Promoting Continuous Learning at Autodesk Through Smart Content Management

In February I wrote about an interesting report Making Greater Use of Smart Content in the Enterprise by Geoff Bock, Dale Waldt, and Mary LaPlante. It covers XML applications that have long proven value with reusable componentized content. Here is an interesting case that came out of that effort, Managing Content for Continuous Learning at Autodesk.

Autodesk, Inc., is a design software and services company and its products address all phases of the design processes for architects and designers. These professional often need to go beyond standard practices to complete their projects. They share their practical tips and best practices through online communities. As the case notes, these “communities are the long tail of the Autodesk ecosystem, where the Internet combines the insights from many small groups into a major web presence.” At the same time the professionals like to get their content in short chucks relevant to the context of their work.  While Autodesk has long maintained a comprehensive set o manuals, it now needed to address the changing expectations.

First, they had already started modularizing their technical manuals. They now needed to build on this effort, to improve the accessed to this content.  They also needed to better leverage the content generated through online communities by capturing and curating the contributions of innovative customers.

They set up an enhanced delivery capability by adding MindTouch to their content infrastructure. I have covered MindTouch’s move into this space (see MindTouch 2010 Provides Intelligent Product and Services Documentation). MindTounch 2010 has enhanced three major areas to support this major use case. It now provides new capabilities for authoring, discovery, and curation of strategic content.

As the report notes, “a social web platform supports “community pages” for collecting and sharing user­generated content on a wide variety of topics. Once authenticated by the site, both Autodesk customers and support engineers from across the ecosystem can publish “tips and tricks” recommendations, blog on new topics, comment on posts, reference code snippets, or add links to topics covered elsewhere on the web.” Here is the answer. 

Moreover, Autodesk can track user activity across their site and the communities to determine trending topics and the emerging needs. Content curators perform this role. This tracking helps plan future releases. See yesterday’s post on The Rising Need for Content Curation Skills and Capabilities.

Since MindTouch optimizes online documentation for Web search, Autodesk now can cross sell through the educational materials, based on participants’ interest.  This turns a purely cost center activity into revenue generating one. Smart move. There is much more in the report.