TC Trends and NextGen Content

Global companies grapple with the complexities of creating, translating, and delivering content to every customer, in every language, across all channels. For many, this process is entirely too manual, time-consuming, and costly. The secret to streamlining the content supply chain can be found in a new, more holistic approach to content. Cruce Saunders, founder of [A] – simplea.com, is the author of Content Engineering for a Multi-Channel World. His team provides cutting-edge content consulting to some of the largest companies in the world. He looks to the power of the [A] Content Intelligence Framework, AI, and a new operating model for content to transform and automate the content supply chain.

This opening keynote will investigate:

• The current state of enterprise content, and emerging content creation trends
• The patterns that enable personalization at scale, across proliferating channels including chatbots, voice assistants, AR/VR, and IoT devices
• Publishing transformations happening today: how technology, people, and process work together to create new futures, structures, and teams to evolve in the face of constant change

China is investing heavily in Industry 4.0 technologies for its “Smart Factories” initiative – part of the “Made in China 2025” programme. But the various platforms and initiatives around the world for these technologies are saying very little about information.

This presentation shares the main points of the model known as Information 4.0, an informational response to Industry 4.0. This model was developed by the Information 4.0 Consortium, which promotes exchange between the worlds of technology and information development and management. The model represents our understanding of what is needed to effectively meet the informational needs of users faced with AI, IoT, Bionics, Augmented Reality, etc. We don’t consider this model as definitive or fixed, it is a living body that will evolve with changing needs.

The presentation focuses on two central notions:
High contextuality
Molecular information

New technological capacities, tied to mobile devices, wearables, and eventually implants, will make it so that context and content interact, change each other, and influence user behavior. Ultra-fine context sensing and personalisation cannot happen without AI, and information design must become molecular – chunked into very small units – to support it.

This also means that development technologies and the technology of information management and delivery need to be integrated at the moment of product design, with technical communicators inside product design teams. This is part of the theory of agile product design, but has not, so far, been well implemented.

In a place like China, where there is no long history of practice, there is a particularly good opportunity for leadership and innovation developing new practices adapted to the future. This kind of approach is also applicable to initiatives such as Smart Cities, another area where China is investing heavily.