Feature
“Fail quick, fail often, recover quickly.”
This truism of DevOps has redefined the way that companies launch products. By destroying the invisible wall between developers -- the left brain of the business -- and operations, the logical troubleshooters, DevOps has created the ultimate digital product assembly line.
Now other departments are looking to this collaborative, just-in-time, iterative process as a framework for success.
A Continuous Content Flow
Enterprise document management is the latest process to adopt the DevOps model. DocOps, as it’s called, applies DevOps-like collaboration to various teams across the enterprise, liberating content creation from its traditional silos into a dynamic platform, where content matures along with a project’s lifecycle.
DocOps is positioned to become the new gold standard for document management. That said it’s still a new process. What exactly is DocOps — and how can you best put it into practice?
The paper age is quickly fading. Content today is a 24/7, on-demand commodity that can make or break a business's success.
In the early days of the Internet, it was more about reproducing all printed materials online. Now customers want short bursts of concise content that is readily available from one interface and is geared more and more towards mobile devices.
Centralizing content through DocOps allows companies to customize delivery however customers want it on any device and in any language, and then get analytics on how well it's working. James Turcotte, senior vice president at CA Technologies, described DocOps in a recent interview as “the content sibling of DevOps.”
It brings all of your document workflows into one actionable platform where you can create and upload content. In addition to these features, DocOps provides ways to implement version control, embed images, diagrams and video, check spelling and grammar as well as including increasingly important translation functions.
In other words, if it involves content the centralized DocOps repository is where it happens, and Turcotte points out, “it allows product information to be continuously developed, even after product release.”
Learning Opportunities
Webinar
Jun
8
Attracting—and Keeping—Your High-Net-Worth Investors
Join PwC to dissect their recent survey findings on a specific customer subset — high-net-worth investors.
Webinar
Jun
13
The Future of Contact Centers with AI at the Helm
Learn how to balance human intuition and interaction with the potential uses of AI to create delightful and lasting CX
Webinar
Jun
13
Learn How to Deliver Dynamic Video Experiences at Scale
Learn how to convert existing assets into video experiences in near real-time.
Webinar
Jun
20
3 Steps to Unlock Your Customer Data and Drive Revenue
Discover how Twilio Segment’s #1 Customer Data Platform helps implement data-driven strategies.
Webinar
Jun
21
Retail Reinvented: A Masterclass in Creating Digital Experiences That Click
Hear how online retailers architect their digital experience infrastructure for peak traffic and demand
Webinar
Jun
22
How to Succeed in Today's Engagement Economy
Doing true personalization at scale with marketing automation
Webinar
Jun
8
Attracting—and Keeping—Your High-Net-Worth Investors
Join PwC to dissect their recent survey findings on a specific customer subset — high-net-worth investors.
Webinar
Jun
13
The Future of Contact Centers with AI at the Helm
Learn how to balance human intuition and interaction with the potential uses of AI to create delightful and lasting CX
How Does It Work?
One of the beautiful things about DocOps is that it takes familiar technologies and repurposes them to be even more efficient and useful. In a recent post, Turcotte added that “since collaboration is a core theme of DocOps, we chose to use the Confluence wiki from Atlassian” and worked in a number of third-party plug-ins. By choosing a platform that enables easy integrations and collaboration, Turcotte set the stage for his documents to flow from creation to maturity to repurposing.
Team members use the wiki to contribute to the whole instead of each person writing separate Support Articles for each issue. One team member acts as the editor and curates the content through a product's lifecycle to prevent repetition and increase value. This way, the question about the most recent version is no longer necessary. There is only one version, and it is always the latest and greatest. When it comes time to add content to websites -- even in different languages -- workers don’t have to hunt for versions or translations. It’s all integrated right into the workflow.
DocOps is a Win-Win for Business
CA's experience is just one example of how businesses use DocOps to bring together those who create the content and those who manage how that content gets to customers. Customers get a better user experience from centralized, curated content and no longer have to wade through hundreds of Support Articles to find answers. The team knows it always has the most relevant information in one place. When it comes to needing to know what customers think, this central content hub provides unparalleled business analytics.
For businesses going global, the centralized nature of DocOps is invaluable. Rather than searching for versions and siloed documents to translate and storing them everywhere from email to project management software, DocOps can facilitate a one-stop translation and localization hub as well. Automated translation workflows allow for control over what is translated and when. Then when the analytics team looks at the data, it will be apparent what features work well and where since users in Delhi might be searching for more information about certain functionality than users in Dallas. Necessary changes in the product, the documentation and target languages for translation are now more obvious because of DocOps.
A Free-Flowing Content Future
Industry leaders know that the right brain and the left-brain must work together. Whether your business is exploring new verticals, increasing efficiency by dismantling content silos across the enterprise or expanding across international borders, DocOps enables the agility and speed that spell success in this new era of business.
