Post on 27-Feb-2018
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Improve Content Quality with One Process Change
Kathleen RuggeriRockwell Automation, Inc.Manager, Information Architecture
and Content Strategy
Lisa Adair Rockwell Automation, Inc.Content Quality Lead
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What We’ll Cover Today
• Issues We Needed to Solve
• Process Change We Instituted
• How We Went About It
• Results We’ve Seen
• Can it Work for You?
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Rockwell Automation at a Glance
AUTOMATION SOLUTIONS
80+COUNTRIES
22,000$5.9B
Innovation
Domain expertise
Culture of integrity and corporate responsibility
SERVINGCUSTOMERS FOR
113 YRS
FISCAL 2016 SALES
WORLD’S LARGEST COMPANY DEDICATED TO INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION AND INFORMATION
EMPLOYEES
for a broad rangeof industries
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Issues We Were Facing
• Limited editing resources
• Multiple style guides to know/maintain
• Levels-of-edit (full, medium, light) helped
• Could not edit all teams’ work
• Clunky editing process (commented PDF files)
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Issues We Were Facing (Continued)
• No (good) dedicated source of terms
• Trademarks - look up cumbersome, enforcement difficult
• No easy way to track or measure quality
Consistent terms
Streamlined process
Good grammar and style
Improving in all of these areas would also positively impact translations
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Process Change: Implementing Machine Editing
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What is Machine Editing?
• Software analyzes content for:
• Style
• Readability
• Terminology
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Tone/Voice
• It’s a tool:
• Can do only what it is programmed to do
• Cannot understand your content
• Not perfect
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Manual versus Machine Editing
Manual Editing Machine Editing
Limited primarily by time- Work measured in hours
Limited by processing capability- Work measured in seconds
Cannot increase scope/authors without adding extra hours (headcount limitations)
One-time cost to increase processing power or add licenses with limited scope- Everyone with a license can be edited
Execute one-by-one with reliance on human editor Execute whenever author wants – beginning, middle, and/or end of project
Slight variations in execution (human nature) Same rule checked the same way for every user, every time
Evaluate and report manually Automated analytics
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Machine Editing Benefits
• Improve quality of source content
• Complex grammar and detailed style issues are corrected upstream, early in the writing process
• Authors can concentrate on their content
• ‘Heavy lifting’ of editing done by the tool
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Machine Editing Options
• Some options:
• ProWritingAid, StyleWriter®, WhiteSmoke®, Grammarly®, Acrolinx®
• We chose Acrolinx
• Natural language processing engine that guides authors as they create content
Trademarks are property of their respective companies.
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Where Can Acrolinx Help?
• Consistency for better customer experience
• Style – embeds institutional knowledge
• Grammar – reduces complex sentences
• Terminology – enforces correct term, provides usage guidance
• Translation-ready due to cleaner source content
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Checking Your Content
Run Acrolinx checks from Review ribbon
Acrolinx lists flags in a sidebar, similar to how Microsoft Word displays review comments
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How We Tested Machine Editing
• 6-month pilot with out-of-the-box configuration
• 8 authors tested the tool
• Feedback overwhelmingly positive!
• Business case to management was easy
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How We Implemented Machine Editing
• Consultants helped us train and load terminology
• Controlled roll-outs – one group at a time, by campus
• Turned pilot testers into super users to help support authors
• Happy adoption – not by force
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What Can You Customize?
• We have 117 grammar and style rules
• 88 out-of-the-box
• 10 customized for Rockwell Automation
• 19 created new for Rockwell Automation
• Create difference rulesets for different groups of authors
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Terminology is Now Formalized
• Centralized termbase
• 1100 English terms; 81,000 multilingual terms
• Use Acrolinx to support authors (use this term/not that term)
• Multilingual terminology is a related, but separate, function
• Up-front decisions on which terms to manage
• Trademarks are key – updates from Legal happen real time
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Results after Implementing Machine Editing
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Results/What We’ve Seen
• Tighter control/consistency in terminology/Trademarks
• More readable content
• 4x more authors have editing support
• Non-native speakers who write in English get immediate support
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Content Quality Improving Translations
• High-quality content is faster to translate and validate
• Quality is built into the source once
• Engage with translation team, vendors, and validators
• Build a process to improve translatability continuously and systematically with tweaks to the tool
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Is Machine Editing for You?
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Machine Editing Considerations
• Style guide complexity
• Cost
• Per-user licensing scheme, plus hosting server
• Consultant fees for configuration and ongoing support
• Resources to manage the tool and support users
• Short-term impact to productivity, translation memory
• Quality check still needed for issues the tool cannot find
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What’s in it for You as an Author?
• Makes you an even better author
• Frees you to learn the product you’re documenting
• Gets new authors up to speed faster
• Use whenever you need it
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Thank You!