Omnichannel Conference 2023 Sessions

“UX Research and Service Design for Enterprise”

Session leader(s):

Through UX research, we have the chance to improve bad enterprise software. I will talk about how to take research to new heights, by applying mixed methods and by modifying the traditional Service Design Blueprint, to suite alternative research needs and how this can make any project infinitely better.

Many of us have worked on some pretty poorly designed enterprise software. As UX professionals, we must fight for those who suffer through that experience for hours on end at work. I am going to share a case study where I applied user research methods and Service Design principles to improve the report-making process. My quest for a better customer report goes through a variety of research methods to uncover gaps and opportunities. Going from low-fidelity analysis to improvement recommendations, I show people how they can think outside of the box of a traditional Service Design Blueprint to make any project profoundly better. Using mixed methods in creative ways can be applied to projects outside of the consumer-facing UX world.

“Presenting Your UX Work Using Spontaneous Talks Frameworks”

Session leader(s):

We know that presenting the value of our work to stakeholders can sometimes be a challenge. Spontaneous Talks Frameworks have been around for years. They are often taught at universities and are used to help people think of answers or tell stories fast and smart. Jen is going to teach you a few Spontaneous Talks Frameworks so you can use them when presenting your work, answering tough questions or simply telling your stories. Applying these simple frameworks can help a person avoid anxiety by quickly organizing a thought, and moving forward to articulating that thought in a cohesive and eloquent manner.

Podcast Ep. 23 – You can’t break silos, but you can connect them w/ Jael Schultz and Audrey Hamoy

Session leader(s):
Jael Schultz, Audrey Hamoy

In this episode, we hear from Audrey Hamoy and Jael Schultz from American Express.

Noz engages in an in-depth discussion with Audrey and Jael, content strategy professionals, navigating the complex terrain of cross-channel consistency. They unpack the challenges and share the strategies they have employed to create a seamless communication experience across various channels.

They discuss the importance of consistency in communication, documenting processes, collaborative efforts, and how to kickstart your journey to better omnichannel communication.

What you will learn:

• How to master the art of cross-channel communication consistency


• How to leverage documentation for efficient decision-making


• How to boost process efficiency through regular collaboration and meetings


• How to choose accessible documentation tools for enhanced team usage


• How to embrace the journey, not the destination, in omnichannel communication.

 



 

Full session transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

Noz Urbina  02:07

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the omnichannel podcast by OmnichannelX. I am your host Noz Urbina, and I’m here today with Jael Schultz and Audrey Hamoy. They are both joining me to talk about their experiences doing omnichannel out in the field out in the trenches, their real life stories. So let’s go in alphabetical order. Audrey, you want to tell the audience a little bit about yourself and how you got into this?

Audrey Hamoy  02:47

Sure. Thank you. Yeah, my name is Audrey, I have been a content architect for about a year now, kind of going into it from a background, bachelor’s in Creative Writing Master’s in applied linguistics, kind of like tailored perfectly to content design and UX writing. And, yeah, I just kind of got into it from that, um, I’ve been at Amex for the last three and a half years.

Noz Urbina  03:15

Fantastic. And Jael, do you want to tell the audience a little bit about yourself.

Jael Schulz  03:22

My education is actually in design, my Bachelor’s is in graphic design. I had an interest in fine arts, but I figured that’s a hard way to make a living. So I went with graphic design. And they wound up in digital content strategy, by accident, actually, I’d applied for a design role. And they said, we have this other role open that we think you might be a good fit for, which was a digital content specialist. And I figured I’d give it a whirl. And I actually fell in love with it. It really played to my strengths as far as information organization. And my design background obviously helped because it was working a lot still with digital designers on web experiences. So I’ve been in content strategy for about a decade. I joined Amex four years ago, as a UX writer, actually, the hiring director at the time said, I know we have a need for content strategy. We don’t have headcount for that right now. So I want somebody with that background. And then last year, similar to Audrey, moved into a content architect role. So Audrey is on the mobile side of things. And I’m on the website. There’s newly formed teams working on information architecture, on mobile and on web. And so were in those roles on those respective teams.

Audrey Hamoy  04:33

Yeah, we got pretty lucky to be going into those roles at the same time. And now we can talk about this omni channel situation that we found ourselves in.

Noz Urbina  04:43

Fantastic Well, you’re the you’re kind of backgrounds and kind of thinking about this as it’s very near and dear to my heart. I kind of say that it’s all rolling up into user experience at the end of the day, and it’s a design process, whether you’re designing words, whether you’re designing information architectures and taxonomies. When you’re designing interfaces, it’s it’s all design work. And it’s all driven by understanding our users. So I’m really excited to talk about what you’ve been doing. So my understanding is you’ve been working on undergrads grassroots push to go more omnichannel, Amex. You know, omnichannel is what we talk about all day, every day at the omnichannel. podcast, we always have this issue, because by definition is cross functional. But organizations are hierarchical, you know, budgets are allocated by department, by region, and so on. The users cutting across departments, and they don’t really care at all, who or where their their answer or their experience comes from, they just want to have a good relationship with the brand. You know, I’m engaging with your brand. For some value proposition, I want that value proposition and I don’t care about your headcount or your turnover, who’s understaffed or whose responsibility this part of my experience was? So orgs have things like a web design team and a mobile design team and a dev team that really has no bearing on the content or the experience? How do you experience that in your roles today, this kind of inherent contradiction all companies have between between silos and omni channel experiences?

Audrey Hamoy  06:22

Yeah, just a little bit of background is just kind of like how we work. Like, obviously, there’s a web design team, there’s a mobile design team. And then all of these things are kind of siloed. separately. So gel works with, you know, different dev teams, and I do different product teams than I do. So we are very much siloed, like through the organization. So it is like how do we like just having that context, I feel like it’s important to know how we kind of like, worked together a little bit on it. But yeah, and

Jael Schulz  06:56

I would say also, where we are now on. Newly stood up relatively newly stood up architecture teams on specific channels still, but as counterparts to each other is actually a huge step forward. Some of the stuff we’re going to talk about today is work that we collaborated together on when we were still in UX writing roles. We were again, I was still on web object was still on mobile. But this was before we were set up in these kinds of architecture roles. And I would say in some respects, the work that we did on this, from the grassroots sort of efforts in showing this cross channel collaboration, in some regards, helped to make the case for setting up these content, IA roles on these respective teams. So there was a plan essentially, to stand up these architecture teams. And the work that we had done on this thinking project collaborating and showing the benefit of that sort of cross channel approach to content, in some ways made the case for having these content specific roles on the team. So I think today, we’re probably going to chat a little more about I think the scenario that a lot of folks in bigger orgs can relate to, which is if you’re in some kind of a content role or design role, it still applies. And you’re trying to work across those channels when the organization is sort of organized around channels. How do you do that before you have official support and official backing and our counterparts to each other? Well,

Noz Urbina  08:27

let’s ask a very fundamental question. How did you find each other? Like how did this How did YouTube first connect and realize that you had a common vision for us?

Audrey Hamoy  08:37

Yeah, actually, we just started working at Amex together. She was on the web team. I was actually the first mobile UX writer on the on the mobile team. So we’re our worlds were a little bit different at first, and then we both just started collaborating on banking and realize that we both I think we played each other’s strengths really well. And then we’re, the other one is like, you know, I’m forgetful. So jello usually helps me like, kind of, you know, pick up where like, my brain leaves off so and stuff like that. So it was just like, yeah, we ended up working Amex together and found out that we’re like, really, really good at collaborating together. And just really good at documentation and all of these things that are needed to kind of like create this. This like story of like, of collaboration, when things like that don’t don’t exist.

Jael Schulz  09:35

Yeah. And UX writing is organized under the UX writing rules are organized under a director within the part of the org that we work in. So we were aware of each other. It was the first time that we had had a project where roadmaps align somewhat across the the web and the mobile and what they were attempting to build or improve at the time, but there’s Also that question of where do you find each other because we eventually discovered, pulled and collaborated with a writer on the business checking side. And that was through the experience of trying to understand like, if we’re working on consumer, then how do we make sure that where appropriate, there’s consistency between consumer and business. And so we discovered there was actually a writing person recently hired there. And so we pulled that into so it is, you know, us being under the same director made it a little easier to get started, but it is sometimes a process of discovery, because you don’t even know who else might be out there in the Lord that’s working on something related. Yeah,

Noz Urbina  10:41

especially Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So that’s what I’m kind of picturing is. So this, did it was this in the days of physical offices or, because I’m thinking about our all our people who are working remotely? And were you like, literally like looking at the org chart, and thinking Who should we reach out to or each other in a hallway,

Audrey Hamoy  11:02

it was remotely and we were beginning to in the banking project we worked on. So this is for, I believe, I can say this for the MX high yield savings account, and then the checking account, which was kind of like a new product that we hadn’t had before. And then we were building the savings account into the app and the website natively. So it was like a bigger thing than we had undertaken, and a brand new, like project that,

Noz Urbina  11:31

like potential brought into that, yeah,

Audrey Hamoy  11:34

which product which Amex doesn’t really build, typically, so it was pretty excited. So like, all these people coming from all these areas, and we started kind of working with the business people and their product people more, and then we kind of found out like, oh, there’s a writer there, they’re, you know, what is this person working on. So that was just us proactively, like reaching out to that person. And, and establishing that that personal connection, which also is very important in a siloed, kind of omni channel and like, separate channel, if we want to become that one channel, we got to have important relationships with with people that are, you know, on our on our team, and, you know, want to fight the good fight, I guess.

Noz Urbina  12:24

Absolutely. So the human relationships, but it’s something we talk a lot about at omnichannel x, because building those internal relationships, they have to be there, we have to be sharing, we have to be aligning on customer journeys, and understanding and supporting a common vision of a customer journey. So often in projects we get together. And when I say customer journey, I’m not referring to like the sales funnel. Like the buyers journey, I’m talking about actual experiences that people have the the journey that is achieving an objective that you have. Some research has been coming out about this, which I quote all the time, which I love. So McKinsey and customer, Kinsey and company has said measuring satisfaction on customer journeys, is 30%, more predictive of overall customer satisfaction than measuring each individual interaction. So we can get very, like we want to get super micro targeted, like I designed this new screen and it’s got a button is my button succeeding and the world’s buttons. And that’s, that’s fine that we all want to kind of measure our works in such a granular way. But that’s not actually what people care about, you know, people care about whether the whole thing came together and they were able to open an account or no migrate, do a bank transfer or whatever it is your your company offers. So but how do you you need to get people together on that? And discuss how do we consistently show up across all these touchpoints across this, this, this this purpose that the user has. And if you don’t have a common vision of that purpose, and you haven’t discussed that, then everyone is looking at the experience through their own lens of what they do. Right. Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about your how, what was it like for different teams who were coming together in a bigger context, but are different teams? And you know, you may look? Where does the documentation live? Where do personas live? Where does your understanding of the journeys live? How to back to

Audrey Hamoy  14:32

this, I want to say this was like it was already Yeah, this was like a pilot for working together, you know, because we were so siloed this was the first big project where it was, teams were working together. So a lot of we did have a lot of like, struggles with documentation and making sure like, where did these things live? And how do we these teams that have these different processes, how do we pull that together? And for us, a lot of it was like, just for So it was like whiteboarding together, making sure we keep that documentation. Not only, you know, kind of like up to date when we’re working on it, but like, how do we find that documentation later is a big like find ability is a big part of it. One thing we did was create a shared document of questions that could go to both of our product teams that way, there was a document of answers to these questions. From us, if we had questions about something, the design process or requirements, something like that, then we’d take it, write it in this document, share it with the product teams. And hopefully, between the two product teams, they’d come up with the answer or answers, and then we’d be able to kind of have that space for us to share that information. And that that was kind of an important thing, because we were finding that Jor el was asking questions, I was asking questions. The other designers are asking questions, and we’re getting answers from all these different places, all these different locations, we need this one source of truth where everyone is looking, everyone is participating, to bring us on more of the same page.

Jael Schulz  16:21

It’s also not really fair for those stakeholders, either if you’re in the treasury, or if you’re in compliance, and you’re getting variations of questions on the same topic from, you know, two or three different folks. That’s a pain. So yeah, I think I think I would like to acknowledge first that documentation is not fun. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody now not yet enjoys doing documentation. But it was especially crucial in this because the project was really fast paced. And then again, since Audrey was working with her products, and engineering partners, and I was working with my product and engineering partners, then sometimes they were working with the same business partners, and sometimes they were separate ones. There was a lot of complexity. And I think there are a couple of key things like Audrey said, having that shared source of just like what all the open questions were, we also made, essentially, kind of an FAQ page, because when somebody new would be pulled in on the project, we were finding that have the same questions around like, how does this thing actually work on savings? Or how is that different from how it works on checking? So documenting some of those things that we were learning and that, too, so then second nature to say like, oh, no, the way that a transfer works on checking is actually like this number of days versus on savings like is quite a lot. And a shared lexicon as well. So as we started defining things, either with our internal partners, or within an external customer facing journey, we were saying like, this is how we use the word transfers, or this is what the terms and conditions are going to be like consistently as much as possible. Across like a disclaimer at the bottom of a transfer journey, for example. That was huge. Also, when when you thinking about a regulated industry, like finance, you have a lot of legal and compliance partners to work with for good reason. And those were different based on like, is this checking or savings or etc, the different products because they have different areas of expertise. And so being able to even talk to them and say, like, here’s how we’ve done it for these other journeys. And we can show you what this look like, is it possible to align as much as we can to this format? So we’re looking at it as almost like component chunks of content and the way we were sharing it with those partners? Yeah, like,

Audrey Hamoy  18:52

we were taking like screenshots and like underlining like, this is the word this is the string that is consistent with this string, it may look a little bit different, but the meaning

Jael Schulz  19:01

is the same. And that was super helpful. Because if I if I’m a legal expert that’s specific to like checking accounts, then I’m thinking about what do we need to disclose to make this clear to customers and be safe as a company and etc. and legal speak doesn’t always translate super easily to like a consumer experience. So being able to show that consistency and that we were understanding what was necessary in that was really helpful and explaining also our goal, you know, like, we see what the legal requirements are, we’ve made these changes for these reasons to be consistent, to reduce the reading comprehension level unnecessary, et cetera. And that was very helpful. Yeah,

Audrey Hamoy  19:47

reasons are important. Always, always are and especially if you’re a writer, unfortunately, as a designer, you don’t need your reasons quite as much. But if you’re a writer, you better have a reason why you did that.

Noz Urbina  20:00

Well, the good designers, the good designers like,

Audrey Hamoy  20:03

I mean, yes, you do need a reason, but like, you don’t normally have to, like validate all of every, like, thing you, you know, design to an outside critic. So just Yeah, it’s it’s make sure you have your reasons why, blah, blah, blah, your your backup documentation and

Noz Urbina  20:23

when we say document to make this concrete like, what are we talking about wiki? Are we talking like, design system? Or are we talking like Google Docs?

Audrey Hamoy  20:33

Yeah, just whatever, whatever like tools that you use? Like I said, whiteboarding was really important for us. If you have some sort of whiteboarding tool. I know there’s a bunch of like, like figma has some envision has one. There’s a bunch out right now. And then

Noz Urbina  20:48

I’m addicted to Miro. Miro, yeah, it was much.

Audrey Hamoy  20:54

And then I lost my train of

Jael Schulz  20:57

thought, yeah. And then we did use like an internal wiki to essentially document things like the questions list, the copy matrix, for example, and a lot of cross referencing. So if I had a wiki page that was talking about, here’s how transfers work for savings on web, then there was a direct link to here’s the mobile page, you know, how transfers work on on the on the exact same thing, so that there was a reference. But yeah, documentation is nobody’s favorite. It’s worth the work. So yes,

Noz Urbina  21:34

well, let’s get back to my library, McKinsey quotes, it may not seem sexy, but consistency is the secret ingredient to making customers happy. If you you need to show up, you need to be consistent. And like language, especially in anything like complex, like medical or financial insurance. The the words aren’t themselves are like the terminology is a barrier for entry. Now, I’ve done a lot of work. And I’ve done a lot of work and all of those regulated industries. And there’s too much expertise in the building. Like just people know all these words. And so no one even they’re blind. You’re blind,

Audrey Hamoy  22:12

to get out of that kind of like mindset when you’re in it so deep for sure.

Noz Urbina  22:18

And then we have the same thing between developers and like our specialists and everybody else, the business can say, well, we’re trying to do this. And we had this recently on a project, we were discussing, like, something didn’t work as we were expecting. And the feedback was, you know, well, the designer showed you the design two months ago, and you signed off on it. And it clearly said that this was a content asset, not a content snippet. And like we’re trying our best to review this thing, but it’s our specialism. Like we have to come together on how it’s going to work, what the expectation is. And language can be a huge barrier. So the more we can kind of keep living documentation and understanding how do we scale up understanding across teams? Yeah,

Audrey Hamoy  23:12

if if you’re in the writing space, it um, I want to say like UX writers, content designers, content architects, anywhere where you, your job is with words and tech, a lot of the time you end up being the person who makes things less confusing for other teams I found because you’re good at taking this this information and making it understandable. So while it’s you know, maybe not fair to always be given this role as the writer you can use that to your advantage in situations like this where you need to document you need people to be on the same page. Use like your writer voice use, like all the tools at your disposal and just make it easy to read make it easy to find the fungibility should be like through the roof. Follow the same rule as you would for writing a screen like copy on a screen format information just like make it easy to read as well.

Noz Urbina  24:15

No, I’m two things are coming to my head one. I have to bring this up or else I lose my podcasting license, which is Chad GPT and AI. And we’ve been using it in production now in projects, both for externally facing stuff but also for internal stuff like for Oh, wow. Yeah. Because you know, you have these meetings where everyone discusses how it’s gonna work. And so for you can take a transcript from a discussion like this, and you put it in chat GPT and say summarize this like one of the one of the key points of discussion or you can, you can take someone at someone’s explanation of something. And you can say summarize this into a procedure like put it into a format of bullets and steps and instructions. And it’s stuff like that. And that’s really, really, really, really, really cool and really useful. And for me, the the meta thing about this, it’s once content production becomes easier, like the skill will not be in the typing or the creating of the words, it will be in the asking of the right questions like the one of the brands who will succeed, or they’re going to be the ones who understand their user better who who share that understanding of user better across the team, so that we’re asking the tools to do the right things for us, rather than kind of the skill being in the actual ability to craft the sentences or produce the volumes of sentences that we need. So it’s we’re on the cusp of very interesting point. I don’t know if you’re experimenting without or have any feelings on the ramp and buzz in our industry?

Audrey Hamoy  25:58

No, I haven’t. But I don’t know why I haven’t because it’s very in my wheelhouse. It looks very exciting. I’ve seen some people do some really wild stuff with that. But yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s a good point. Like, we there is like, you know, as writers, we we asked questions that that people might not see, you know, we find roadblocks that people might not visualize, and, yeah, like we need to really rely on on those processes and those skills that we have in the future for sure.

Noz Urbina  26:35

So just very quickly, we refer to actually literally as a meta content strategy, like you have your content strategy champion we’re trying to do externally, and use the content, people have to have an internal sense of who are my stakeholders, what language they speak, what’s going to resonate to them, what’s my cadence for communicating with them? Or else, you know, you can’t get the buy in? So for yourselves that I what I’m hearing is that’s been a big part of the effort, like the outreach, the documentation that communication?

Jael Schulz  27:04

Yep, absolutely. And I think it’s the nature of working anywhere where you’re collaborating with different roles is, yeah, you’ve got different silos of like, disciplines, or rule types, or channels, or whatever they might be. And it can be easy to get frustrated with, like the forest for the trees. And like, why don’t they understand that we actually need to do X, because otherwise the experience is gonna be terrible, and so forth. But it is the nature of a business is not going to succeed if you don’t have goals if you don’t have things that you’re being measured against, and so forth. And so when you particularly in larger orgs, but anywhere, somebody does have to be focused on specific goals that are smaller. So it’s easy to get frustrated when you’re running into bumps on the road with things like that. But understanding like they have a good reason for being focused on that it’s my job, or maybe it’s not my job, but I’m making it my job to bring in this broader perspective, to show how looking at the entirety of it is actually going to contribute towards their goals succeeding, or sometimes there’s a trade off. So it might be we’re looking at the broader ecosystem, we’re going to make a change that’s going to affect, let’s say, the entry rate to a journey, but what we’re actually doing is increasing clarity about whether or not the customer needed to do that in the first place. So it might be affecting one area and making sure that there’s acknowledgement about that it’s not like oh, your your entry rate declined. So that’s a ding on you. It’s like documenting and acknowledging that trade off. So I know it’s something that anybody faces when you’re trying to do things like this red cross channel, try new ways of working, et cetera, don’t get frustrated. But understand that perspective, again, what you were seeing Knauss like, knowing where they’re coming from, and then being able to speak in those terms that make sense to them and what they have to deal with and put up with every day. Because they also have frustrations

Audrey Hamoy  29:11

and luckily, that’s what we’re good. I’m so

Noz Urbina  29:15

content to the rescue. So your daily, your raise a really good point about the measurement like what is the reaction been to this and and how do you report this out in a way that if you’re if you only have 30 minutes of if you do get a chance to to kind of talk this up the hierarchy? How do you quantify or measure or show the benefit of this and then how are people reacting?

29:43

Yeah, I would say

Jael Schulz  29:46

for internal partners, a big part of it was efficiency and decision making, really so as we started to get some buying And then get more folks involved in understanding what we were doing there. It was just when the question came up with like, Well, how do we treat this thing? We could say, Well, we haven’t documented for how we treated it here. What are just the essential changes that we need to make to apply it to this, or when we were working with our partners and labeling compliance, being able to come and say, we already have a document to pattern for how we’re handling the terms and conditions or disclosures on a transfer journey? What are the essential changes that we need to make to this pattern instead of coming up with something from scratch? So I think the big thing that really started making it make sense to partners was essentially that savings and efficiency.

Noz Urbina  30:43

I think that that’s an interesting example, because we talk a lot in in this world about reuse, for production content going out. But reuse not of the actual necessarily the words like copy and paste, but reuse of the of the thinking, like we’ve already worked this out, we’ve already kind of have the Word template is fraught with confusion. But we have we’ve we have the logic of this already, maybe if none of the words are reusable, but that logic is repurposed bubble and the decision discussions that we had apply. And so as you say, What’s the difference? We may populate it with completely new content. But we’re shortcutting the process because we don’t have to think it through again. Yeah. That’s really, really good. So when you say that they’re they’re seeing that efficiency? Are you? Are you capturing like testimonials? Do you have like internal slide decks? Where you show hey, this person said, This is so much better? Or? Or can you actually see it? Can you see like this? Well, this took this used to take us two weeks, and now it takes us three days.

Jael Schulz  31:48

Yeah, we can see it, there’s actually so it caught on enough. And i We can’t take full credit for it, I think, I think also village, it takes a village, we can take some credit for it. But our product partners, we’re also seeing the need for some more collaboration is the more efficiency I think the credit to some of that was like us having been working on that grassroots. And they started standing up ceremonies to collaborate across channels, and across the different types of banking products. And that was just

Noz Urbina  32:21

to be clear ceremonies in this context, like what does that actually look like? So

Jael Schulz  32:26

an example would be having like a monthly meeting to discuss what’s on the upcoming roadmap, or the various linking products across both channels. And then to see, oh, work has already been done on this one side and understanding the logic of the back end and how we can bring this in. Cool. This is now going to save the web team a bunch of work, for example. So just some things like that, like a monthly cross channel meetup where what was upcoming, and what had been done could be shared out. And so that knowledge that had already been gained or work that had already been done could be shared again, the same thing of like, understanding, is there a template? Is there something like that that can be reused? Yeah. And that was massive. So we can’t take all the credit, but we’ll take a look at it.

Audrey Hamoy  33:13

Yeah, that was a good point. On top of the documentation, you do need to have people in the rooms discussing these openly, otherwise, there will be gaps in communication. And I think there was a point in time where that meeting had dropped off for some reason, like something happened. And then I immediately I think, we’ve basically immediately noticed that things were starting to be a lot less clear between our teams again. So it was a very clear indication that having these these places to just like share out and kind of like a stand up for the for each team a little bit was was super important just to stay on the same page.

Jael Schulz  33:58

Yeah, I don’t think that documentation can replace discussion, documentation is important. But you still have to have folks in that room, or WebEx or zoom or wherever. Having a

Audrey Hamoy  34:12

discussion around gangs and, and part of it is knowing also that you you are the expert in this field, like you feel free like to, if you notice these gaps in communication, like take the reins on that and start these conversations and start this documentation. That’s basically all we did was just, we were like noticing these issues. And we were like, Let’s try and solve this. We’re struggling with it. Maybe we can make our lives better and everyone else’s lives better as well.

Noz Urbina  34:45

Yeah. So that that leads me to a common question about the audiences are events of like, how do you set how do you get people to set aside time for that? Because everyone’s saying, oh, like, I don’t have enough hours in the day. it anyway, would like for these sinks or to read this document that you’ve created? How are you getting people to kind of make time for this not just engaged, because I’m sure people are like, if you if you show benefit, so they’ll want to, but it’s the it’s the manufacturing of the time or cutting, taking time away from something else that that we’re already doing dedicating it to this, how did that work?

Jael Schulz  35:23

Yeah, I think you have to find a partner in crime. So starting with Adrienne, I was using time, um, I think if you have been working with folks on projects before, you’ve probably already got a sense of one or two people that would be willing, that you’ve seen have exhibited interest in new ways of working in trying out stuff that could improve things. So start with those people, you’re not going to send an invite out to like three dozen folks across all the disciplines and say, we want to do this new thing and insert it in your calendar, and it’s going to take up time and have everybody say, Yes, that sounds great. You’re gonna have to make a case for

Audrey Hamoy  36:09

small with like, product teams, and then talk to them and then build from there.

Jael Schulz  36:15

So if you know whether it’s like a product person, one of your engineers, a designer, whoever, if you if you know, there’s somebody that you’ve worked with before, start there, if you don’t know, um, toss it out there like in your next sync, whatever it is your weekly meeting, whatever it is, say, hey, I really think you know, there’s value in making sure that we have some alignment across channel, if most of the people say, we don’t have time for that. Keep tossing that out there in every like, standup that you’re in until you find somebody that was like, Oh, that does sound like a good idea and say, Cool, I’m sending you a calendar. Right now. Yeah, yeah,

Audrey Hamoy  36:55

if you’re the only person also, it could be you are the only person writing for both channels. I think all of these things still apply. Like, unfortunately, you do have to You are your own partner in crime, I guess for a bit, then you gotta find your people. And then, you know, feel free to keep this documentation, right, this consistency thing of like, you know, you can have what consistency means as UX as a UX writer, as a, as a writer. And just like, that’s what we think, as writers like consistency. And let’s have this guide for what this means. And then you can share that out. So don’t feel like you can’t do this. Like, if it’s just you, and you’re trying to, you know, solve this siloed channel issue.

Noz Urbina  37:40

I think this is a great story, because a lot of our a lot of our attendees do come from big companies, and a lot of them feel like, oh, we must be the only big company that’s that’s facing this. When that’s absolutely not the case, like we all of our work is with with, generally speaking, like global multinationals. And there’s the haves and the have nots, like some organizations are doing really well. Nobody’s actually omnichannel like,

Audrey Hamoy  38:05

nobody’s new, you know, like,

Noz Urbina  38:10

ya know, like, I’ve been harping about this stuff for 21 years. And we’ve had, we’ve had on the channel X for five years. At that, the what’s clear is, it lots of people are trying, but it’s, it’s like this, it’s this ongoing thing where you, you are always trying to move things in the right direction. And the ironically, the journey, we’re gonna call it that, like, that’s the point is getting the journey going in the right direction, not stressing that you’re not there yet, because nobody is like everyone is Oh, there’s another channel, there’s another touch point, there’s another team and other product,

Audrey Hamoy  38:53

yeah, you will get frustrated, you will get frustrated. And you have to remember that you can only control so much, you know, at the end of the day. And as long as you’re, you know, trying,

Jael Schulz  39:05

yeah, and hopefully this will be encouraging. But to be honest, we’ll never get there. Right? So technologies are evolving, how people use technology is evolving, the kind of products services etc, is evolving. So nobody’s ever going to arrive at a perfect state of like totally omni channel incredibly amazing customer experience and then like brush their hands off and be done is always going to be a journey. So I think that can be frustrating if you’re in a moment of existential crisis. I think that can be really reassuring. If you’re like, why are things in this discipline or at this org or in this field, whatever are not like they aren’t where they should be? That’s okay. Because you got until forever.

Audrey Hamoy  39:58

I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing.

Noz Urbina  40:00

Yeah, well, like jump in that start wherever you are, like that. That’s a good message. You know, wherever you are, that’s a perfectly valid place to start. It’s like yoga poses are infinite. So, alright, so we’ve said, Okay, start where you are kind of jump in, find your find your tribe progressively. Any, you know, anything that’s shareable and X easily accessible and findable for documentation, write it down, share it, help people find it, but still talk. You know, I think that you, you’re saying, like, you have to be able to get together, you got to sync up on a regular basis. Any other? Like, if you’re gonna say, if someone walks up to you, and said, I’m trying to get this started Americanization what, what what should be my first steps, or, like, what’s the simplest thing I can do is to get get this moving? Or to tell?

Audrey Hamoy  41:00

Um, first of all, I would say, you know, get some documentation, like define consistency, make make a definition for that. Start thinking about where you want all of this to live kind of in the the, like, don’t create it in a tool that you’re not going to use again, you want to be able to, like find this where use it in a tool that’s easily findable, or, or something that people use a lot of

Noz Urbina  41:28

easily accessible by your colleagues, by your

Audrey Hamoy  41:31

colleagues. And then yeah, like, a lot of times, some tools aren’t accessible through to some people, and you just want to make sure, that can be frustrating. So yeah, just trying to make it as accessible as possible.

Jael Schulz  41:45

Start talking about it. I think the sort of area of like, content, strategy, AI, all of that tends to pull in folks that have like, super organized, and a lot of times a perfectionist approach to things. So the piece of advice that I give people all the time is like start talking about it way earlier than you feel comfortable. Because we always want to have like this neat, tidy package that we can present. And then everybody be like, Wow, that’s amazing. It solved all my problems, like start talking about it right away when it’s still gross, and crummy and ugly, and not all in one place yet. And that’s going to be huge, because it makes it more accessible to other people. First of all, if they see like, Oh, this is a work in progress that I can contribute to. And also just like getting the word out there that you’re even working on it. Yeah, you can start getting that input that feedback. And other

Audrey Hamoy  42:43

people might also be struggling with the fact that like they’re doing similar work. But you know, other teams are doing work, and they’re not having that good communication. And maybe they’re just not sure what to do. So if if they see, you know, you’re taking that initiative and you’re trying to bridge this gap, then maybe it’ll be easier for them to also bridge this understanding gap as well.

Noz Urbina  43:08

Fantastic. As I said, I love this because a lot of big clients, like people in big companies can can feel this kind of, oh, we shouldn’t be like this. Something’s wrong with us. You know, how can it be so, so difficult, but it comes down to just having having a go and getting started. So that’s that’s the message that I’m getting from this. And I think that’s a great message. Thank you so much. Both of you for joining us. I didn’t mention at the end you’re dialing in from New York City. We managed to hear

Audrey Hamoy  43:40

a little background noise that is just the sounds of the

Noz Urbina  43:45

well, we had a sounded perfect crystal clear. totally silent. I would have guessed you’re out in the out in the in the mountains. If people do want to get in touch and learn more Do you are you LinkedIn folks? How can people kind of

Jael Schulz  43:59

LinkedIn is good? Yeah. Always happy to do like coffee chats, you know, content people, strategists, whatever, or people just getting into UX. Always happy to have a career talk or

Audrey Hamoy  44:13

commiseration, you know? Yeah. Anyone else in a content architect or similar? role? I would actually love to talk to you because we’ve never we’ve only talked to ourselves. So to talk to somebody else.

Noz Urbina  44:27

Okay, well, maybe we can schedule another podcast. Yeah, so I’m always happy about talking about that too. You can reach out on LinkedIn for myself. Noz Urbina, OmnichannelX.digital. So check that out for our podcasts, articles and other resources that’s getting revamped right now. It’s a bit of a mess. Honestly, and we’re cleaning that up. But keep keep an eye on that. A we should be hearing a lot of new things in 2023 and beyond about what the new incarnation of OmnichannelX is going to look like with our editorial calendar of podcasts and webinars and so out throughout the year. So please check us out. If you are whatever platform you’re on. Give us a like, give us a comment. Let us know what we missed what you thought, what we should talk about next time. Who should who should invite because that really helps us out. Thank you so much. Gel and Audrey and everybody has a great rest of the day. Thank you.

Audrey Hamoy  45:28

Thanks for listening.

Pharma & AI: How artificial neural networks enable computers to think like us

Session leader(s):
Val Swisher

After years of promises, artificial intelligence has finally reached the stage where it impacts our lives on a daily basis. The things computers can do with us and for us are rapidly expanding through the use of artificial neural networks (ANN).

This technology is extremely powerful and complex when used by pharmaceutical and med device companies. Life sciences organizations face the unique challenge of creating vast amounts of detailed and interrelated content over many years. An ANN solution allows these companies to reap the benefits and advantages of using AI to complete data-heavy tasks. These advantages extend to the way pharma companies create content and impact how they will work with computers that “think like us.”

Podcast Ep. 21 – Omnichannel first steps at Dechra Pharmaceuticals

Session leader(s):
Thomas Molenaar

Full session transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

Noz Urbina  09:43

Okay, everybody, thank you for joining. I’m here with Thomas Molnar of Decker pharmaceuticals. I’m happy to have you, Thomas. You want introduce yourself a little bit to to the audience.

Thomas Molenaar  10:26

Of course. Thanks for having me here today, as I am done was more than I am the head of digital marketing at Decker pharmaceuticals. So a little bit about my background. I originally graduated with a degree in art history, having the dreams and aspirations to be coming arch curator. That didn’t work out but I did I discover marketing and I kind of like gradually flows into marketing starting out in paid search. And, you know, over the years getting more acquainted with core marketing principles, but also with different channels, which over the years led me to, to kind of evolve my role as a marketeer and leading to currently working as the head of digital marketing at DEKRA.

Noz Urbina  11:11

Excellent. I love that path from art. I studied literature and classical civilizations.

Thomas Molenaar  11:18

Yeah, yeah. I think it’s interesting that in a way, I think it really helps because one thing that you get in the humanities is coming at problems from a variety of different angles, which I think is something that is really interesting when it comes to marketing as well, making sure that there’s not one or truth. There’s different ways to you know, solve a problem in that way and analyze your data

Noz Urbina  11:41

Absolutely. There’s pros and cons to every approach. There’s the philosophy of how we work and kind of thinking, what are the visit lots of things like the long term impacts of how we do things? I think people are very conscious now that we used to battle the whole world and a variety of seniors would kind of jump in and now we’re with with the zeitgeist the kind of awareness in society as well. What is this gonna mean in 510 years or is this the right long term plan of action? Yes. Long term thinking has come to the west. Yeah, so can so we’re here on the omnichannel podcast, brought to you by omnichannel x. So Thomas, I’m interested to hear your definition of omni channel marketing. We are we’re often talking about omnichannel from different roles, different perspectives. And this is you know, this is interesting to speak from a from a marketing point. Of View. So what is what is your definition doesn’t mean to you?

Thomas Molenaar  12:39

Yeah, I think for me, it always comes back to what it isn’t. And usually when the term omni channel marketing starts, a lot of people start panicking about oh, now having to use every available channel to us, truly omni channel. Where’s the thing for me it’s purely about the integration of channels, making sure that there’s consistency and messaging across channels, making sure that there’s a visibility of the data that is you know, can be used to kind of like enhance and complement touchpoints as well. Complement channels. So you can be omni channel with with just a few channels as long as they are consistent and as long as they’re fully integrated.

Noz Urbina  13:22

Preaching to the choir, I couldn’t agree more. I think that the the there was a sort of channel or channel panic a while ago that we had to be on all the channels and the intention was to be on all the channels be everywhere. And I think that I feel that that’s dying down when I talk to when I talk to most people and excel they realize that’s an impossibility. No brand, no matter how deep your pockets is going to be on all the channels. It doesn’t even make sense because channels can also come and go. So it’s all it’s about how you are ready for new channels and what you do when a new channel pops up. And having a really intentional strategy about the channels that you do have as as a whole. So I really Yeah, definitely, definitely aligned with your definition there. Yeah.

Thomas Molenaar  14:15

Sorry. I just wanted to actually be like the term channel planning. So I might still like going forward. I think that that’s very much kind of you know, it comes up a lot where people start thinking about how do we familiarize ourselves with our channels. And it comes back to the idea about like, are the channels actually serving a purpose so you know, for your customers needs, What channels do they actually require to solve those needs? And those are the ones to focus on we I liked that word channel panic actually.

Noz Urbina  14:44

Absolutely and one I’ve definitely seen as a channel panic because the channel is just literally big. For example, I had I remember the example I think was a baking company or something it was something they were very particular industry. It wasn’t like shoes or something. It was something that had a particular target audience. And there was this one channel that was just bursting out on the scene. Everyone was going on, et cetera, et cetera. So suddenly all this pressure to get on Snapchat or whatever it was, and I remember the contact I was talking to going our audience isn’t there. The channel is channel is big. The channel is popping not with our audience. Yeah, this this kind of thing going a fear of missing out, but at a corporate level. Yeah, everybody’s talking about blah. We should be on blah. But that doesn’t mean that your people are there or that they go there in a mood or with an interest to talk about what your what your value proposition is.

Thomas Molenaar  15:44

Yeah. Yeah, no, definitely.

Noz Urbina  15:47

Okay, so you’ve actually been doing some multichannel projects. We’re very much about the practical here about you know, real lessons learned. We do talk a theory game because you have to, you have to think about what’s coming and understand the theory. But I really like to be able to talk about the real stories. So can you tell us a bit about your project projects, very interested in what kind of audiences and you know, the kind of the ecosystem of stakeholders who will be addressing what channel what types of content your other your own channels, third party channels, some mix? Yeah.

Thomas Molenaar  16:21

I mean, so, I think for us, where we currently are is we’re very much and I think that’s the same for everyone. We’re on omnichannel journey and we’re very, very early stages of the of the omni channel journey and that you know, there’s a lot of education happening around the company about the the concept of omni channel. There’s a lot of interesting initiatives in terms of trying to match channels up and making sure that the consistency and messaging is there. If I look at my projects, I think what I’m really working on is making sure that the conditions structures in place for our company to become omnichannel. So that’s focusing on Channel integration that’s focusing on making sure that the data that the tools are there for our content teams and our product managers to be able to when they you know, when they feel that they’re ready to put that omnichannel message out the tools already there. So I’d say you know, can you if I have to talk a bit about audiences, we’re doing a lot of research currently to just get an understanding of what are the touch points and the channels that are, you know, customers use? And that’s for me, it always goes back to customer needs. So it’s it’s the research stage trying to figure out well, what touchpoints do we actually need to develop for our customers, where they will require information or where they will you know, require our services to then start thinking about how can we connect them better? How do we make sure that the data quality is there so it’s almost kind of like at step minus one, where we still have the conditions into place around omnichannel. And from a from a communications point of view, I think it’s it’s purely focused on consistency and content making sure that you know, we orchestrates we orchestrate kind of the whole omnichannel process better by not looking at as separate channels in that way.

Noz Urbina  18:15

Well, you’re so let’s let’s try to make it a bit more concrete for the for the listener. So Decker is not a I wouldn’t say Decker is a household name. Like there’s probably a lot of people who when we talk about your audience, can you tell us a bit like literally what kind of people are you trying to target and and what I’m interested especially as more talking omnichannel is interaction between those people. If you’re talking to multiple stakeholders, how do they relate to each other what what are their roles and how do they how do you have to target the audience as a whole?

Thomas Molenaar  18:50

Yeah, of course. So if if you look at our industry, so we’re a manufacturer of pharmaceutical products for the animal healthcare industry, so our primary audience will be veterinarians and veterinary professionals. And there’s a lot of overlap between us and human pharma, but there’s also you know, some some key differences and definitely when it comes to maturity, there’s some differences. I think, as an industry, we’re still a couple of years behind behind in pharma. So our key I think, one of the key challenges that we face is understanding and getting to know our audience better. So we know that we’re talking to veterinarians, but we are still in very early stages to be very clear to how we segment between veterinarians. So that goes in terms of what are the sub species that they treat, what are the the therapy areas that they specialize in? So they do specialize in dermatology they specialize in in anesthesia and analgesia. Then there’s also the question about well, what kind of messaging do they actually prefer? Do they look at commercial offering that we have, are they more there from a scientific angle from an emotional angle as well? So when we look at our different audiences, it’s very much about trying to understand our customers in how they interact with our channels. So how do they interact with digital means but also offline as well? And how do we find that perfect mix in serving up their content in the right way? So the way that we’re embarking on that journey is very much around you. We know that our customers have value the offline touchpoints that we have, that’s the relationships that our sales reps have with our customers, the relationships that our customers have with our technical teams, if they buy one of our products, and they’re not 100% Sure, you know how to apply it or they’ve got questions around it. We’ve got a whole team of veterinarians at Decorah as well, to be able to provide those services and we really pride ourselves on having that knowledge in house and that’s also part of a brand proposition to come at things from the veterinarians perspective with with having kind of our customers as part of the organization as well. So what we’re trying to do now as part of this omni channel journey is how do we take those relationships those those people relationships, and how do we extend them online, so that across, you know, every touchpoint, our veterinarians have the idea that it’s the same high quality service we provide as the ones that they have with, you know, with the offline counterparts with the people in your organization. So from the you know, we know that we just can’t depend on our offline relationships anymore. It’s the 21st century, even in healthcare to 21st century. Customers will be online, there will be

Noz Urbina  21:50

fun times I think it’s just become the 21st century. It’s

Thomas Molenaar  21:54

definitely an animal healthcare, sometimes we are. You were laggards in that way. But I think there’s there’s a change happening and as you said, you know, with with audiences changing with with things like Snapchat and Tiktok they might not be relevant now with our core customers, but maybe when when this whole generation grows up and become the new generation of vets, it will become very relevant as well. So does that Does that answer your questions?

Noz Urbina  22:19

Yeah, it does. I’m interested. Yeah. So it raises a couple of other interesting questions. The the role of different types of for example, influencer. So you’re talking about, you’re talking about different specialties. I know that when we’re talking for our pharma clients, the role of the influencer or opinion leader, as is often called, is really interesting, and I think that’s something that I think the audience might want to hear about, because I think that concept is is relevant to any industry. So I’m interested to see how you’ve been thinking about influencers and and I don’t want to forget, you mentioned something which is very near and dear to my heart, which is the people channel and I wanted to know when you’re looking at marketing, whether you are seeing part of your role as providing assets and knowledge to those people or deriving assets and knowledge from those people as part of your strategy. So those two different those are my two follow up questions. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Thomas Molenaar  23:22

So I think the first one, especially in pharmacy in pharma, key opinion leaders are essential. And again, I mean, we’ve got our veterinary professionals in the organization that liaise with key opinion leaders because they speak the same language. But they are you know, the I think it’s also from other customers. There’s always a skepticism around pharmaceutical manufacturers always, you know, we are biased, we want to sell our products. And so key opinion leaders are essential in having that sort of neutral voice in the discussion and making sure like, hey, this product from Decorah, or this treatment is actually you know, is is effective, and it’s something that from an from a specialism something that we will we want indoors. So it’s a fine line and a fine balance between making sure that you can use those key opinion leaders in you know, create those partnerships and making sure that they are there to also promotes kind of like the Decorah Decorah solution that’s out there. But also make sure that you don’t make them into influences where they lose that, you know, neutrality and yeah, half of that thing that I keep that credibility and authenticity as well. And we only recently finished a piece of customer research where when it comes to veterinarians, you know, and I can imagine for for healthcare professionals in general, accessing information online, that’s those are the two key parts credibility, authenticity, making sure that when they find information, it’s on information they can trust. So I think that that’s kind of where for us keeping leaders are essential and also something where we can still do a lot more compared to where we currently are and what we currently do.

Noz Urbina  25:16

Yeah, that’s a bit I was kind of hoping you would drill down into this. What is for again, very practically speaking, what can you do what kind of marker would like what kind of our listeners because that’s not done, I am seeing time and time and again, this siloing between the knowledge centers of the business and marketing and so often marketing goes out and pays agencies to go get knowledge that they can publish that their own people in the next offices down the hole have and then they publish it to the public but that they don’t share it with the internal people. So I’m interested in terms of practical terms, what what can we do? What do you what is your vision of how that relationship could work better?

Thomas Molenaar  25:56

I mean, that sounds like the content creators, aren’t they? And I think we sometimes separate that out too much. Just in a very in very practical terms. We were now doing a large SEO audit as well and going through our content and when it comes to key opinion leaders. In our case, when it comes to the veterinarians, they are the ones that put the content out, but within the guidelines to making sure that the content out that’s that it should be the tandem between the the SEO expert in this case and the key opinion leaders to create a partnership and making sure that we harness that knowledge in a most efficient way. And I think that’s the same across just

Noz Urbina  26:33

checking here. Just when you say key opinion leader do you mean key key opinion leaders you have on staff or both?

Thomas Molenaar  26:40

Yeah, I think I think there’s a case for both. I mean, we have brilliant people and stuff that can create a lot of content who are I mean, you can perceive them as being buyers but equally their veterinary professionals. So think there’s definitely that, you know, expertise and that knowledge there and obviously also making sure that you can start with applying content from external key opinion leaders and seeing how you can leverage that in creating articles of interest or special kind of features on websites as well. And that for me is something that can be extended across all channels. It’s not something that just comes with, with websites, it’s social media, it’s but it’s also the offline conferences, etc, symposium so it’s, you know, I think it’s, it’s a source where we don’t have the answer yet, but definitely acknowledge that it’s something that we can do a lot more with.

Noz Urbina  27:37

Absolutely, yeah. I actually one of my most popular examples at a at a content marketing conference was showing that you can repackage messaging if you have the right tools and methodologies, and reuse nuggets, Lego pieces of content for web, social, you know, print symposium, content, posters, and even intranet content so that your that your people are messaging, and that’s, that’s it’s I think it’s it’s very relevant, and I think so the site is about the keeping years as a channel. And yeah, I think I think you’re covered both my questions. So what do you see your your biggest challenges like what’s, well, that’s all the good stuff, the happy path, the vision, what are you seeing that holds you back and you don’t have to get too detailed about if you don’t want it, what do you think if you want to be general in in healthcare marketing and an omni channel marketing in general, what do you feel the biggest barriers are?

Thomas Molenaar  28:40

I think, so one of your previous questions was about kind of like the role of people and I think that that is so for me, fundamentally, you know, the, this is everything is about people. And I think the biggest challenge that we have in the organization which is very common, is alignment between teams, making sure that every one is moving in the same direction, which especially for omnichannel when every channel complements each other. There’s, you know, the it’s it’s hard to move forward some parts if there’s no alignment between functions or between teams between sales and marketing organizations, but also between channel owners. So I think internally that’s one of the biggest barriers that we have, I think externally, which can’t be helped is is in our case, a regulatory environment which which just makes some put that just makes makes things more complicated in terms of how we want to go and walk straight and put content out in some cases. But I think overall, our biggest challenge is probably internally and making sure that we are truly committed to all go in the same direction and creating barriers.

Noz Urbina  30:02

Yeah, there’s something inherently and we refer to this many times on the podcast inherently broken about the way that organizations are built and what their goal is, so their organizations are trying to build relationships with their audience, that will be long lasting, enduring, mutually beneficial, mutually profitable. And that that’s good for the audience and is good for the for the brand. But that requires that you can make a build relationship with a brand which is actually not not quite so easy. We know we talk about it. We do build relationships with brands, but they’re not the best or most healthy relationships because the brand is built in departments. You know, we have different teams different specialisms different budgets different timelines, different system owners, different channels and channel owners and product lines and business units and there’s all this there’s all this fragmentation within the brands. So building a relationship with this heterogeneous, often very difficult. To relate with entity gets really complicated. So I think that I agree that that’s the heart of it is is if you’re going to build a relationship with something as complicated as a multinational corporation, then it requires the people in there to be dedicated to working across those lines. Yeah. We were kind of given up on silo busting. That, that that term, I used to say it a lot. I don’t anymore. Now we’re talking about kind of silo, Silo piping, you know, can you run pipelines and communication flows between these silos so that the whole thing operates as a single network, as opposed to now where it can, it can be so fragmented, left hand really doesn’t know what the right hand is doing?

Thomas Molenaar  31:54

Yeah. Yeah. And in the end, for me, it just comes back to strategy. It’s about making sure that that strategy is understood across the business. And I think the way that you raise it in terms of silo pipelining is probably the most realistic one because you can’t you know, there are different functions to different people, the different skill sets, you want to skill salaries, yeah, different personalities and you want to connect those but you can’t open up the house completely in that way and when you want to build a road between houses, but you don’t want to build one big house in that way. So yeah, no, I think that’s that’s definitely where we where we currently are. And, you know, one thing is strategy. The other thing is also the leadership challenge in that in making sure that it needs to be steered from the top and coming down from the bottom making sure that cross functional initiatives and cross functional projects as well. It’s not a one way street, but I think it’s it’s a very complicated it’s a very complicated issue and no straightforward solution, especially the bigger and the more kind of once a fragmented, but the larger the matrix kind of becomes in the organization. It’s just a very, you know, it’s a challenging issue to solve.

Noz Urbina  33:16

Yeah, absolutely. I think that that’s a big part of it. I’m interested to ask you about how you measure that. So you mentioned strategy being core. And when when I hear strategy, I think about metrics. So we have things that we want to do. How do we know that we’re doing them how do we actually report back in a quantifiable way that this is actually happening? I think that that’s I’m interested know what you think about that and, and if you can, if you I’m interested when I’m talking to a lot of of our customers about content system and CRM system integration. So we have our customer relationship data, where tons of the business is is building, literally relationships, it’s the customer relationship management system, CRM and then marketing systems are often very divorced from that, both from a data and a content point of view. Have you been looking at that? That and can you talk a little bit about your the measurement side of your strategy?

Thomas Molenaar  34:23

Yeah, I mean, that’s what keeps me awake at night, I’d say. I mean, again, like I think if there’s anything you know, that kind of puts all this together is that this is on maturity as an organization and it’s really being at the start of that journey. And also recognizing that especially with data being so complex. There’s a lot of steps that we need to take before we can get the measures in place that we’d like to take and like to put in place, which obviously relates to to return on investment and to revenue. So I think we we are trying to think about the easiest way to put that together. What we’re looking at now is is finding those key metrics that we can measure currently, and that will give an indication as to are we on the right track as you just suggested, which currently I think one of the key most important ones is customer satisfaction and customer related metrics in terms of are we actually delivering the services that customers expect from us? And are we able to kind of like grow from there in making those metrics more sophisticated to get a better understanding of the key parts. Another part of it is obviously, if we break down the omnichannel part, and how is each of our How is each of our channels performing? are different platforms performing? And can we come up with with a framework with a structure in which we actually get some sort of picture of the overall health so if we put all these platforms together? Are we you know, are we in a position then to get more clarity on what is our performance from an omnichannel perspective? And we’ve just started talks with a third party agency to help us on their journey because realistically where we currently are, we will need that help and we will need a hand holding in order to define those metrics for us. That kind of immediately flows into your next question as well about how are those platforms connected? We that’s that’s a big part of our omni channel kind of strategy that we’re looking at is how do we integrate are not just our channels, not just a messaging, but also our platforms as well, that can be on a more technical level between API integrations, but also how do they complement each other? What is their role? What is their purpose within the larger kind of framework that we’re trying to achieve? And how do we make sure that we connect to bits that can be connected, and then the data that comes out of it is from a performance point of view, but also very much from an insights point of view, make sure that we then you combine those insights and create one consistent story about our customers and about kind of the insights that we have there rather than its you know, we talked about silo busting before. I think there’s also that silo busting between platforms in between channels that needs to happen to make sure to really get that that integration and lead that omni channel approach in place as well. So yeah, but we have, again, very early stages of their journey, but it’s definitely our main focus, because I think that without creating that infrastructure and making sure those connections are there, then there’s no way for them becoming omnichannel.

Noz Urbina  37:49

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So do you have examples where you have taken concrete steps that you’ve been able to roll out that you feel have made a difference?

Thomas Molenaar  38:02

So we’ve we’ve recently started the implementation of a customer data platform, and that, for us is is a really big step forward, where we have a single source to plug in all our different data sources, from analytics from social media, from our marketing automation platform from a CRM to really stitch that data together. And get a very clear understanding of who our customers are, what they’re, you know, what their online behavior looks like, what their interactions look like, which then gives us a really, really powerful data to start segmenting. into, you know, into very crazy, very granular segments and also be able to kind of personalize our messaging as well. So I think that’s, for us a really big step to start pulling data together in order to become more customer focused and be able to kind of create a messaging on a on a on a personal, personalized basis rather than blanket kind of push messaging and hope that it hits the mark somewhere.

Noz Urbina  39:07

Yeah, sometimes we’re only a little away from spamming. Yeah, yeah, I actually. I have some research I’m gonna be sharing next week. On our Well, I don’t know, depending on when you’re listening to this. I’m doing a joint webinar with with Sanofi, who’s one of our customers and they did internal research. I don’t have them. I think I have the number and but I believe that they’re the number of the data that they have on file. I do have it here was that 55% of healthcare professionals feel overwhelmed by the content they receive and question the accuracy, and trustworthiness and 65% of Alcatel deal at least one comm farm company has spammed them. So and this raises an interesting point for all omnichannel initiatives that you’re trying to build this relationship and you’re trying to build your brand relationship and your brand, but we’re kind of held back a little bit by our industries in the sense that if you are the first one to be the best, that’s great. There’s it’s hard to change the overall perception because the the the audience will still be going Oh, well. That kind of company spams me. And if there’s an exception to the rule, the generalization is still there for quite a while. And that presents an interesting challenge I think you’re gonna face and that we’re all facing in as we go on the channel. is continuing to keep management interested that what are the short term metrics that we can affect, but there are certain perceptions that will be very difficult for us to isolate because there’ll be a lot of noise. So if you ask people, whether they feel they’re getting too much content, it’s hard for them to filter out do I like how do I get too much content from Decorah or Sanofi or, you know, Eli Lilly versus the general feeling they have about getting content from your type of company? Yeah. So you have to break down the short term and the long term metrics in your strategy.

Thomas Molenaar  41:21

It’s something I think as well, you know, especially in our industry, people don’t have time and that’s that’s the biggest you know, without so what we get back from from our customers is, you know, there’s so much pressure at work in so little time, so how do you then stand out and get your message across? In force? I think one of the you know, as I mentioned, the key objectives is how do we extend those personal relationships that we have online? So can we stand out by making sure that the messaging that is being put out is being put out through those personal relationships as well, which is why I think I’m the head of digital marketing but I think the offline component is is at this stage as or not far more important than the digital component. We’re where we currently are like it needs to complement together in that way. So the how we get that offline component on board is just by really high quality data because I think that the people that have built up the relationships over the years, are also reluctant to act upon data that they don’t know for 100% they can trust and I think as well once we start personalizing it and saying, Well, we want emails that have pre approved content, but come via sales reps, don’t our sales reps would love to be absolutely sure that the messaging within those emails is is accurate, and is is appropriate for that customer. So I think again, that row of data is so critical and making sure that you can move this forward.

Noz Urbina  42:50

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So we’re we’re kind of coming not quite to the end of time. So I just had a couple more questions. I’m interested see what what trends do you foresee in the field of functional marketing so not what you’re working on now but sort of on your on your vision on the on the horizon? What do you see is exciting or what you see as as important and upcoming that people should be aware about?

Thomas Molenaar  43:15

I think, I mean, just to stay with basically every other post on LinkedIn, I think artificial intelligence is is just going to be a game changer across how we produce content. Also how we conduct marketing, how we manage data. And for me, that’s that’s really the biggest one out there currently, just because if you look at things like a chat GPT for me, the biggest question is not how are we going to utilize it support with a content generation but how are our customers going to interact with either Chad GPT or other AI products to access information going forward and how as an industry, how as marketers, do we then equip ourselves to be able to deal with that challenge because we’ve just gotten acquainted to the whole SEO thing. People go to Google to find information and we know how that works. I think that’s definitely a trend that’s really worth watching over the next couple of years and it’s, there’s a lot of I embrace it. I can completely understand the risks on many different levels, but I think it’s just going to be very exciting to see what opportunities it brings with it as well.

Noz Urbina  44:29

I think you’re the first person I’ve asked that question, who talked about AI from the consumption side, which is a very, like I’m very, I think that’s great because I think that’s extremely important and we’re forgetting a lot is that we’re very excited about how can we use it as creators and content, you know, orchestrators and so on internally, but kind of forgetting that the audience is also going to be using these same tools to deconstruct and find what we put out there so that it’s it’s actually a saw I actually saw a comic book with a comic strip which perfectly where this I’ve got a you got a marketer, you got to got one guy in and sitting at his desk telling a colleague, this is great. I can just type in a few lines and chat up table. We’ll make it look like I wrote this email. And then you’ve got the next panel is the other guy sitting on the opposite side of the computer going on. It’s fantastic. Now I’ve got chat up to can put the emails in pretend I read them.

Thomas Molenaar  45:31

Yeah, and I think that’s that’s a really good way to putting it as well. And you know, the turning it the other way around. We’re going to have a lot of very, very well informed pet owners going into veterinary practices going forward because the information is not just accessible easily but also explained in a very, very easy to digest way that doesn’t allow pet owners or doesn’t require pet owners to dig through Thrive scientific articles. So how how are you going to support our customers with dealing with that? You know, Dr. Google’s already a problem, the problem what’s Dr. GPT going to look like? Basically? So yeah, I think it’s, it’s a very interesting, interesting future.

Noz Urbina  46:11

Yes. I love it. Thank you so much for raising that. Okay. Do you have any tips or last tips to give our audience or any resources that they should check out if they’re interested learning more about implementing on omnichannel strategy?

Thomas Molenaar  46:24

Um, I think the tip so I was speaking at a event a couple of weeks ago, and we talked about you know, we talked about kind of this, this idea of, I’d say, Sally pipelining, and sort of breaking down silos. But that is the element of curiosity. And I think the only way to become omnichannel has really tried to dig into what is it that other parts of the business are doing, how do we involve them in the discussion? How do we, you know, it’s really that part of trying to get to understand your business outside of marketing as well and making sure that you build those relationships with other parts of the business. In terms of resources, I mean, I get most of my information currently from from LinkedIn, which I think is great because, you know, it’s, it’s, again, as you said, Kol is it’s peer to peer people that will you know, if you connect with people or follow people, I would always kind of like go back to LinkedIn and say, it’s great to get your up to date content across marketing, when it comes to separate resources. Cool, that’s a really good question. I would usually go to things like BCG, marketing, weak, those sorts of industry standard sources as well. Any I don’t know if there’s any nuggets of got turn around and see if I’ve got it here. I started reading data and analytic strategies for business not too long ago, which is a great book as well, in order to get your head around the data conundrum. So I think that’s, that’s as far as I can get

Noz Urbina  48:08

with it. Okay, yes, data analytic strategies. Business by Simon asplundh Taylor,

Thomas Molenaar  48:21

is the one Yeah, so. Yeah. But yeah, it’s great book. It’s very informative, very practical as well. And even for people who aren’t data scientists or data, you know, data experts. I think it just reads very well in terms of how do you make data work for your for your business? So definitely would recommend this as a read for anyone that’s interested in in data.

Noz Urbina  48:45

Right? Okay. Perfect. Yeah, I got social channels and and a book I think that’s what that’s correct. Okay, so, Thomas, thank you much for your much for your time. I really appreciate it our our chats, and maybe we’ll have you back on the podcast someday.

Thomas Molenaar  49:04

Thank you. Thanks. for having me. Pleasure.

Noz Urbina  49:09

Bye, everybody. Record recording stopped. Cool.

Thomas Molenaar  49:15

Right. Do you want to cut that last bit out about the resources because

Noz Urbina  49:20

No, no, it was fine. It was fine. People don’t expect any. Yeah, I think it’s fine. You got that. Maybe we can cut the LinkedIn part and jump to the book. Yeah, I

Thomas Molenaar  49:32

didn’t see I didn’t it wasn’t the button but I just didn’t expect that to come up to be completely honest.

Noz Urbina  49:37

Alright, so let me just

Thomas Molenaar  49:41

was that okay? Was that kind of what you expected as well? I know that in a way from an omnichannel point of view, we’re so early on that there’s maybe not a you know, a lot of

Noz Urbina  49:52

yeah, a lot of that kind of kind of like practical execution stuff. Yeah. I thought you were a little bit further on. It’s, I think the story is still good. Frankly, a lot of our listeners will be at your point or even earlier. So you said your daughter what the phase negative one. I think they’re like, phase negative free. So that’s fine. I think there is a market for that. And we just have to make that clear in the introduction in the show notes. Yeah. And I’ll probably change the title some to something more like first steps or something. Yep. Yeah, and then that I people will. We just have to be clear set expectations properly. That’s the only thing. Okay. So yeah, so no, it was fine. Do you have another 10 minutes? Of course. Yeah. Yeah, cuz we’re booked to the end of the hour. Did you ever take a look at those slides? I sent you.

Thomas Molenaar  50:54

The Yes. Because we had to cut off our conversation. I mean, I have to conjure them up.

Noz Urbina  51:02

Just gonna take a look at what I sent you. Because you said something that triggered me a lot when you’re talking about where you are, and also the like the kind of the strategy and it it was, I was thinking about, and I do want to ask you because I I figured the answer would would kind of be no and I didn’t want to put you on the spot like on the recording to talk to you about the the content itself. Yeah. And because what we’re seeing a lot of is when when your any stuff which you said you’re you’re looking into with a with an agency and so on the data and the data, the metric side. What I’ve been seeing, I’ve been talking to some other practitioners on our field, what what I’m not seeing a lot of in the market is agencies who are putting connecting the dots actually have that drive a content structures. So what you have is you have the data and I’ve seen this multiple times, is that you shouldn’t be dead driven, you should be dead a lead, you should be thinking about how to how to connect and integrate the data. Once you have it. How do you execute? Because if your content is still document oriented, channel oriented in the sense that you’ve got copies of the content in InDesign, or whatever your print, print channel pipeline is for, for events, you’ve got it in PowerPoints, you’ve got it in a document style stuff like PDFs that you’re going through. You’re assuming you’re using Viva

Thomas Molenaar  52:45

we know as a CRM, we use Salesforce for CRM.

Noz Urbina  52:50

Okay, yeah. But Viva as a like the approval and document management.

Thomas Molenaar  52:56

Only in the US we’ve got a another solution. Go and codify in, in Europe,

Noz Urbina  53:03

fantastic. View is such I don’t know if you’re familiar with them. With sorry with you know, the name viva. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, because they’re a nightmare for me, because it’s ridiculous. You know, we were talking to Roche global infrastructure project and the call started, and the guy had a copy of my book. And that’s how he I said, Hi, Noz. Nice to meet you. I’m a fan and like, he had my book with a bunch of yellow stickies in it, where he highlighted pages. Like he was super excited to work with me. We give our bid. It wasn’t a lot of money, blah, blah, blah. And we didn’t get it and then afterwards, I was talking to one of our contacts, just having a one on one and she goes, You didn’t mention viva. And I’m like, seriously? They’re like, Yeah, you got to talk about Viva man. No, Viva no deal. It’s that like they’re they have a look. You’re the you’re the first farmer and maybe yeah, because of the European and that

Thomas Molenaar  54:05

ya know, we actually just came out of a large project. I so I led a project across all markets to look at kind of like, you know, asset management’s approval. And because we’ve got Viva in the US, and we’ve got we’ve got other systems in Europe and in our international business, to see whether we would all move to Viva and then the end of the answer was currently no, because I mean, it takes a big investment and now we need people to actually adopt current systems. But yeah, I do have the idea that and it’s the same as what you have at Salesforce and some of these other kind of big tech companies is once you entrench yourself into or once you start working with it, you kind of entrench yourself with just being Viva oriented with everything that you do. So I get where you were, where your pains coming from with this, but yeah, we’re not we use fever for our regulatory components, but for marketing, it’s not it’s not widely learning

Noz Urbina  55:06

right now. So I wanted to show you I don’t have for some reason I can’t find the email I sent

Thomas Molenaar  55:12

you. I’ve got the slides here. Do you

Noz Urbina  55:15

can you tell me which ones because I don’t see anything relevant. I might have just put them on some thread.

Thomas Molenaar  55:25

I think so. Just just going to you know, I did. I did. Have a look at this. When we when we saw last Sanjay Javits. It’s from.

Noz Urbina  55:38

Yes, okay.

Thomas Molenaar  55:40

April, I think so. Two things for us when it comes to content the first one is, and that’s probably Sorry, I’m trying to get to PowerPoint up again. I lost it. So we started we started talking about modular content within the organization. It’s a bit of a buzzword now. But how do we get the content because it’s definitely something that we need to use and something that you all know better than I do from a regulatory point of view is just far more efficient because you can give content creators, the guidelines within which they can be used come to and stay on track, but also make sure that that content can be edited and remain compliant. So

Noz Urbina  56:25

on the other side of that, you’re suddenly putting a ton more assets out there. Yep. So your if you can, so we have clients who are who are getting out 52 variations of a single, single piece of content pushing it to three formats and translating it into around 50 languages 1500 outputs that have to be approved from what used to be a single document. So that’s an extreme case, but the idea is that on the good side, you know, you can show look, I’ve got all this audit ability, you know, we can keep all this track of the rules, we know who did what, et cetera, et cetera, all this good stuff from a compliance point of view. But then there’s all suddenly this volume problem, you gotta have this discussion of suddenly we’re going to be hitting all these variants are going to be going through so how, what are the rules for how we manage that

Thomas Molenaar  57:18

Yeah, I think that’s, you know, that’s definitely something where, where we haven’t even gotten to to be completely honest with you. So there’s two, I think, two components from us that make it that we probably if we want to discuss this in a bit more detail, we’ll probably just just wait until we solve those first one is we are doing a massive rebrand, which we’re very excited about. It’s that veterinary perspective angle that’s been launched a couple of months ago and will be kind of like really rolled out over the next couple of months and that will impact massively on the rest of our content strategy as well. So, you know, we’ve we’ve got the we’ve got some, some some sort of pillars, some sort of, we’ve got pillars underneath it that will inform content production going forward, however, that what that needs to look like hasn’t been communicated yet. So that’s the one part and we’ve got an external party helping us out with defining that for us. I think the other part of it is then looking at well, how do we create consistency across channels once we’ve defined what it actually is that we want to be consistent with, you know, the product level to an extent but I think that’s going to change over the next couple of couple of months. So I’d almost say well, let’s, I think if we if we’d have this conversation now then we would we would go to content teams and say, well, that’s great, but we haven’t even figured out what where we need to go next. And because from a consultancy, you know, point of view, we already have a party helping us there’s also not really a room to potentially partner up there. Again, but I think a bit further down the line where we really look at like how we can manage all this content and how are we going to come up with a structured approach to make our content available and you know, make that applicable for omnichannel? I think that’s something where we should definitely pick up the conversation with a wider team.

Noz Urbina  59:13

I wanted to show you something specifically about that. Which is that where does these Where do these where and how did these two things connect? And so I spent like the first half of my career, doing it, as you’ve described, where you know, I come in this kind of strategy, this is what we want to do these deliverables, let’s structure and modularize that and then about 10 years ago, I flipped that on its head. And because what I was finding was we tied ourselves in knots over and over and over again. Because what was happening is that there the the modularization process, we kind of thinking about it as like chopping up what we have, and that’s how I thought about it for for a decade. What actually is it’s a design process of redesigning our content for omni channel. It’s it’s not just breaking down what you’ve got because what you’ve got is wasn’t built that way. It wasn’t didn’t it wasn’t written that way. It wasn’t constructed. The way it wasn’t originally intended to do that. So it’s not like you can break apart a boat and make a plane out of it. Yeah, you got to think what are what are the components that we need in order to build this new thing that we’re trying to do? And what are the shared components that will allow us to build this kind of playing that kind of playing on a racecar? Like what are the shareable components, etc. So, I wanted to talk about that intersection point. So, we, when we talk about modularizing content, we start with the customer journey process. So you may have you know, you’re you’re figuring out what the new brand is going to look like you figuring out what you want what your go to market looks like all that’s great. That’s an input. And then we got to we take that and say, Okay, well, now we’ve done the research, we’re doing the rebrand. We’re figuring out the data. We’re understandings but then we got to get down to what is the what is the information requirement? What are people asking? and in what order, like, do if you’re already a key opinion leader, maybe we’re going to target you with different messages than if you’ve just you know, you’re just opening up your practice as a veterinarian. And if you’re just starting taking on a new therapeutic area or whatever, you have different journeys you’re going to go on and your questions will have different amounts of depths that you want and they will different relevancies Depending on where you are. Then taking the emotional component like you know, is this is this a current urgent care thing Do I have Do I have a an owner sitting in the room and I’ve got to look up question now or is this like a research thing where I’m printing off some four pages to read them on the train or listening to a podcast, that kind of thing? And then context. So Europe, different regulatory contexts, different animals and treatments? And all of that maps to taxonomy? I don’t know how much you guys are talking about taxonomy yet. But I say the who, what, when, where why of your content, all of this metadata, and that takes your market data and says Alright, so we’ve identified this segment this person, etc. We know the whose we know the metrics that we want. We know seasons, we’ll take all of that. And now we have to apply that to the content. And so this is where the content modeling bit comes in. We figure out the persona, the goal, the story that they’re going through what their questions are for particular moments, geographies, channels, etc, what the actual probable channel processes are within that journey within that stage of the journey. And that says, Okay, these are then the modules that we want. These are the modules which we should create. Now we go find that information in our source and we define how we should capture it target etc. And then how we map that those things. So we’ve created these modules is our modular strategy doing what it should have we created the more right modules, are we tagging them the right way? Are we surfacing them to the right people? And this second half is, first of all, it’s often kind of forgotten that you’ve got to map back to the metrics and the first half. So the stuff around the actual models themselves is where we’re often seeing issues. So I’m happy to you know, I’m not I’m not rushing you but what I do want to say is the modeling process should begin when you’re still doing journey mapping, experience mapping and strategy. Not that I’m going to come in and take over that work. No, no, that’s that should be a dialogue because what happens is they don’t ask the right questions because they don’t realize the downstream requirements. They don’t realize how this is going to affect modeling. So they just simply don’t get the right data, or they don’t ask the right questions in the in strategy building and stuff.

Thomas Molenaar  1:04:06

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that’s a very valid point. I mean, I need to go because I’ve got another meeting. Oh,

Noz Urbina  1:04:13

that was first 10 minutes.

Thomas Molenaar  1:04:17

Yeah, I think it’d be worth kind of like extending the conversation a bit longer and making sure that we kind of like also get more clarity on the services that are being offered as well. Seeing whether we can, you know, can can then maybe plan something in with with some of the people close into the content creation as well, because that’s something that I think will be interesting to get the we’ve got the wider conversation now about our content strategy. It’d be good to maybe have a conversation with people in that that group as well.

Noz Urbina  1:04:46

Yeah, absolutely.

Thomas Molenaar  1:04:47

So if you could you sent me some availability maybe for for not next week, but the week after? Perfect. Maybe we can we can have another half hour to talk us through and then I’ll jump to my other call now. But then thanks. Yeah, thanks again for your time. And thanks for the invitation for the for the podcast as well.

Noz Urbina  1:05:04

Yeah, it was fun. Well, thank you for joining

Thomas Molenaar  1:05:08

us, speak to you soon.

Noz Urbina  1:05:09

See you soon. Take care. Bye bye bye.

Omnichannel in pharma: Scaling up your content operations

Session leader(s):
Monica Mercer, Noz Urbina

Pharma companies around the world are trying to “go omnichannel”. Various departments, from Medical Affairs and MedInfo to Commercial and Marketing to Regulatory and SciComm are looking at ways to improve efficiencies, outcomes, and audience experience.

In this session, we’ll examine where and how pharmaceutical companies are adopting omnichannel solutions, including modular (aka LEGO-like) content and data integration.

We’ll explore the future of omnichannel for the industry and share a vision of what a remarkable omnichannel solution looks like. This session will draw upon case studies from Eli Lilly, Sanofi, Roche, 3M Life Sciences and more to outline proven strategies and tactics to help teams across the organization move towards omnichannel.

This webinar is hosted by The Content Wrangler and is sponsored by Urbina Consulting.

Transform traditional content into intelligent modular content

Session leader(s):
Cecil Lee

Eli Lilly’s commercial organization has a vision of delivering personalized customer experiences through omnichannel orchestration. This means delivering the right content to the right customer in the right channel at the right time. Transforming our traditional content into intelligent modular content is a key enabler for the ‘right content’. Traditional content is often human-only - that is, not ready for machine processing - and resource and time intensive to produce, and finally it's quite difficult to reuse or measure its effectiveness.

Lilly has transformed its content operating model with a modular approach to creating claims, implemented a technology stack that is machine friendly, and enables fast productivity of content and its measurement. In this session, we will explore the journey of converting human-only content to both human and machine-friendly content that enables automation showcasing the modernization of product claims content.

Free Masterclass: Omnichannel in Pharma – from getting started to the cutting edge

Session leader(s):
Angus Edwardson, Noz Urbina

Omnichannel vision, alignment and execution: A life sciences cautionary tale & case study

Session leader(s):
Victor Lebon

Achieving Omnichannel success can be a big leap for many companies. In this case study about a life sciences company that was transitioning from a product-centric & multichannel strategy to a customer-centric omnichannel approach, the gap between desire and ability was (at times) chasmic. Making such a leap can be daunting.

We will share some of the opportunities & challenges in achieving organisational alignment across customer experience and content and data excellence teams. We will also highlight the importance of a solid data strategy, as well as how to work with program execution teams while trying to integrate with education, change management, and communications.

We'll cover what went well (and what didn't), what we'd have done differently, and the lessons learned that can be applied across programs & sectors.

Podcast Ep. 19 – AI, ontologies, and componentized content w Yanko Ivanov, Enterprise Knowledge

Session leader(s):
Yanko Ivanov, Noz Urbina

[bctt tweet="Domain models are powerful tools for organizing information, but they aren't machine-readable. That's where ontologies come in.” @YankoKIvanov / @NozUrbina #Omnichannel Podcast. #ontology" username="OmnichannelX"]

Highlights

In this episode, you'll hear why:

• Domain and content modelling are different, complementary, and essential in organizing information effectively.


• A domain model helps build content models by establishing key concepts and relationships.


• Formal ontology and knowledge graphs enable the integration of structured data with content, forming a unified platform.


• Large language models have potential issues with reliability, traceability, and provability, but could connect with ontologies to be more reliable.

Full session transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

Noz Urbina  00:02

Hello, everybody. I'm Noz Urbina, host of the omnichannel podcast by OmnichannelX and founder of Urbina Consulting, who brings you omnichannelX and all our delightful resources. I'm here today with Yanko Ivanov who works for a company that Urbina Consulting partners and collaborates with on a regular basis with Enterprise Knowledge. Could you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?

Yanko Ivanov  00:26

Sure. Thanks. Nice. Thanks for having me today, and talking with you. My name is Yanko. Even though I'm an enterprise solution, architects with enterprise knowledge, I've been doing this for quite a bit, but content management, content, delivery, semantic solutions, those pieces have always been part of my career from the very beginning, both from the technical side of things as well as to down to the business implementation, business goals. In the most recent stage of my career, I've really been focusing on the structure content and semantics of how these areas overlap. And I'm really excited to talk to you about it.

Noz Urbina  01:02

Awesome. Yes. So Yanko and I, we work together, we have very interesting Venn diagrams of our backgrounds and our and our skill sets. And then so we do. And we also, I think one of the things interesting is, we both work on that boundary between the technical people and the and the business people. So they're interested in how the business, the business is going to derive value, and how they are going to operationalize solutions, but we do have some technical background. So what we're gonna be talking about today is various ways, essentially, at the highest level, various ways of organizing your content. So we're going to talk about domain and content modeling, ontologies, knowledge, graphs, and of course, what no conversation today is complete without some mention of AI, and large language models, aka, chat, GPT. And, and the like. So to kick us off, I want to start with a topic, it's very interesting for me, and we're getting a lot of demand and interest these days. Domain and content modeling. So I'm gonna define those. And then we're gonna see where does domain content modeling and, and where do things like ontologies, knowledge, graphs, and all that other stuff that's coming up, begin. And that's, that's what we're gonna switch over. So to start with, kicking off with a dog domain model. So when we're doing domain modeling and projects, what we're talking about is figuring out the relationship between all the key things in a subject domain. So there's a lot of that can be sometimes confusion between the word domain like, I'm speaking now in terms of a subject, like a domain of expertise or domain of knowledge, and domain like a URL. So no, we're not talking about web domains. Although you may use this for for for your web content, we're talking about in the sense of like a domain of expertise or domain of knowledge, what are the things that we're talking about? So if we were in the pharma domain, we would have, we have drugs and prescribers and patients and conditions and side effects, and, and so on, and so on, and so on. So the reason we start with domain modeling is because we're building the key and important relationships between the key concepts in this area. And, incredibly, this is often not done. When we're doing content, people just kind of launch into projects, and start creating content, but have not thought of the underlying domain and how the different things relate to each other. And there's a lot of benefit that can be derived. Because when you take your your base classes and concepts that are in your domain, and you start to extend those and say, Okay, well, what do we want to say about these things, then your content model, which is the your content types, and the structures of your content, and how they are related to each other, will be rooted very much in the reality and share the mental model that is existing in the heads of your audience? So I've been content modeling for years, and I used to content model from documents. So I would model and I would go into an organization say, Well, what are we trying to create here? These are the documents that you're doing. Okay, so let's model these up, so you can create them more efficiently. domain modeling was very, very powerful, because it started to look at what, before we start modeling to reproduce the status quo. What is the underlying architecture here? Like, what is the logic behind all this? How do people think about it? And so, getting into domain modeling and journey mapping to really understand the information and experience space that your potential content consumers and content creators are living in, before we start saying how we should package things up into documents? That's been very, very poor. awful. So I've kind of already alluded to a content model. But let's say so we've named all our things. So if we were staying in pharma, we've we've named our drugs or side effects, things like studies and participants, and all these different things and how they all relate to each other, how they're what the rules are around those relationships. Now we get into, what are we going to say? So we have, for example, a study may be talked about in dozens and dozens and dozens of documents. It's one thing in the real world a study, you know, clinical trial, it is it is a study on on drug and how it works. But how we may talk about it when we're responding to a patient inquiry, how we might talk about it, when we're speaking to a regulating body, how we might talk about it when we're speaking, when medical professionals speaking to you know, another medical professional who works for the form of brand, all of these things are different contexts, that might require different content types that may or may not share information. So you're going to have consistent things like study names, participants, design, geographies are the other kind of key finding. So there's lots of stuff that you're going to you're going to share. But how you talk about them may be encapsulated in different content types, depending on the need, and the use case, and so on. So that's how the content the domain model relates to the content model. Once we've got a content model, then we can create this nice what we call semantic structured content. I'm constantly use the metaphor of Lego, you know, if you want to Lego a fi, your content, and actually build this reusable components that you can take apart and build it up different things for different people, or do personalization, all that good stuff, then having this meaningful, aka semantic model behind it is really powerful. You can bake that into your different management and delivery systems, so that they all understand what's being operated on, they can deliver much more, much more, much more personalized, relevant, localized, channel appropriate, et cetera, et cetera, experiences. So that's my kind of area of expertise. I do that all day in day out, figuring out how we build good day models and content models so that people can author deliver this great content. And in the last six or seven years, I've been collaborating more and more with people like Yonko, who do ontologies and knowledge graphs and artificial intelligence systems, recommendation engines, and so on. So you don't go. If the domain model is kind of like our design picture, it's our it's our, it's our visualization or conceptual visualization of what our domain looks like, and what the relationships are. Can you take us into where things like ontology and feel free to just throw in some taxonomy stuff in there? What's then the next step? And what's the benefits of going from having a model to having a formal ontology?

Yanko Ivanov  08:09

Yeah, this is really interesting, because what you mentioned earlier is having all the content or information around a, let's say, a study, or, or even a drug, and being able to present it in various different ways. Now imagine what if we can actually automatically integrate not only the content of our study or drug, but also actual data? It could be standard results, it could be specific, specific data points for the drug, or the results or the study that are currently local, stored in a database in a very structured data source data system. When we're talking, talking about content model, this is content we have, whether it's structured content, whether it's this rich text, and so on, it's actual text, mostly right? We can have images and so on. But the ability to integrate that text with the related data is where a solution like a knowledge gap really comes in. We can get into into more detail about knowledge paths, but the idea is that it can connect is basically a connective tissue, issue all the connective layer between various different elements in your enterprise that produce one cohesive view of whatever entity you're looking at, whether

Noz Urbina  09:28

that's the ontology that's a knowledge graph, or both. That's a knowledge graph, where

Yanko Ivanov  09:31

we'll get to the knowledge graph in more detail, but how do we get there? You also mentioned the domain model. So the domain model, like I said, it's it's really the representation of our world, whether it's pharma, whether it's a manufacturing company, whatever that is, what is our world? What are we talking about? What are the specific entities that we refer day in and day out? If it's a product, what are the components of that product? What are the attributes of that product, and so on. That's the domain model. How do we take it into an ontology? First of all, what is an ontology? Well, you mentioned taxonomy, let's start there, taxonomy. It's a hierarchical view of metadata, right? You have the tree structure of the different attributes, different different metadata. A good example is country, right? You can have a list of countries, you can have a list of colors, and business units, and so on. So this this, all of these items, compose your address. And some

Noz Urbina  10:28

I always use the example of, of region. Yes, in the sense that country symbol because there's like a list of countries, right. But it actually in practice, when companies are getting a bit crazy, it's like, okay, well, what what, what are our regions? What's who's, where's North America? Where is? Do we want to address the Nordics? Do we want to address Scandinavia? Do you want to address Europe? Like, how does the world break down into groupings and sub groupings of of countries? So quite an interesting taxonomy channel challenge?

Yanko Ivanov  11:02

This is a very common one. And like, how do I find a document that's tagged for India? For example, when I'm searching for you, Mia, like, how does that work? Right? So

Noz Urbina  11:12

did he meet me as Europe? Middle East Africa?

Yanko Ivanov  11:16

Yes. Yes. So this is a challenge for taxonomy. So this is where we start talking about not only taxonomy, but more getting into an ontology. So let's talk about ontology. And ontology is in a very basic, simple terms, you can think about it as a taxonomy in 3d. Because taxonomy is your parent child relationship, the tree structure on ontology, it really allows us to now provide different types of relationships between these things in our taxonomy. So if you had a list of countries, and then a separate list of regions, now you can connect all the countries in a specific region, outside of your parent child relationship. So it really provides a different layer of different relationships,

Noz Urbina  12:02

or the region country thing is an ontology example.

Yanko Ivanov  12:05

It can be an ontology example, I guess, right? Because this isn't how it's implemented. But yes, absolutely. And this is a very, very basic example of an ontology we can talk about. So let's talk about a drug, right? In pharma, you have a drug, and there is there are so many different elements around the drug. So getting back to the to your domain, you had a little circle or a drug in your domain, domain picture. Now, we need to be able to define how the string relates to other things, other entities in that domain, like studies, like participants, results, in status, and so on, but in a more granular detail. So when you're thinking about the domain, it's a very high level conceptual representation of your domain of your world. When we start getting into ontology, this is something that we actually can take in implementing our graph database. So it takes a domain, and really gets into the detail how specifically these things relate. Maybe even a little bit of engineering, just to be able to be applied to the data in a more efficient way. But an ontology is, ultimately is a representation of entities, their attributes, and how they relate to each other. That's the data model for a graph database. And once you apply that data model into the graph database, and you have the data integrated with the graph database, that's where you have a knowledge graph.

Noz Urbina  13:38

Okay, so there's a couple things. One is that I recently was talking to somebody and I managed to Google this in the interim. But I realized that I've been saying graph database for years, not knowing why it was called a graph database, specifically, as far as I could say that it might as well call it a strawberry database, for as much as much benefit as that word graph is adding. And I googled that, googled it and eventually found out why it's called a graph database. And, and they actually, there was actually somebody going back to the 80s. Talking about how unfortunate was that we call them graphs. Because most people don't think of graphs that way at all. So when we think of the word graph, we think of graphic or graphical something visual. But it's a very nerdy mathematical term in the sense that it like if you if you think back to Geometry, you have functions, like you know, I don't even know enough math to come up with an affliction of example, off the top of my head, but you have something times something for example, and that I don't make a line. You can graph that function. Yeah. Also, you have when you have a system of these different things and their connections, you can Talk about mathematically about how you connect between the different things in that system, and what falls within a certain group, and so on and so on. And unfortunately, that's also called a graph. And that's why it's called a graph database. Because we have this idea of things and the relationships, you can trace the relationships within it. Hence, graph database, one of the least intuitive two terms in, in technology, I think,

Yanko Ivanov  15:28

agreed when I got into this. When I got into the graph database in graph, knowledge graphs, in my mind was like, Wait, isn't that actually a network? It's really it is a network of things, how they connected to each other. That's what it is. But yeah, there's.

Noz Urbina  15:45

So there's that I want to also use another example, just because we've talked about farm a bit. I know, we do a lot of work from in pharma. But I want to give people another example of an ontology that I think everyone can relate to, because we've all owned some sort of complicated thing at some point. So if we had a manufacturing product, yep, we can have graphs. Or we could have an ontology for example that you have, you have a product, and that product has parts. And you might need spare parts for that product. And that's those spare parts have certain availabilities, like, where they're available in what countries, these availabilities variations, there's all variations of the part that you can get, they all will have their price they will have, whether they're in stock, or not all this different information about a part. And they will have, they will break down. So you'll have like parts, you think of a car has an engine as a part. But an engine is a really complicated thing breaks down to lots of other sub parts, so that you have an actual, the whole world of manufacturing, you can think about as another example of where you might have an ontology of the relationship between parts and spares and regions and, you know, engineers that are certified to install that kind of part. And all these times types of relationships,

Yanko Ivanov  17:07

materials as well, like, what is this this part made up? What are substitute materials? What are the effects of that? Exactly, it can get really complicated. But it's fascinating how it can actually describe the relationships between these things. And then the fact that this is now captured in a machine readable way, can then allow us to really implement all kinds of use cases on the front end, whether it's a recommendation engine, whether it's just the website, Hey, um, my car broke down, I need this part, making sure that that part actually fits my car.

Noz Urbina  17:42

Yeah, I think that you dropped the word machine readable in there, which was one of the other things that I'd wanted to bring up, which is that so the part that I'm usually involved in, is figuring out that domain model, but a domain model can live on a slide. Yeah, you can be a mural board, it can be in a, you know, in mind mapping tool, you can do domain models, kind of wherever you want. Because it's figuring out the things and the relationships. And you do that by talking to people by doing interviews, and getting subject matter expertise, experts in talking to clients and understanding the domain, subject area that you're talking about. But you can't that doesn't live in a database, it's a powerful thing. And you will write better content and you will, you know, you'll you'll be able to make better insights and do things. But it's not machine readable. You can't use that to power anything. So So what are the kind of some of the kind of things we can actually power? Once we've got this machine readable? What can we do?

Yanko Ivanov  18:45

Yeah, so this is where the ontology comes in, right? Because ontology is machine readable? It is the that data model that tells the machine saying, Okay, well, if you have a drug, or if I have a part, that part can have all these different attributes, or it can have can have all these different relationships, it can be related to a different part to different products, and so on. So now the machine can really get the algorithm can really look at a specific part and tell me, okay, these are the related items that are explicitly related. These are the attributes of this machine, the this part, and actually presented to me so as is an actual true answer. And I'm specifically focusing on this because we're going to talk about this in a second or a little bit later, when we talk about charge up, for example, but this is curated information. This is actual true fact. And then what kind of things we can do with us. recommendation engine is the very basic one, I mean, recommending so if we're only talking about content, say you have a bunch of publications, articles, and actually we've implemented something like this for one of the development banks here based in this area. You have a bunch of publications from different sources, then we need to be Well to recommend, based on who I am based on what what areas, I'm focused on my seniority level level in the organization, what kind of articles or publications are relevant to me. So, because we have the articles, because we haven't the metadata on those articles, because because we know who I am, then we can make that matching and recommend content. From a parts perspective, we can again recommend the parts that are very specific to you, whether it's a monitor, whether it's a car engine, whether it's pharmaceutical products, or manufacturing, medicine, America's product that you need for your hospital machine, for example, knowing all the details, all the attributes for that machine that you've already purchased, and what's available out there, you can then make that match and say, Okay, well, these these are the the specific parts, components, consumables that you need for your specific machine, rather than, hey, here, this is big manual, that's 500 pages, figured out what you need that,

Noz Urbina  21:05

and this huge catalog that goes with it. And you need to connect the two. So we're, we're seeing that, in manufacturing, where there's a lot of demand for this idea of the the universal, personalized hub, sense that I want to go in. And this sort of this would apply to any complex operation, but it's very, very obvious and clear in manufacturing, I'm going to repair this machine at this hospital or this, this airplane, or this, you know, Formula One racecar, whatever it is. And I want to know exactly the parts I need. This is the spares I need etc. And if I want to, if I don't have them, I want to be able to order them while I'm reading through the procedures. So I'm getting I'm, I'm about to start, I'm about to start a job. And that because something's gone wrong. And I'm going to ask him to tell me right at the beginning, you're going to need these things. Do I have those things? No, I don't? Can I order those things? How long will it be before I can get them, etcetera, etcetera, sort of so separating parts database or parts, ordering manuals, knowledge base, how tos all that and bringing it all together in one world.

Yanko Ivanov  22:21

That's, that's where the bringing it all in one, you wouldn't have to copy all the data into knowledge graph, but we connect to it, we point to where things are. And that's that's the power of it.

Noz Urbina  22:32

I think we also should I should, as a content model guy, I should bring this back to how does this relate to content types. And so if we had a if we have our parts, and we have our spares, or we have our, our drugs, and we have our studies, I mentioned the different people will want to pull together content in different ways. I think people often get confused because it sounds like everything lives in the Knowledge Graph. And then you then people go, but why do I need a content model? What Where's like, don't I just put all my stuff in the graph. But we're still you can you could be writing a paper for one audience, like a presentation, a certain audience, or you could be writing an email newsletter. Or you could be writing a formal response to a query, like if someone emails you in and you need to somebody have a question that you have to write them a response, you may mention many of these things, you might bring up lots of these facts and lots of these pieces of data and you want them all to be accurate. You want them to be live linked to the source of truth. But the content that you write about them will be very, very different types, depending on the situation like your newsletter content, although it may mention the same facts. And in different ways, you're creating content context, when you in your in your content model saying okay, well, I want to write a newsletter, or I want to create a brochure or I want to create a manual or I want to create a knowledgebase article. So those content types are things that live. It's a separate layer, from your ontology of all the data and facts, you want to talk about your data and facts that you're going to talk about in lots of different ways. And you're going to talk about it lots of different channels a lot. And that and from lots of different departments in your in your brand. So whether it's, you can do this in one department, but at the end of the day, you're going to be producing lots of things. At the end of the day, you're going to be producing lots of different types of content that you deliver. And those different those are defined in your content model. And they will they interlock with your data model in the ontology. So these, they're both going to be done separately, but they're entered together their chocolate and peanut butter,

Yanko Ivanov  24:56

also Okay, so there are two general ways of thinking about this knowledge graph or an ontology. Let's talk about ontology and Quantum. The Quantum model can be really loosely integrated with a knowledge graph or an ontology. Because yes, you have an article. And the article is mostly text and not as structured as an ontology, for example. So an ontology that describes your products or your your drug, or whatever that is, can say, CERP, here's the datasheet, or publication article for that drug. And that points to your content model to your content item in the world. So that's an explicit relationship. But it the overlap between data model or content model and ontology, it's loose, not quite there. Whereas when you're talking about a little bit more of a structured content, that overlap is a little bit more of an overlap. So for example, you have a product and you want to provide specific images for that product that are approved images, specifically, for regulated industries, like pharma, this is this is huge, right? You have to use the approved images, uproots information about a product otherwise you can get in real trouble. So if we're talking about a drug,

Noz Urbina  26:18

and also just for marketing, you want to use the approved the right approved stuff, you don't want to be selling pictures into into Sub Saharan Africa with a bunch of Swedish models,

Yanko Ivanov  26:28

right. So that that's actually another good, good, good problem there. Alright, so we're talking about a product and you wanted to have specific images, you have to have you want to have the approved description of that product? Well, do you want to store that description in a graph database, relational database, or you want to store it in your content management system. And that is the approved product description that may have a short description, Title Tag, tagline? Multiple tagline is depending on where it's displayed, and so on. So you have

Noz Urbina  27:02

multiple legal disclaimers. They list?

Yanko Ivanov  27:05

Absolutely. So from a content perspective, your product model will have content that says okay, well, here's the product. And I have the title, the description, short description and everything else. Well, that same model is represented in your ontology so that they're consuming applications know exactly what what description should to use, what image to use, or what legal disclaimers to use, depending on the region, depending on the use case. So the content model and ontology really overlap in that sense, when your content is restructured to reward structure. And we want to provide a lot of personalization and customization will the delivery end. Yeah,

Noz Urbina  27:48

so what we're doing projects these days, for example, if we keep with the farmer example, we have people who are talking about this stuff, literally in PowerPoint. And they're getting tired of it, because they don't have the same facts will appear in many, many, many, many PowerPoints. And they and for example, you've got a citation, and you have to copy and paste the reference, or you got those facts at the bottom of every single slide that mentions them, the citation is not a thing, you know, you can't it doesn't live anywhere, you can't universally reference them. If you if you got if you add another one to a slide, it doesn't automatically number them for you. So whereas if we move to a much more structured way of working, we can create, we can create slides. And we will and we will make sure that all the citations are up to date, we will make sure that all the graphics are being used for the for the particular region that you're delivering that that stuff to. But you could also express the same thing out as a website. With the search box. We're gonna phone. And you can't really do that unless you're actually structuring your content. If at the end of the day, you have this fantastic search engine or recommendation engine that goes here's the best content and they send you a PDF, or slideshow that is not going to be able to deliver you the experience that you want to do in this decade and day and age. So this is a bit based. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of copy paste. So this is, yeah, so what either you copy paste like crazy, and then review each copy so that you can have your different outputs that you want. Or you just move to a different base way of working, which is this structured way of working on the content side, and a structured way of working on the data side. So I think you've you've nicely teed us up here. So we're taking the merging of structure and data of content and data in this unstructured ways. Which takes us to the word on everybody's lips, which is AI chatbots. And specifically for some reason ai ai and chatbots has kind of kind of become synonymous with chat GPT category, they kind of pulled the Google in the way that you know now people Just say ciao GPT when they really mean like large language model chatbots

Yanko Ivanov  30:05

it's amazing. This has happened only in a few months. Yeah, four months now. It's just, it's phenomenal how quickly it grows up.

Noz Urbina  30:14

So how does this interact? How does this world interact?

Yanko Ivanov  30:19

Yeah, I've been thinking about this. And actually, my colleague, Chris Marine, who recently published a blog about charge GPT. And whether it's ready for enterprise, it's a fantastic blog. Actually, I read it recently in a really good time.

Noz Urbina  30:34

Okay, you got to send us that's all put it in the show notes

Yanko Ivanov  30:36

are definitely well, I have some thoughts from there. We'll touch on that. But chat GPT is still young. It's the technology is very young. And we've seen it has tremendous power, and tremendous potential, but it's not quite there yet. Right? It can produce results that are actually not correct and not correct. And they're in an enterprise environment. That's not, you can't do that, right. It still requires a lot of supervision. A, it has a huge potential in terms of content generation, with supervision. That's, in my mind, if you're generating content, do you have somebody to expert leads to go through and update it and so on? Absolutely, there are use cases where this, this technology will fit really well. But at this point, it's still early on for pull on enterprise adoption, again, depending on the use case, in their use cases where it can really fit nicely. But from regular enterprise level, still around.

Noz Urbina  31:41

So let's let's, let's do a quick definition before we get too large. So I mentioned large language model chatbot, etc. So what if you haven't heard already, if you've been hiding under a rock? So chat, GBT is a what's called a large language model based chat, bot or chat interface. So it's, it's essentially done in the same way that autocomplete has been working on your phone for for a decade or so. And now what you see in, in Google, you have auto responses, you have these like, quick, if you use Gmail or Google Suite, I'm sure probably Microsoft as well. You, you get these kinds of sentences generated and actually read the email. And it's kind of been creepy, even for a few years now. How, how fitting the responses that it generates are, are like a really will pick out, like, it'll, it'll send people condolences for bad news, and it will, it will, you know, will notice that something's supposed to be funny and offer you with Oh, yeah, that's really funny, as a response. So these, this ability to understand the language and pull out an appropriate string of words has been here for a while. And the large language model is basically just times 100. Doing that, so that instead of saying, here's, here's a probable word, or sentence, we're getting up to long form answers, you know, essay length, answers where it's, it's basically, it's a probability engine that says, based on what you asked, chances are, this is what you want as a response. And it generates that from this this enormous language model that it's created by scanning basically, the internet.

Yanko Ivanov  33:34

It's really fascinating to watch how they've implemented is just out of this world. But yeah, ultimately, I actually saw a colleague of mine was talking about so ultimately, this comes down to, like anchor pressing and pressing the autocomplete button, and it will complete the whole setting for you. Pretty much. It really, it, basically, like you said, takes everything that you've written so far, and analyzes it based on all the incredible amount of confidence already has its learning base, and produce the statistical statistical recommendation of what would be next and and again, and again and again. So it keeps going on that way. It's It is fascinating, the question. So

Noz Urbina  34:18

how can we? Well, we I'm sure, probably most people who have heard of it have also heard of it the times it's gone crazy. Yeah. So it's straight up made up facts. Yes. They actually using they've already invented a term for for large language models, screw ups called hallucinations. Oh, yeah, that's the term that they use now. So basically, you can if you'll ask it for a list of seven articles about the French Revolution. And it can only think of six it'll make up a seven. It'll literally just make up an article and if you ask for more information about that article, it'll double down. It'll just it will say it will give you a summary of that article it will give you when it was when it was published, and none of this is real. It's all All just grammatically. Hallucinations not acceptable.

Yanko Ivanov  35:06

From a business perspective, like I said earlier, yes, not right. They're not there. But from a technology perspective, I mean, think about this, there is something out there that can just make up stuff. It's like, wow, it creates its own thing. This is This is incredible.

Noz Urbina  36:10

Okay, so we're cutting in here, we've never done this before we are jumping back in Younker, you'll, you're gonna hear my audio a little bit different. And if you're watching the video, got a headset, now I'm actually in a different place. We, this is the first time this has ever happened. We were in mid flow, talking about this very, very quickly moving industry talking. And we were basically saying, as you've heard so far, that large language models are very powerful, but have some issues with reliability, traceability, provability. And to get them ready for the enterprise, the ideal would be if they were married, with knowledge graphs that do have traceability and auditability and are using verified facts and connections. So I'm gonna play you a little bit of audio from an announcement that happened in between when we recorded and, and when we wanted to go live. This is not a promotion of this particular product, but it is.

Yanko Ivanov  37:08

To build copilot, we didn't just Connect Chat GPT to Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 copilot is powered by what we call the copilot system, a sophisticated processing and orchestration engine. It harnesses the power of three foundational technologies, the Microsoft 365 apps, that's Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook teams and more. The Microsoft Graph that's all your content and context, your emails, files, meetings, chats and calendar and a large language model, or LLM, a creative engine capable of parsing and producing human readable text, all accessible through natural language. It starts with a prompt from you.

Noz Urbina  37:28

So that's basically it in a nutshell, what we were what we were saying is to make these systems enterprise class, they needed to be connected to the graph. So Microsoft has said, your apps or emails, your meeting transcripts. And that's fine. That's absolutely true. But the kind of technology that Yonko and I work on in these projects are not just ambient recordings. It's not just capturing email discussions and transcript from meetings, although that's that is very useful. There's actually intentionally curated and loaded data. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the difference and and how they fit into building solutions differently?

Yanko Ivanov  37:40

Yeah, absolutely. So like I said, it's been literally a couple of weeks, and there's no announcement came up at the breakneck speed of this technology's just amazing. We talked about knowledge, graphs, and charts up team. So talking about knowledge graphs, you said, we're trying to capture actual facts, actual information that is true, validated, curated, if you will, whether it's data or actual content as well, knowledge graphs are have that capability of doing that both of them integrating that information. But ultimately, knowledge graphs are a data structure, Data organization structure, you can you can connect all this all these entities and how they're connected and all that. But on top of that, you need to build a user interface, something that interprets that data. Knowledge, graphs are really good for helping identify trends. For example, depending on the use case, there are so many use cases.

Noz Urbina  38:57

Trends, trends

Yanko Ivanov  38:59

But again, we still need the front end, to interpret that data. So here's where Chad deputy kind of technology can really come in and play really well. So this is what we were talking about a couple weeks ago. And it's becoming a reality now, where you you connect the front end of the large language model to the actual facts to the actual database, the organization of the data. And that way, you can start interpreting that information, you can start getting the actual information from from your data, rather than something that could be unexpected when when the LLM is based on the old information on Ethernet. As you can imagine, it's not curated. It's not verifiable. Sometimes and it's not always accurate. We talked about this a little bit earlier. Yes, charge up to four. Again, this was another release that since we talked about this, originally, it's supposedly better at not making up things, but we still there is still a chance that it can introduce information that is not absolutely accurate. And at a business level, that's usually not acceptable. So this is where we still need the technology, the actual packs, the the ordering information that's curated and accurate, and the efficiency of this new technology. You have a lens where it can create the text reviewing contracts, and the different businesses, business cases. So marrying these together can produce really powerful system powerful environment, if

Noz Urbina  39:32

you will. Yeah. And we said, we talked about the idea that Google is going to be hot on their heels, with similar announcements. So they're off for their applications. And I think it's important to say that the point of this is not. And this happens often, like the first person to get out there gets mindshare, the first brand get out there. But this is this is not a Microsoft thing. It's not just a Google thing, we're going to see this kind of technology be everywhere. This is I think someone could refer to it as the iPhone moment of AI, in the sense that smartphones had been around for years, but then the explosion happened. And they became part of our daily lives. And just, you know, we can't even remember really life before them. It's sort of a foggy memory, what it was like before them, that's what we're seeing now. So it's not, everyone's not going to start using Microsoft, Bing instead of Google. But that these applications are going to become ubiquitous as the way as a layer for all us to allow to do queries and kind of programming things that only technical people could do before. But now if you can express it, in natural language, computers can can do it for you. And that that is going to open up a level of power and efficiency, which is is going to be a leap forward.

Yanko Ivanov  41:46

I can't agree more. Even yesterday, I was chatting, chatting with some friends of mine. And we were thinking, Hey, can you remember 20 years ago when? What was the work? Like? What was life like? And can you imagine 20 years from now, what is this going to be? It's just It's just incredible. And this, especially with the speed that this is developing? It's just absolutely incredible.

Noz Urbina  42:10

I've been I've been very sorry. Yeah, I've been very lucky in my career, that I was kind of straight out of university ended up in this very tiny community where we were talking about things like we talked about, there was there was LANs, like a local area network. And then there was WANs, wide area networks. And in 2002, we were in a company where we were we were these theory theorizing about. We're talking about pans, and no people like in the community, we're talking about pans, you're the personal area network, where you would have these devices on your body that would be connected. And they would be able to leverage, you know, the processing of one device would do things and devices and your eyes and your ears. And what we what we now call having a Bluetooth headset, a smartwatch and a smartphone. And you know, it just it's just a normal thing. But all these things have been under discussion. And we're just now seeing the mass marketability of them.

Yanko Ivanov  42:13

Yeah, technology, the way technology is developed, evolving is just incredible. And like we've been, we've been talking about this Chad cptn language, large language models. It's really going to change the way we work the way daily life is really, I mean, imagine right now check, it is requiring a lot of processing power. It's not cheap. It's not something that an enterprise can just easily pick up and go unless they're ready to put an investment in. But imagine in a few years when you have this in your phone right now, it's it's again, it's very powerful. The question is, how are we really integrated so that it is powerful in a useful way in terms of getting the actual information, accurate information that he needs? In the right way?

Noz Urbina  43:02

So it also I don't know if this is since we recorded but very, very recently, it's hard to keep track things are happening in terms of days, instead of weeks. Since chat, so we had chat GPT. Three about 4334 months ago, I think it's right before I think it was right before it's October, November. Yeah. October. Yeah. It all exploded right before the holidays. And then we've had we've already been charged up for so about five months later. Yeah. There was there was the I think it was the Atlantic if I if I'm doing this, right, but somebody made a prediction. One of these kind of tech houses made a prediction that to get this chip, this chip GPT, three level, large language model down to something was less than $1,000 to create and train and run was going to take till 2035 weeks after that, after that prediction. This somebody at Stanford, a team at Stanford University, took one of metas AI models. So Facebook's Facebook's AI models, and what they did is they got another AI model to train it rather than having human trainers. And so and so within five weeks, they were able to get this new one that within five weeks, but five weeks after the prediction that they wouldn't be able to do it to 2030 they got this of AI model, which wasn't even one of the more powerful ones, it was more basic ones. And they were able to more or less benchmark against chat GPT. Three, and they're able to do the whole project for 600. American dollars.

Yanko Ivanov  43:36

That's incredible. Now researchers, yeah, they can do some incredible stuff.

Noz Urbina  44:18

Yeah, so this is running on a laptop at this point, you know, this is this is running on a local computer for an you know, $1,000 with a with, like, cloud computing, etc. Services. So as you were, as you were saying, having on your phone in a couple years, it's not unreasonable. Okay.

Yanko Ivanov  45:35

Okay. It's also a little daunting. What are we going to do in a couple of years or five years down the road? Who's going to produce all this content? How are we going to know that this content was actually authentic? authored by authored by something, somebody rather than something? And, and

Noz Urbina  46:55

will that even be a criteria anymore? You know, you know, we had a, I talked about this on another podcast When? When electronic we went through this with electronic music, we went through it with Photoshop. Yeah. And now we're doing it with words. You know, I remember I was doing photography since I was a kid. And there was the when Photoshop came out, that was cheating. You weren't, you weren't a member? I remember. Yeah. It was a real telegraphy, the real real photographers worked with chemicals and light and smells and, and film, the real photographers didn't do digital. And then the same thing of music, you know, electronic music was this kind of like, oh, no, no, that's not that's not real. That's not composing. Like, that's not art. And the same thing, it just kind of you just need, you need to get over the cultural barrier to this feeling of Well, we were always doing it this way. This new way, a copyright. They kept their copy acceptable.

Yanko Ivanov  47:15

The the only the only difference here is that with music with photography, it's a one specific area. For this, it has an impact on everything. Everything really can transform industries, not not just how we work, but industries. Entire economies. Yes, yes. Yes, absolutely.

Noz Urbina  48:11

I mean, so yeah. So we got we got to wrap this up. I think I think we could talk for a whole other podcast. implications. This as we said, things are moving so fast. Yeah, it's been so great to have you Yonko. I think we'll have to have you back before the end of the year to do like a roundup out. How did this turn out in a few months time. But thank you so much for your contributions and, and thank everybody for listening. Remember to check out the rest of the podcasts on OmnichannelX dot digital, and we're gonna be announcing some themes. Some themes for the year are doing some different themes, like content modeling and pharmaceuticals where you can get lots of different resources, podcasts, webinars, etc. all year long. Check that out. Subscribe for our mailing list. If you liked this. Give us a like and a comment and let us know what you want to us to talk about next time we get younger on the show.

Thanks so much. Thanks, everybody.

Cheers!

 

Maintaining and evolving your content models

Dealing with change and diversity while maintaining a core model

Session leader(s):
Noz Urbina, Carrie Hane, Jeff Eaton, Cruce Saunders, Meghan Casey

In this session, we will guide you through the nuanced processes of managing, maintaining, and updating your content in a changing environment.

We will tackle the challenges of aligning conflicting team requirements, integrating various systems using a shared content model, and consistently delivering the much sought-after "next best action" where the right content is served up to either the person or system who needs it. 

We'll also cover many of the issues surrounding the maintenance of models like

• ongoing business case presentation of the need for models


• ongoing education and support of your model in spite of staff and leadership churn


• the inter-departmental politics of a shared standard, and


• the inherent organizational conflicts with having a standard: Who owns it? Who pays? Who is in charge?

This is the third in our modelling panel discussion series, and part of this year’s themed Session Series “Designing content for Headless, Omnichannel, and Personalisation” including multiple webinars and podcasts. It will be recorded and available to anyone who registers.

Finally, the webinar will explore the interrelationship between taxonomies, ontologies, and content models, discussing their different-but-related roles in creating an effective and agile system. 

This session will have limited attendance to promote dialogue and questions, so register now to secure your spot!

Applying content models

Rolling out and rolling over obstacles

Session leader(s):
Jeff Eaton, Carrie Hane, Noz Urbina, Cruce Saunders, Meghan Casey

Picking up from our session "Demystifying content models", our high-powered panel of industry experts is back to share their insights on how to apply content models effectively in the current digital landscape.

This webinar will delve into the core areas of getting operational with content models. It will focus on their practical application for flexible, personalized, or omnichannel content solutions. It will provide strategic insights into

• managing content operations


• personalizing content


• effectively using a headless CMS.

This is the second in our panel discussion series, and part of this year's themed Session Series "Designing content for Headless, Omnichannel, and Personalisation" including multiple webinars and podcasts. It will be recorded and available to anyone who registers.

We'll also discuss the vital and sometimes challenging issue of how to get content owners and stakeholders aligned on adopting a new model. Unsurprisingly, stakeholders engage when we clearly emphasize modelling outcomes, not the models themselves. Therefore, we'll arm you with argumentation about how models optimise user experience and increase ROI, and of course, the common claim:

"My content is too unique to work in a model".

Join us to gain actionable knowledge on applying content models effectively in your organization.

This session will have limited attendance to promote dialogue and questions, so register now to secure your spot!

Demystifying content models

Your content is already modelled, even if you don't know it

Session leader(s):
Noz Urbina, Cruce Saunders, Jeff Eaton, Meghan Casey, Carrie Hane

An on-demand panel discussion with Noz Urbina, Meghan Casey, Jeff Eaton, Carrie Hane, and Cruce Saunders.

Content models are crucial to the digital landscape, yet they often remain a mystifying concept. This webinar will clear the haze, providing a clear understanding of content models, their importance, and how to get started on your journey toward using them. For both beginners and practitioners who want to elevate their work, this session will equip you with valuable knowledge to understand models and where they fit into your strategy.

This is the first in our panel discussion series, and part of this year's themed Session Series "Designing content for Headless, Omnichannel, and Personalisation" including multiple webinars and podcasts. It will be recorded and available to anyone who registers.

This first session will introduce models - an expertise that is in great demand but often not well understood. We'll explore the what, why, and how of content models, and how they relate to the many other related concepts like templates, CMS configuration (headless or otherwise), taxonomies, and other models in your organisation. We'll show you how your content is already more structured than you think, and discuss practical strategies for elevating and integrating models into your content operations and planning.

INTERVIEW – Why break down documents for better search experiences?

Session leader(s):
Chris Marino

In this interview we address Component Content Management and its impact on three search-related questions:

1. Why is componentizing content important in regards to search? Aren’t you just looking for a bunch of words?


2. How can I see the benefits of componentization in my search experience?


3. What steps do I need to take to introduce these benefits into my search application?

 

3 pitfalls on the way to omnichannel

Session leader(s):
Evgenia Popova

The journey to omnichannel communication is often a long one and it leads us through several phases. Numerous challenges and pitfalls await us along that way. In my content strategy career, I encountered cunning pitfalls disguised as shortcuts and leading into nowhere. Such traps cause damage of various severity depending on the stage of the project.

The earlier in the process we take a wrong track and the longer we do not detect it, the more damage it might cause. Thus, some pitfalls are fundamental and the harm is hard to "repair", while others are less dangerous, however, they happen all the time and we need to keep a constant lookout for them.

Content Modelling: The translation layer between teams

Session leader(s):
Meghan Casey

Wellbeing session: Stretch and breathe June 16

Session leader(s):
Tracy Playle

Keep your body fresh and your mind focused for the rest of the learning for the sessions ahead. Use your break to join us for 20 minutes of gentle stretching and breathing exercises. Stay seated (or standing if you prefer) and feel free to keep your camera off if you wish. 

Wellbeing session: Morning meditation June 16 (13min, on-demand)

Session leader(s):
Thomas Deneuville

This session is on-demand. Play it back at your own pace.

Start your day right with this guided morning meditation.

Wellbeing session: Day-end meditation and journaling June 16 (9min, on-demand)

Session leader(s):
Thomas Deneuville

This session is on-demand. Play it back at your own pace.

Close things off with a guided meditation and short journaling activity session will help you focus your mind and capture essential points from your day.

Wellbeing session: End of day journalling and reflection June 15

Session leader(s):
Thomas Deneuville

This session is on-demand. Play it back at your own pace.

Close things off with a guided meditation and short journaling activity session will help you focus your mind and capture essential points from your day.

Wellbeing session: Morning meditation June 15 (13min, on-demand)

Session leader(s):
Thomas Deneuville

This session is on-demand. Play it back at your own pace.

Start your day right with this guided morning meditation.

Wellbeing session: Managing your relationship to overwhelm

Session leader(s):
Tracy Playle

Join us for a discussion about how to manage overwhelm. In this conversation we'll take a look at how overwhelm starts and progresses for each of us, and consider all of the things that we can do to have it go another way. Tracy - who is a trained ontological coach as well as a content strategist - will bring her experience of coaching and content to the discussions.

Wellbeing session: Creating space to play

Session leader(s):
Tracy Playle

Play is for grown-ups too! In this session we'll spend some time reflecting on the importance of play and playfulness for our wellbeing and our productivity, and we'll allow time for you to head off and get in some important playtime during your break too. Everyone will also receive a copy of Tracy's playfulness toolkit.

Wellbeing session: Day-end meditation and journaling June 13 (9min, on-demand)

Session leader(s):
Thomas Deneuville

This session is on-demand. Play it back at your own pace.

Close things off with a guided meditation and short journaling activity session will help you focus your mind and capture essential points from your day.

Wellbeing session: Stretch and breathe June 14

Session leader(s):
Tracy Playle

Keep your body fresh and your mind focused for the rest of the learning for the sessions ahead. Use your break to join us for 20 minutes of gentle stretching and breathing exercises. Stay seated (or standing if you prefer) and feel free to keep your camera off if you wish. 

Wellbeing session: Encanto overwhelm: which character are you?

Session leader(s):
Tracy Playle

What does overwhelm look like to you? What are your predictable behaviours and ways of being when things get a little too much? In this session we'll take a playful look at our own relationship to overwhelm by exploring which character from Disney's Encanto we are most like when things get too much. You might also choose to pair this session with Tracy's discussion group about managing overwhelm at 18.35 on Wednesday 15 June.

Wellbeing session: Morning meditation June 14 (13min, on-demand)

Session leader(s):
Thomas Deneuville

This session is on-demand. Play it back at your own pace.

Start your day right with this guided morning meditation.

Wellbeing session: Morning meditation June 13 (13min, on-demand)

Session leader(s):
Thomas Deneuville

This session is on-demand. Play it back at your own pace.

Start your day right with this guided morning meditation.

The business of content and the content of business

Session leader(s):
Christopher Collette

As content professionals, we often find ourselves uncovering major gaps, flaws, and misguided decisions around organizations’ business, marketing, and communications strategies. Because we know the content best, the audiences that content is meant to serve, and how that content is delivered across multiple channels, we almost always have a 360 view of how an organization presents itself to the world. While we’re equipped with that knowledge and understanding, we often are left developing systems, programs, and frameworks that don’t quite make logical sense for the business or the intended audiences.

In this moderated discussion, we want to hear from you about your experiences and how your work as a content professional informed or contributed to influencing an organization’s business strategy, or when it didn’t, how you overcame those challenges to produce a better content product.

Industrialize your Global Content Strategy to include “how to” videos with the power of DITA

Session leader(s):
Frédéric Vallenet

In this workshop, we will discuss the video localization process and show you how to structure, manage and internationalize your video content by you on a tour of our Agile Video solution leveraging the power of DITA. We’ll start with a tutorial video with no audio and a standard script.

We will convert the script, convert it to a DITA format with audio and subtitling, manage a list of phonetic reusable key terms, publish a fully synched video with neural voices and subtitles in the source language, translate the DITA content and publish it in the target language.

We will experience with the audience the Agility of the solution by showing how simple it is to implement changes (voices and text) and republish videos in any language with the click of a button.

 

Only connect: Thoughts, musings & perspectives on this thing we call content

Session leader(s):
Christopher Collette

In the 15 or so years since content strategy made its formal debut on the stage, much has changed in the world and in the collective forums in which content – and content strategy – have played a role. Technology, business, politics, social movements, governments, and the world at large all have witnessed seismic changes, disruptions, accelerations, and re-evaluations.

While the (original) discipline of content strategy has evolved to keep pace with the times and the challenges for which it seeks to provide answers and solutions, a handful of enduring principles continue to remain fundamental to the “case for content strategy” regardless of what we call ourselves or our discipline today.

In this session, Christopher will explore perspectives on content and content strategy through the lenses of history, the humanities, and the arts. He’ll connect the dots among various content strategy concepts and principles with the enduring forms, structures, and approaches found in lyrics, plays, musicals, poetry, novels, and live performances.

This session will shine a spotlight on the connections and integrations among the (seemingly) disparate dimensions of content, strategy, technology, letters, music, the fine arts, and performance.

Are robots taking your jobs: the evolving role of AI in content

Session leader(s):
Casey Jordan

Casey Jordan will demo the power of the open.ai suite and discuss how AI isn't going to take your job but it will change it.

Where does your content come from?

Session leader(s):
Angus Edwardson

We love to talk about where our content needs to go. We love distribution; getting our content to the right place, at the right time, with the right message. We are obsessed with journeys, channels, personalisation, and new technologies that can help us engage with our audiences wherever they are.

But… All this focus on delivery puts a huge amount of pressure on production. It’s not easy to create adaptive omnichannel structured content for several different audiences. It’s very difficult. 

Perhaps we should talk a little more about where our content comes from, and how investing a little bit in upstream operations can have a huge impact on our ability to deliver omnichannel experiences. 

You will leave this session with a simple (and thoroughly super fun) exercise you can use in your own organizations to map out content workflows and identify areas for improvement.

Why brand experience is omnichannel content experience

Session leader(s):
Jantine Geldof

Many organizations we call our customers deal with experience problems. They have grand visions of themselves and how they want to be perceived. They spend loads of money on navelgazing, resulting in fancy brand guides that line the walls of the marketing offices, but are not seen beyond the marketing department. This has a significant effect on the brand experience of their customers. In this talk Jantine explores how omnichannel content is not an accessory to brand experience, but its backbone.

2022 Women in Tech: Panel of experts

Session leader(s):
Rahel Anne Bailie, Carrie Hane, Sana Remekie, Jenifer Schlotfeldt, Ula Howlett

Ask anything of these thought leaders in omnichannel content and experience technologies.

2022 opening: Welcome

Session leader(s):
Noz Urbina

Noz Urbina opens up the event with highlights from our event and an overview of the vision and mission for OmnichannelX.

Breaking barriers in Healthcare

Session leader(s):
Rob Punselie, Ellen Altenburg

This session is fully interactive. You will be able to turn on your microphone and camera if want to.

As in many organizations, healthcare professionals work in silos that sometimes limit their view on the impact of their work. Specialization and technology also have a tendency to further narrow down this view. There are even signs of professionals who are giving up, because they feel their "calling" to help patients is getting more and more lost, even irrelevant, to the operation that they work inside.

How can healthcare professionals better understand the context of their work, their Jobs-to-be-Done?

In this session, together with our with you, we'll explore possibilities to break these barriers: challenges, examples and discussions.

Join us if you care for health care.

How to level-up hyper-personalized CX

Session leader(s):
Ed Breault

There’s more that goes into delivering exceptional customer experiences besides creating engaging content. How is the content performing? Is the content being optimized, customized, and reused? Are marketers able to see the results and full value of their efforts? Is the right content being consumed and engaged with by the right customer at the right time?

If you're not asking—and answering—these questions, then even the best content will fail. As digital marketing puts a premium on real-time search and access to digital assets, marketers must be fast and efficient with their content creation and delivery if they want to win in the moment. In digital marketing, speed is the key to success.

Join us for an in-depth look at how marketers can easily and efficiently streamline the entire lifecycle of their content. We’ll discuss real-world cases and dive into core DAM capabilities, including modular content, digital rights management, content workflow, cross-functional collaboration, versioning control, compliance, and more.

How to go agile with structured content localization

Session leader(s):
Dominique Trouche

If you develop software, chances are high that your dev teams work in an agile methodology.

What about your documentation team? If they work in a silo using the old waterfall process, the time you save in software development is partly lost. Going full-agile involves breaking the silos between the dev and documentation teams and sharing the same agile practices.

Going full-agile has two principal benefits:

• Localized software documentation is ready in sprint +1 or +2


• Localized and source documentation are fully consistent with software UI terms.

In this session, we give you a step-by-step guide on how to go full-agile and build a smooth process from software design to release, with localized UIs and documentation.

Moving to structure shouldn’t create just another silo

Session leader(s):
Rik Page

Instead of being just another silo of data, making the move to structure and a CCMS can create an opportunity to build a central publishing point for all information. Too often companies have multiple systems each containing valuable data but completely disconnected from one another. As a result, anyone looking for information ends up searching in multiple places wasting valuable time. Added to this is often uncertainty about the validity of the content – is it the latest information.

If you are not careful, the move to structured content and a CCMS is just going to compound this situation. But, with careful thought and consideration, the move to structured content can start to deliver the original vision of a ‘single source of the truth’.
Calling on many years of experience Rik will explain how you can maximize the benefit of migration to structured content.

So, you’re somewhat multichannel. Now what?

Session leader(s):
Christopher Strebel

It is often easier to find money and enthusiasm to set up new channels, content management systems, and set up the links between them.

It is often harder, when planning to project costs and resources, to maintain and grow these systems over time.

Angus’ session details coming soon

Session leader(s):
Angus Edwardson

Abstract and details for this session will be up as soon as possible!

Session details coming soon!

Session leader(s):
Christopher Strebel

Abstract and details for this session will be up as soon as possible!

Welcome back to the future – How to do futurism

Session leader(s):
Noz Urbina

As a futurist with a solid track record, Noz Urbina provides a detailed look at the future of omnichannel experience and some tips on how to predict the future yourself.

2022 closing remarks

Session leader(s):
Noz Urbina

Noz Urbina gives out some prizes to our attendees and provides key take-aways for this year's event.

All OmniXConf attendees are custodians of the future that is not yet evenly distributed and have the opportunity to go home and distribute it.

Mastering The Metaverse: Getting Ready for Web 3.0

Session leader(s):
Noz Urbina

The hype and confusion around Web 3.0 is huge: The Metaverse, the semantic web, Blockchain, NFTs, and more. What are they? And more importantly – who cares? As a career futurist with an excellent successful prediction rate, Noz Urbina is excited and ready to de-hype Web 3.0 for the non-technical audience.

Attendees of this session will participate in a group brainstorming on why and how different industries could start getting ready for their metaverse presence. Using live VR demonstrations for inspiration, we’ll review and dive into current and potential applications of VR/AR Web 3.0 experiences for different industries.

Noz will set the stage by giving simple relatable explanations of the core concepts and technologies and discuss what changes you’ll need to make to be ready for Web 3.0. He’ll look at why – just like Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 – it will be the users who drag businesses, sometimes kicking and screaming, into this next major paradigm shift.

Perception and self from the inside out

Session leader(s):
Anil Seth

When we open our eyes in the morning, it seems as though the world just pours itself into our minds through the transparent windows of the senses. But how things seem is not how they are. I will outline a new take on an old view of perception according to which the contents of our experience come as much from the ‘inside out’ as from the ‘outside in’, In this view, every perceptual moment is a creative act of interpretation, a ‘controlled hallucination’ in which the brain’s top-down predictions are reined in by sensory data: we don’t just passively perceive our worlds, we actively generate them. What’s more, this applies to the ‘self’ too.

The self is not an essence-of-you that does the perceiving – the self itself is a perception, or better, a collection of perceptions. Drawing on my new book Being You, I will unpack the science and philosophy behind this powerful way of thinking about perception and self, and draw out some of its implications for how we live today.

Mapping content measurements to business metrics for more strategic insights

Session leader(s):
Noz Urbina

This session looks at the common mistakes that content teams make when developing their content measurement strategy and how to fix them. Attend and learn to position content in a way that resonates with the organisation that funded it, and the users who consume it, by focusing measurements on customer journeys and top user tasks.

Looking back on two decades of project experience, Noz Urbina has become a little obsessed with measurement. Despite having more raw data than ever on content and user experience, content teams still measure their output with metrics like simple hits, likes, clicks, and shares.

Instead, we should be measuring whether it fulfilled its reason for being. We will walk through examples where clients changed their measurements to achieve 10s and 100s of % improvement on their key content metrics and were able to better justify and explain the power of content to their colleagues and leadership.

Improving usability with an omnichannel-ready writing methodology

Session leader(s):
Sophie Gravel

In this half-day workshop, Precision Content will introduce you to the fundamental practices of human-engineered content: material designed for use by people and machines. Our techniques and methodology are based on the science of human cognition, delving into how and why content works, and how to make it work for you. We teach the techniques to increase usability, reader satisfaction, and retention of the knowledge that you are trying to communicate.

We will show how to systematically tackle existing content and structure it into more easily digestible pieces for your readers’ benefit. You will get hands-on practice using the Precision Content methodology to transform content in real-time. You will see for yourself how to better write and structure your content to align with your user’s needs and the needs for omnichannel delivery.

Use your leverage: Advancing sustainability

Session leader(s):
Alisa Bonsignore

Most people think that sustainability is someone else's job, yet at its heart it's a communications challenge. We are uniquely positioned to influence sustainability initiatives in our organizations, and create ripple effects that extend to our clients and communities. In this presentation, we'll talk about how to use our leverage to advance strategic efforts that align with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals set forth by the United Nations to improve climate, health, and justice.

The real omnichannel promise: a better life

Session leader(s):
Corina Cora

For experienced content and marketing professionals, brand planning, customer segmentation, an adoption ladder, and KPIs go together. But now, with omnichannel integration, artificial intelligence, and a rapid global spread of internet adoption, it's easy to get distracted from our core purpose and instead focus on logistics and tactics.

The internet age offers us a range of digital possibilities with which to design a new way of sharing our humanity.

In this session, I'm going to share with you how omnichannel can help improve patient's - or any user or audience member's - lives when we give ourselves permission to go beyond logistics, take a look at the big picture, and step into a new way of designing campaign objectives that keeps in mind the caring we can share.

Let’s innovate our omnichannel engagement with examples from the healthcare industry

Session leader(s):
Lorenzo Valacca

There are so many new technologies out there, some, like augmented, mixed, and virtual reality (XR/VR/AR) still feel like something out of science fiction. But which of them can really help improve the customer experience? In this session, you will explore some applied and successful examples coming from the healthcare industry, including first steps into digital realities, with the hope that this can inspire you to add that innovative touch to your next communication campaign or customer initiative.

The MetaGraph: merging personal data and the metaverse

Session leader(s):
Ashleigh Faith

More and more time is spent in digital ecosystems, but what happens to all that data? How can that data be used to provide better customer experiences? How can individuals own and manage their own data in these verses? Using personal knowledge graphs, users data can be interlinked across planforms and services, blending together their behaviors and assets, but with autonomy. Join this session where we will walk through the use of personal knowledge graphs in digital ecosystems, where we can see examples of this today, what we can learn from these early examples, and how this may impact business in the years to come.