Fighting the Inevitability of Content Chaos
How an LCMS Can Help You Defy the Laws of Thermodynamics
By Ken Ballard, Xyleme, Inc.
I just completed the annual fall ritual of cleaning out my disgustingly messy shed. I pulled down the spider webs and wasp nests, organized my garden tools, sharpened my lawn mower blade, and got rid of all the empty fertilizer bags. This year, I bought a new shelf to help organize my organic weed killers and put up a chalkboard to track my pruning schedule. Satisfied with my efforts, I closed the shed door, feeling pretty darn good about my efforts.
But, when I walked back into the house through the garage, I was reminded of my similar spring ritual of cleaning my garage, which is presently 50% disgustingly messy. It made me realize that most things in my life are constantly becoming messier — from my garage, to my desk, to our company’s file shares.
I’m sure I can’t be the only one who feels this way. What about your business content?
Whether you realize it or not, it too is on a path towards becoming disgustingly messy. Well, I’m telling you it’s not my fault… and it’s not your fault, either. It’s nature, pure and simple. In fact, we are all fighting the most powerful forces in the universe: The Laws of Thermodynamics.
How Do the Laws of Thermodynamics Apply to Content?
Thermodynamics is a branch of science that describes how heat (or energy) works. It’s easy to understand because it explains life. If you know what to look for, you will realize that you deal with thermodynamics all day long. Whether it’s the stars in the sky, your business content, or my shed, nothing can escape the relentless grip of thermodynamics.
Let’s take a closer look at the three primary laws of thermodynamics and how they negatively impact content, and explore how a Learning Content Management System (LCMS) — a Content Management System (CMS) designed specifically to support learning, but applicable to a wide range of content types — can help you fight them.
Fighting the First Law of Thermodynamics: Work Harder, Then Smarter
The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can’t be created or destroyed inside an isolated system, it simply shifts from one thing to another. For your daily life, this means you can work harder, but it comes at the expense of something else. This could be another project, fun conversations at the coffee machine, or time with your family.
Once you recognize this — and “working harder” has reached its limits — you might introduce a new employee to balance the load. This essentially breaks your “isolated system,” and adds “new energy” to your team. Adding staff also has limits, because it too must come at the expense of something else within the larger corporate system. That’s the hitch of the first law — when you step out of your “isolated system,” you’re simply kicking the can down the road.
So, what’s the solution? If you can’t create more energy in your team by either working harder or hiring additional staff, then there’s only one answer… get more efficient with the energy you have! By becoming efficient, your team will be happier, your manager will be happier, and your overall career will be better.
“Put on a Sweater.” — President Jimmy Carter, during the energy crisis in the 70s.
The same applies to your business content. An LCMS can greatly improve your content efficiency in three simple ways.
1. Content Re-Use
Breaking down content into reusable objects is a key component of an LCMS’s efficiency. To be truly reusable, content objects should be as granular as possible. To simplify the process of reuse, LCMSs come with a built-in “Where Used” report, allowing you to see exactly where each piece of content has been used (and reused).
With an LCMS, you never start with a blank sheet of paper, you have a repository of content at your fingertips. Knowing where content has been used and reused allows even greater efficiencies for maintaining and updating content. When there is a change to a specific piece of content, you only need to make the update once, and it will automatically update all the places where the content is reused.
2. Template-Driven Outputs
During my tenure in the learning technology space, I’ve found that content authors often spend upward of 50% of their time on formatting and layout. An efficient LCMS reduces this time tremendously by allowing a team to collaboratively build, publish, share, and maintain output templates. This allows authors to spend less time formatting and more time focusing on writing more valuable content and keeping up with content changes.
An efficient LCMS makes it easy to create print, web and mobile versions of the same content without duplicating efforts. Without an LCMS, authors typically have to recreate content for different outputs using multiple tools. As a result, content production times can increase exponentially, making it impossible for many teams to keep up.
3. Translations
Translating content to meet different audience needs is both expensive and time consuming. With an LCMS, organizations can improve efficiency and reduce translation costs. Having the ability to export your content in XLIFF, a standard format used by translation vendors, allows organizations to export and import only what is needed for translation. In order to do this, content cannot be tied to presentation. Separating content from the formatting or output type, allows organizations to complete translation in a fraction of the time.
A robust LCMS also provides side-by-side translation, so that native speakers familiar with your business can compare translations to the base version for review and refinement.
If you can’t fight the first law of thermodynamics by working harder or justifying more staff, then consider inserting more efficiency into your process with an LCMS.
Fighting the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Stay Organized
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy (or disorder) in an isolated system will always increase over time. Without some outside influence, disorder always follows order and it’s never the other way around. This so called “arrow of time” is so pervasive that it is used to secure your bank account with cryptography, explain my battle with my disgustingly messy shed, and to predict the eventual collapse of our universe.
Imagine that! Your content is always on a path toward chaos. Entropy is your enemy, and the only weapon you have is organization. Like my annual shed cleaning, organization can be an event, or it can be built into your everyday routine.
“I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.” — Elon Musk
Gone are the days of content isolated on individual desktops. Unfortunately, now content is often uploaded to a SharePoint site and forgotten, making it highly vulnerable to entropy. An LCMS helps you proactively fight content chaos and entropy by making your content accessible, searchable and trackable.
1. Accessibility
An LCMS must have a robust content library to facilitate the organization, control and sharing of learning objects. Of course, you still need control, which is where granular permissions come in. They let you define exactly who can see, access, and edit content. Limit access to content as needed, and once it has been reviewed and approved, content can be locked down to prevent additional editing. Effective organization requires content be accessible but controlled.
2. Searchability
Hard-to-find content is a huge barrier to organization. An LCMS allows you to define your own taxonomy and tag it at any level you choose, including educational objectives, retention date, archive date, expiry date, keywords and more, making it easy to find the content you need, when you need it.
3. Versioning & Trackability
Part of being organized is tracking content through its full lifecycle, and beyond. With an LCMS, you get a complete history of changes, allowing users to compare versions, roll back and forward between versions, and view a full audit trail — including who last modified it, and when. An LCMS allows content to be “checked-out” at the project or paragraph level, allowing multiple team members to work on the same content simultaneously.
Because content is a critical asset, organization needs to be part of your routine operations. It certainly shouldn’t be treated as an annual event, like my shed cleaning.
An LCMS makes organization seamless and helps you fight the second law of thermodynamics — entropy — without any extra effort.
Fighting the Third Law of Thermodynamics: Build for Change
The third law of thermodynamics states that, as the temperature of an isolated system approaches absolute zero, entropy slows. When absolute zero is achieved, entropy stops. However, absolute zero can never be reached.
That sounds futile, doesn’t it?
Well, it is. In fact, it’s going the other way — change is increasing. Your company may add a new product, acquire a competitor, or move to agile development with daily software updates. To adapt to these changes, you need to put content directly in the applications people are already using and make it more personalized and accessible.
What the third law means is that content chaos inevitably will become more challenging over time.
“We are stubborn on goals, but flexible on details.” — Jeff Bezos
To loosen the cold, hard grip of the third law, your systems and processes must be flexible so you can quickly adapt. Content flexibility hinges on these three pillars.
1. Use the Right Tool for the Job
No single tool will allow you to accomplish all of your content authoring needs over the long term. Do you need branching simulations? There’s a tool for that. Virtual reality? Video? The list of potential authoring needs is endless. The problem is, all of these unique pieces of content are then siloed in their monolithic authoring environments. An LCMS platform allows you to pick the right authoring tool for the job, while still keeping all content in a consistent and collaborative environment.
2. Constantly Improving Content
As your content proliferates for unique audiences and experiences, it becomes impossible to manually track usage. Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Learning Experience Platforms (LXP) are becoming marginalized as companies find their rigid structure inhibits learning in the flow of work. Too many people suddenly realize they’ve created a daisy-chain of authoring tools and distribution points that gives them limited insight into how their learning content is really used.
An LCMS platform should have its foundation in a Learning Record Store (LRS) that tracks how users interact with content. Having a single source for distributing your content allows your LCMS to be “the” place where leaner consumption is tracked in xAPI statements, even when that consumption is happening on different LMSs and learning portals. These xAPI statements power analytics dashboards that provide an accurate and objective picture of your content engagement and performance.
With an LMCS, you can improve your content at a granular level, defying the third law to get your organization as close to absolute zero as possible.
Wait, isn’t there a Fourth Law of Thermodynamics?
Yes, there is. It’s actually called the “Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics.” Despite coming after the first, second and third laws, it is actually considered the most fundamental. The Zeroth Law states that if there are two “systems” that are in equilibrium with a third system, then all systems are in equilibrium with each other. In science, this is used to quickly compare multiple systems.
With an LCMS, the Zeroth Law speaks to the equilibrium between your company, your LCMS, and a third component… the LCMS provider. When all three align, great things can happen!
Ken Ballard is VP of Sales at Xyleme, Inc. Xyleme’s next generation Learning Content Management System (LCMS) empowers content professionals to revolutionize the way learning content is both created and delivered. From authoring and publishing to delivery and analysis, organizations can now manage their entire content lifecycle efficiently and effectively, and all in one place.
