Stories
I was asked many times what I actually do at NXP. My answer was never satisfactory: usually this person asked me back "Isn't it boring?", and never really understood what my job is. Well, here it is!
My core skill is creating documents that explain technical concepts or procedures, and make them as accessible and useful as possible. That's what I learnt during my Master's degree*. Think of the help system you open when you're stuck using a program. I could have written it. However, at NXP, the writing part is only 10% of my job.
The central part of my job is to use my capacity to structure and simplify technical information to redesign how the documentation produced by NXP is created and published. As NXP manufactures electronic chips, a pretty technical field, marketing and technical documentation** have a lot of content in common.
Here are a few examples of documents, for the same product (except the brochure):
- a data sheet (very technical, by engineers for engineers)
- a product page (Web version of the data sheet)
- a leaflet (glossy technical overview that marketers print for events)
- a product category page (mostly marketing, introduces the product family)
- a brochure (marketer wet dream)
If you pay attention, you'll see that the data sheet, the product page and the leaflet have a lot of text content in common. My mission, in the long term, is to make sure these pieces of content are written, reviewed, updated, translated, etc. only once, and not on each single document.
The schema below shows how content pieces such as the Features and benefits and the General description can be reused in for the publication of documents for multiple products, with no copy/paste. The content pieces used for the documents dedicated to products are often too specific to be reused at product category level.
I am also in charge of configuring the publication of the documents you have seen: colors, fonts, layout, etc. I configure each publication channel once, and then the pieces of content are published automatically when they are released by the author.
Currently, it is only the case for the product page and the category page. The other documents are still made by hand and individually with a lot of copy/paste from other documents: the data sheet will come soon, closely followed by the leaflet, and the brochure will probably come somewhat later given it has little content in common with the other documents.
My secondary tasks are the following:
- writing user documentation for the documentation editing and publishing tools
- training the users for the same tools
- representing the company at world workgroups dedicated to information management, such as the OASIS
- assisting the company in the selection of tools and the design of procedures for the translation of the content
- more generally, coming up with crazy ideas that question the well-established motto: "we have always been doing it this way"
* For those who have known me for some time: yes, I studied translation, but that was only during my Bachelor's degree (3 years). Then I specialized in Multimedia and Technical Communication during my Master's degree (2 years).
** The technical documentation helps the client engineer to know what the product does, how to implement it and to compare products. The marketing documentation helps the people who give money to the engineers to understand why it's worth it. Or not.
First post here, so let me introduce myself. I'm Colin Maudry, and I want to enable people to get the information they seek in its purest form, as easily as possible.
It consists in regrouping similar "things", connecting those that are related somehow and presenting them a way that makes their meaning and purpose obvious to the target person or audience. I'm merely refering to enabling any interesting piece of knowledge to unleash its full potential and let anyone who is looking for it embrace it with no compromise whatsoever. The perfect connection between information or knowledge, and the one who seeks it.
That's quite a tough challenge when you know the massive load of knowledge available... Well, when you think of it, the existing mass is not an issue. If you leave aside the outdated knowledge, in other words, the knowledge that is not true anymore or has an extremely low probability to be of any interest for anyone*, the endless universe of books, articles, maps, PDF, tagged concrete walls, fanzines, cereal packages and tweets shrinks to a galaxy. You can't sense the difference, but you know it's smaller.
Moreover, I'm not the only one, there are more. More people, skilled gardeners of the human history, holding their ground under the assaults of the worms of ignorance and oblivion. They do their little part of the job, sorting, listing, organizing, filtering, updating their rows of litterature cabbages, their science pumpkins or their news sunflowers. They rule a library, reign on the yellow pages or sort their records in inverted chronological order of release date. In a word, they keep stuff tidy, in a way that will help people to access it. That's some more sectors of the galaxy I don't have to worry about, because they are in good hands.
That leaves us the interesting information that is either not managed or badly managed. The information people are looking for, but that is hardly findable (by the way Internet did a hell of job to make things, if not easily findable, at least somewhat accessible). If we state that any piece of information that is not managed correctly is not easily accessible and consequently sinks sooner than later into oblivion (= the endless universe, §3), we identify the real challenge: taking care of the new knowledge as soon as it's out of the press, published to the Web or saved on the disk. We are billions of intelligent creatures who create or imagine something new, every day, in every corner of the Earth. But our memory is limited. And we like sharing. And we are curious. This is where I roll up my sleeves and start doodling the kind of things you see in the background.
I created this blog to share (!) with you the content management tricks I come across with during my trip in this galaxy.
- Colin
*I'm not saying there is such a thing as "uninteresting" information, given it's a relative notion. In this article, I refer to this information that only historians or archivists are likely to be interested in, precisely for its very nature of old forgotten piece of information.