Business
John Collins John Collins is a content engineer at Atlassian, where they are well along in their transition from old-fashioned bespoke content models to modern connected content. Creating and managing content for intelligent content ecosystems requires a fresh approach and a new set of skills. This new content engineering discipline helps enterprises address the biggest challenges of the digital era: personalization, omnichannel strategy, and localization. We talked about: his work as a content architect and engineer at Atlassian and his background in journalism and technical writing the maturing of content professions and the emergence of specialties like content engineering Cruce Saunder's seven disciplines of content engineering: model, metadata, markup, schema, taxonomy, topology, and graph the move from bespoke content creation to new kinds of connected content how he has helped authors adapt to the new kinds of creativity that decoupled content requires the different approaches to content strategy and information architecture necessitated by the emergence of content engineering the three trends driving enterprises to decoupled content solutions: personalization, omnichannel strategy, and localization the relationship between localization and the technical writing concept of conditionalization how modern CMSs permit more robust uses of metadata in content management the need for more people with content backgrounds to get into the content engineering field John's bio John Collins is senior content architect on the Content Platform team at Atlassian. Long ago, John was an award-winning community journalist, but he made the move to the software industry more than a decade ago and has extensive experience with technical writing, UX writing, content strategy, content design, and localization. He has spoken internationally, but John is still learning and exploring content, design, and how best to get users the content they need. Connect with John on social media Twitter LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/cszmfIvAP98 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 106. As online content becomes more complex, and as the content itself gets decoupled from its ultimate presentation, new specializations are emerging in the content profession. Content engineering is the new discipline that builds content assets for decoupled content ecosystems. John Collins and his colleagues at Atlassian are adapting their approach to content strategy and information architecture to engineer these new content experiences. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 106 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us, John Collins. John is a Senior Content Architect at Atlassian, the big software publisher. So welcome, John, tell the folks a little bit more about what you do there at Atlassian. John: Yeah. So I'm in a new role at the company as Content Architect. I've kind of been doing this for a few years under the title of Content Designer, but we've made this move, we're trying to make this more of a practice at Atlassian, of engineering content or architecting content. And trying to build that up as kind of a community of practice, or whatever of those kinds of terms you want to use. I come from a content background, I was actually in journalism years ago, and I was a content designer and technical writer in software for many, many years. And I've always been kind of drawn to the underlying systems and structures of the content, and that has morphed into what I am doing today. Larry: That's great. And I love it. Well, I want to say, in terms of the way you contextualized it, that's such a common pathway into this, and I love that you've gone down the more technical part of it. But I think the way we first connected was you did a ...