning in this space. So, what is the role of content operations in relationship to the learning experience, or the learning experience platforms that these tools are aiming to evolve into?

Alan Pringle: From my point of view, content is one of the bedrocks of these things, you have to have content that will support all these different delivery channels. And to be able to do that you have got to have intelligence built into your content. So you can chunk it up and deliver it to the different kinds of audiences, the different kinds of platforms that you need. Because what you want for one user experience over here is not going to be the same as what you want over here, for example, and you may need to be able to remix, reinterpret the same kind of content, but in slightly different ways. If you have intelligence built into your source content. And when I say intelligence, I'm talking about things like what is your audience? What is the education level, what is the reading level, all of those kinds of things built in, and I'm going to use a technical word here, metadata, you want to build that in, into your content source. So that way you can remix, remodel, chop it all up, put it back together in a way that is correct for whatever delivery target that you are aiming for. And without that intelligence built in, you're not going to be able to do that. And that's when one way that content operations and all the systems that go in there really support the intelligent use of content, it is no longer write a Word file over here, a PowerPoint deck over here, you write it one time, and then you transform it into whatever you need it to be.

Phylise Banner: Thank you, I kind of fed you in that direction. So thanks for taking. I put a timer up to see how long it would take before you use the word metadata.

Alan Pringle: I tried to resist but it is the correct word to use here too. And that is what you use to basically make your content source smart. That's what you need – metadata,

Phylise Banner: Right? Without using company names, or, you know, naming people or places or organizations, can you talk about a time when you came into an organization? The problem you faced and the solution you provided related to this L&D space.

Alan Pringle: We're in the process now of working with an organization. And they are training people and hospital settings, about how to use certain kinds of equipment. They are addressing multiple layers of audiences, everything from clinicians, to doctors, to nurses, so there's all these levels that they have to address. And certain facilities have slightly different processes than other facilities do. So you have to address those variances, the equipment over here is a little different than it is over there. So as you can imagine, if you're trying to address all of these different audience levels, all these different equipment levels and whatever else and system levels. There's a lot of copying and pasting and word documents going on. And it is impossible to manage, especially when the systems that you're documenting are changing all the time. There's always updates, always improvements. So you've got to keep up with all of those improvements and changes. And sometimes those changes will affect multiple locations, multiple audiences. But if you have copied and pasted Word documents, that means you have to go and find every single instance of this piece of information and change it. It just grows exponentially. They realize This was not sustainable. And what they have had us come in to do and we're still working with them on this is they want the single source of truth. They want to write this information one time, and use metadata. There we go metadata, to basically build an intelligence about the location, the audience. So when there are those slight differences, instead of doing a wholesale copy and paste, you basically just insert, for example, a few sentences or a paragraph and say, this applies only to this audience. This applies only to that location. And then when it comes time to deliver, you deliver it through an automated process. And then you put filters on it. And you say, I want to output this content for this location, and this audience level. And that way, this need for copying and pasting and tracking hundreds and hundreds of Word files, it goes away. And that is the aim. And that is what we are working with them right now on.

Phylise Banner: The solution you're providing, enables anyone to reuse and repurpose content, because of the work that has been put upfront, put in upfront to describe that information, that content. How much work is that? Is that a huge lift?

Alan Pringle: It is a huge lift. However, you can chunk it up, you can you don't have to give just the tools. And I know you and I had to slip right into tools because it happens all the time. But you don't have to do that. And here's a really good way that you can get your content ready for this kind of shift. Everybody knows about templates and being consistent and how you organize content. However, everybody's always not really good about using those templates correctly. There's a distinction there. If you can really templatized the way that you put information together, even when you're working in Word, for example, that can be a stepping stone to moving to the next level. When it comes time to migrate to a smarter way of doing content. If you have that bedrock that basically that foundation of consistently put together content, that is a great springboard into doing things a little smarter, if you will.

Phylise Banner: When you talk about content, you're referencing Word docs or PowerPoint file, that content in this learning space could be an AR component, VR component, you know, audio, video, anything. So, let's just let folks know, here explain to folks how you work with other types of content.

Alan Pringle: Sure, and I think I would also throw assessments in this mix too. Because that is a big part, we are dealing with another client and we are kind of picking apart the very things that you just talked about now. For example, they put together simulations. So there are audio and video components involved in that. But underneath that, there is content in the sense that they sometimes script things, they have narration, they do reenactments, things like that. There is some text there that can be created in this Smart Content way that I'm talking about. And then it can be repurposed into an audio file, into video, whatever else and then when it comes time to assemble all the bits and pieces that would put together a simulation, for example. Your automated process will basically reference your audio files, your video files, which would live in like a digital asset management system somewhere and pull it in as a component and then distribute it to a Learning Management System or whatever the endpoint is. So yes, you do have some things that are not, shall we say text when we talk about content, even so, a lot of these audio files and Video files, there are text components that are required to put them together. So I would be careful not to dismiss right out of hand, oh, this is an audio file, or this is a video file, it doesn't have any potential for reuse or whatever. There are ways to chunk audio, there are ways to chunk video. And again, there may be some phrasing some words, some procedures that you reference in these things that are shareable across things. And they need to be scripted for lack of a better word. And that could live in one of these content management systems as a reusable thing. And then you can create an outline, and basically pull together all the chunks that you need to create a really good script as a starting point for these recordings that you're going to need for your simulation.

Phylise Banner: One of the things that I love the most about Scriptorium is that you're not tied to one specific tool. And when you work with clients, you look for the best solution to serve their challenges. But there are so many tools out there, and our audience may not be familiar with some of the tools that you're using. So, I'd love to hear the tools you love, the solutions you have implemented, what value lies in their ability to solve the problems that you see?

Alan Pringle: Sure. And I'll try to keep it at a somewhat high level more about categories of chores, because I could do a deep dive in here and just run every single listener off of this podcast, if I were allowed to, and I really don't want to do that. I'm glad you pointed out that we are we're not a solutions provider. We're not we are a consulting firm. Basically, we're selling you our expertise and our brains, we have worked with these systems for a very long time. A lot of our clients end up in solutions that are based on extensible markup language, yes, I'm going to dive a little deeper here. So forgive me. XML gives you a way to do the single source of truth that I was talking about earlier, you can write your content in a format neutral way you can build in that intelligence, that metadata where you can track what is the audience level, all of those kinds of things, what is the product level, you bake that into your source content, that content generally lives in something called a component content management system. Now, content management system means a lot of different things to different people. A lot of people hear CMS, they may think, oh, SharePoint, where I'm going to dump documents. To me, that's more of a document management system. But some people call it a content management system. There's a distinction here with this component content management system that first see component, what you're doing is you are going to manage all of these smaller modules, these smaller chunks of this XML content that has that intelligence, big 10. And then you will basically line up more or less like in an outline. These are the chunks that I want for this particularly delivery target. You lined them all up, basically like an outline. And then through the system, you pick an automated delivery target, it can be HTML, it can be an eBook, it could be a SCORM package, I know a lot of LMSs. That's how they absorb information, then you can automatically transform that content into whatever format on the back end, or excuse me, on the front end, that's the distinction to CCMS is on the back end, that's where your source lives. But then you hit a transformation process to shoot it to whatever front end you need, whether it's a website, an LMS. And in some cases, what you will do is have connections such as API's, and I hate to go this deep, but I'm going I'm going API's where your content management system will talk to your other systems like an LMS, for example. And without really any human intervention is Miss A connector. Let's just call it a connector for lack of a better word. So basically, you've got this CCMS in the middle. You have got automated transformations that take your source modules and spit out the different kinds of delivery formats you need and addition there can connectors coming off of that CCMS that talk to your, your dam, your digital asset management system. So it can pull in video, it can pull in audio, it will talk to other LMSs and share the information out to it in a format that the LMS can understand. So that's kind of a generic kind of outline of how these systems work. And what a lot of our clients end up using some variation of what I just explained. And I hope I didn't go too deep there.

Phylise Banner: Not at all. So, with the evolution of technology, and the greater access to AI these days, where is the future of the CCMS going with the advent of this access to artificial intelligence?

Alan Pringle: For me, I think we have to be very careful and regard to intellectual property and copyright issues. That is one thing that has immediately set off alarm bells and all our heads that Scriptorium this idea, and I've, I've seen some executive starting to fall for it, that AI is going to magically fix everything, every few years, there's something magically going to fix everything. AI has a lot of potential, don't get me wrong, it really does. And the content space, this is where I kind of see it going. If you set up your own private, large language model, one that does not leak outside to the internet, like the public ones do like Chat GPT, I would not dare put my company's content or recommend a client put their content into that I know there's supposed to be guardrails in place, etc, etc. Let's just say I'm a little skeptical, I can understand the value of creating your own large language model, and then feeding all of your content into it. Because that way, the AI will look basically inward. And look at your content, help you find connections you may not have found, help you summarize things in ways you've never never thought about. It could even possibly help you find reuse, you know, this, this chunk of content over here, it's very similar to what's over here. Do they need to be aligned, it's a matching situation. And for content people that matching can really take a huge load off of people. So people can focus on writing really good content that speaks to their learning audiences. And let the AI help with some of the scut work some of the unfun stuff. Do I think AI is going to completely replace instructional designers right now? No, I don't. But I think they can give and that technology can give IDs a boost. And let them focus on what's important and not on the some of the silly things we have to do sometimes with content.

Phylise Banner: Absolutely, it was great. Thanks for sharing that. Earlier, you mentioned the word sustainability. And it got me thinking, you know, we're, when we consider sustainability where it came from the physical plant, it's evolved into, you know, not just physical, but ethical issues. And the notion of content sustainability really resonated with me. We're starting to explore sustainability in the design space in some of my working groups. And what do you see falling into this content, sustainability space?

Alan Pringle: The big thing is, is not to fall in the trap of from my point of view of using a lot of single purpose tools, using things that are designed really well for one thing, closed systems. And I will say in the training space, I see a lot of tools that I think are pretty closed. And that is a concern to me. And it's been a problem and a challenge for our clients. You need to create your content in a way. So it's kind of agnostic, because if you do it from a very purpose built point of view, you're limiting yourself, what if three years down the road, there is a new standard that you need to address you haven't even thought of what if you Learning Management Systems start to move away from SCORM. And some of them, you know, are moving to like xAPI, for example. What are you going to do when the next thing like that happens, the next upheaval with what is considered the better target to talk to an LMS, the better, the better delivery format, if you were using purpose-built tools that are closed, you're going to have to reinvent the wheel over and over again. And that's what leads to the copy and paste and duplication I was talking about, because there's no easy way to get the same information from tool a tool B, through an automated process. So you're maintaining 234 tracks, sometimes the same exact content, because it's being fed into purpose built systems. So you need to basically build your content at the core, and a way that you can extend it. And two ways you may not have even thought about five years down the road, who knows what's going to happen, none of us know the way the technology moves these days. But you can be prepared, you may not know what's coming around the corner, but at least you can be prepared for it. If you write your content and kind of this tool and format agnostic way, that that you can then basically put the pieces together and then transform it into whatever you want with next to no human intervention. That's where we need to be from my point of view.

Phylise Banner: So in the next three to five years, what innovation might shake up the content operations space.

Alan Pringle: AI is definitely part of this. And I, as much as I am kind of overwhelmed and frankly, annoyed by some of the hyperbolic content and the coverage that it's getting in the media, there's no denying it is going to play a part. But what I think we're going to have to do is figure out a way to be sure that whatever systems we use, are respectful of individual companies and organizations intellectual property, I am sure there are lawyers right now. And the liability space, here it is having field days thinking about all these potential problems. So we're gonna have to iron out those problems with AI, I do think you can mitigate a lot of them by going with the private model, and doing it that way. But I do, I really think that is probably the next big thing. And it's a matter of harnessing it in a way that helps productivity, and lets the content creators, your instructional designers, and so on, do what they're good at. And leave some of the scut work behind that. That, to me is where things are headed. And I do think the more you're going to start seeing these content systems, integrating more and more with AI, I mean, it's already happening. But a lot of times it's integrating with like Chat GPT – not really wild about that. But once you can start integrating with your own models, and there's some tools out there that are already doing this. I think that's where things are headed.

Phylise Banner: Beautiful. Thank you so much. Thanks for sharing your insight and your expertise and for opening up this connection between the content space in the training space. We look forward to seeing you more at our training, magazine events, and collaborating on the future of content operations.

Alan Pringle: Thank you so much. This has been a great opportunity. And I think there's so much room for growth. And really, I look forward to the partnership because in your world, we see a lot of the problems we see elsewhere. It's just a matter of addressing them in a way that suits your crowd the best and that's what we're aiming to do.