5 Ways DocOps Will Help You Globalize Your Business

Featured article by Rob Vandenberg, President and CEO of Lingotek

In yet another case of “what you don’t know actually can hurt you,” DocOps is the latest process poised to up-end your content-management world. If you haven’t heard of this DevOps adaptation, you need to, especially if you hope compete in the race to globalize.

DocOps borrows DevOps’ collaborative, just-in-time, iterative process and applies it to content for seamless delivery across the enterprise and customer base. It eliminates content silos once and for all creating a win-win for workers, customers and the bottom line. The tech industry has been talking about the democratization of content for years, and now DocOps just might be it.

Globalizing Content with DocOps

Most businesses today rely on a pool when it comes to content. Users can dip in at any point around the edge, getting material from obvious places. But drilling down to a specific or obscure bit of knowledge, for example the Portuguese translation of a piece of documentation, takes some skill. Users must mine support databases using appropriate keywords and differentiating between technologies where content might be stored; not to mention taking the time to wade through hundreds of support articles often just to get a few sentences worth of information.

DocOps reins this in and brings parity to all content, making deeper knowledge as accessible as common questions. It takes the content that traditionally lives in a number of different departments and brings it together in a wiki or other collaborative and accessible format.

Here are five ways DocOps will help you stay competitive in the global economy.

1. Collaboration. DocOps breaks down the next level of those silos bringing ownership and responsibility for content to all a project’s stakeholders. Collaboration makes for less repetition. With employees not duplicating content that already exists, they have more time to add quality to their work, which adds to the bottom line.

2. Organization. DocOps creates an editor role for each project’s content. This not only cuts down on repetition, but also allows the editor to highlight important information. James Turcotte, senior vice president at CA Technologies, put it this way in arecent post: “Over the course of a product lifecycle, literally hundreds of knowledge documents may be written … what I call the great knowledge swampland.” DocOps transforms that “swampland” into an up-to-date, navigable, wiki that evolves with both the project and users’ needs.

3. Centralization. Content spread across multiple servers and multiple websites is no longer an option for global business. DocOps centralizes content, providing benefits for companies looking to globalize. First, content is always up-to-date, eliminating the need to worry about who has the most recent version. Since the most recent version is always readily accessible, businesses can set it up so that users can automatically create a pdf of the full documentation. And perhaps the biggest boon for companies looking to global markets is that with content all in one place, automated translation is even simpler than usual. Now you will know that users in Beijing and Munich both have the most up-to-date information, translated professionally and behind the scenes with the click of a button.

4. Analytics. Tracking who is searching for what in your support database has never provided more accurate or essential information. With centralized content, user behaviors tell you exactly what needs attention. The top customer searches in your wiki help create both an easy burn-down list for your developers to fix bugs and improve functionality as well as a common problems list for the technical support engineers.

5. Customer Experience. Let’s face it, the only time a customer looks at the documentation is when something goes wrong. You need to make this experience count. In fact, the goal needs to be users talking about needing to look at the documentation as a positive in any feedback they provide – it wasn’t a technical problem, it was a chance to feel empowered by quickly finding an answer they needed. Companies that eliminate that support article “swampland” rise to the top. Users want brief, concise explanations that are easy to find and viewable on any platform. DocOps is the framework to provide that.

Agile Globalization

Today’s globalization is less about physical presence around the world and more about digital agility. To take full advantage of the tools that make this possible, the workflow has to keep up as well. DocOps brings cutting edge processes to the content world, allowing everyone involved to access the information they need when they need it and in their own language.

Rob Vandenberg, President and CEO of Lingotek | The Translation Network

As President and CEO of Lingotek, Rob is driving the vision of a company that is looking to change the future of translation.

Prior to being named president of Lingotek in 2008, Vandenberg served as its Vice President of Sales and Marketing where he was a source of guidance and inspiration. Prior to Lingotek, Rob headed up several successful ventures. He was co-founder and CEO of LocalVoice.com, which was acquired by HarrisConnect in 2005. He was named Vice President of Sales and Marketing for HarrisConnect after the acquisition. Before his work with LocalVoice.com and HarrisConnect, he was one of the first 20 U.S. employees at INTERSHOP Communications, where he helped build its worldwide clientele as a top-performing Sales Executive. The INTERSHOP initial public offering was one of the most successful enterprise IPOs in US history boasting a $10B market cap.

Rob holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Economics from UC Berkeley.