Ann Rockley

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Ann Rockley is a content manager. [1] She is the founder and President of The Rockley Group, based in the greater Toronto Area. She regularly presents papers and workshops on subjects involving the efficient creation, management and delivery of content for organizations in North America and Europe. She was the lead analyst for The XML & Component Content Management Report [2] on Content Management Systems Watch.

Contents

Education and early career

At university, Ann Rockley took a Bachelor of Science degree in Astronomy. In the early 1980s, she got her first permanent job as a junior technical writer at I. P. Sharp Associates. She went on to work for Cemcorp, Unisys, and American Express, then formed Information Design Solutions with two partners, Heather Fawcett and Sam Ferdinand. According to Gerlinde Schuller, information design is a complex, interdisciplinary, and experimental art. The partnership consulted in usability, document analysis, SGML, [3] and large-scale online documentation projects. [4]

In 1995, Rockley left Information Design Solutions to start The Rockley Group. She took a master's degree in information science at the University of Toronto while continuing to work at The Rockley Group full-time.

Involvement with the STC

In the mid-1980s, Rockley took the initiative to revive the Toronto chapter [5] of the Society for Technical Communication, a professional organization for technical communicators, by getting in touch with the international organization's representative for her area, Rennie Charles. The chapter was founded in 1959 but had been dormant for several years. [6] She and Michelle Hutchinson, another technical communicator, assembled a group of their colleagues and presented a plan to hold regular meetings, find speakers of interest, and develop services for technical communicators. The chapter has been active ever since. Among other things, Rockley served as chapter president, produced the newsletter, and was general manager for a very successful three-day, multi-stream conference in 1989. (Hutchinson served as chapter president, produced the newsletter, and organized the hosting of the international society's annual conference in 1997.)

When Toronto hosted the international conference, Rockley proposed producing the conference proceedings on CD as well as in book form. She also volunteered to produce the CDs for the 2500 attendees. That was the first time it had been done. The machine-readable format proved to be so popular that it has been provided in one form or another ever since.

Rockley regularly presents papers and workshops at the annual meeting of the international Society for Technical Communication. She was named an Associate Fellow of the STC for her contributions to the profession, and in 2005 became a Fellow, [7] the Society's highest honor.

Teaching and writing

Ann Rockley helped to develop the Information Design certificate program at the University of Toronto. She has taught courses in the program (information design and enterprise content management).

Rockley is the lead author of a 2002 book, [8] Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy. It has become a standard reference manual for content management. Her methodology includes return on investment calculations, which can justify the content management effort to executives.

She is also the lead author of a 2009 book, [9] DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers, co-authored with Charles Cooper and Steve Manning. It is a beginner's guide to understanding the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), an XML-based architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering information.

Rockley's 2015 book, [10] Intelligent Content: A Primer, was co-authored with Charles Cooper and Scott Abel. It is a beginner's guide to creating intelligent content—defined as content which is not limited to one purpose, technology or output—and overcoming the challenges to its adoption. Intelligent Content was published by XML Press.

Innovation

Facing challenges such as putting online 10,000+ pages of documentation for a nuclear power plant, Rockley has been an innovator in devising ways to handle large quantities of online information. [11] She has progressed from information design [12] and online documentation [13] through single sourcing [14] to content management for entire enterprises. [15] She pioneered content reuse using a unified content strategy [16] and was among the first content strategists to regularly incorporate the use of XML for implementing that strategy. [17]

Involvement with CM Pros

As her interests became more specialized, Rockley went on to help found another professional organization, the Content Management Professionals (CM Pros), in 2004. [18] She served as the president in 2005. [19]

Involvement with OASIS

Ann Rockley is a member of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). It is a "not-for-profit consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society". [20] She is the Co-Chair of the DITA for Enterprise Business Documents Subcommittee [21]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intranet</span> Network of private resources in an organization

An intranet is a computer network for sharing information, easier communication, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization, usually to the exclusion of access by outsiders. The term is used in contrast to public networks, such as the Internet, but uses the same technology based on the Internet protocol suite.

A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content . A CMS is typically used for enterprise content management (ECM) and web content management (WCM).

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is a nonprofit consortium that works on the development, convergence, and adoption of projects - both open standards and open source - for Computer security, blockchain, Internet of things (IoT), emergency management, cloud computing, legal data exchange, energy, content technologies, and other areas.

A technical writer is a professional communicator whose task is to convey complex information in simple terms to an audience of the general public or a very select group of readers. Technical writers research and create information through a variety of delivery media. Example types of information include online help, manuals, white papers, design specifications, project plans, and software test plans. With the rise of e-learning, technical writers are increasingly hired to develop online training material.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Technical writing</span> Type of written communication

Technical writing is a specialized form of communication used in many of today's manufacturing, medical, and research organizations to accurately communicate complex information to customers, co-workers, engineers, or scientists. The content is often written using simplified grammar, supported by easy-to-understand visual communication.

The Society for Technical Communication (STC) is a professional association dedicated to the advancement of the theory and practice of technical communication with more than 4,500 members in the United States, Canada, and the world. The society publishes a quarterly journal and a magazine eight times a year and hosts an annual international conference. STC also provides online education in the form of live Web seminars, multi-week online certificate courses, virtual conferences, recorded seminars, and more.

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) specification defines a set of document types for authoring and organizing topic-oriented information, as well as a set of mechanisms for combining, extending, and constraining document types. It is an open standard that is defined and maintained by the OASIS DITA Technical Committee.

Single-source publishing, also known as single-sourcing publishing, is a content management method which allows the same source content to be used across different forms of media and more than one time. The labor-intensive and expensive work of editing need only be carried out once, on only one document; that source document can then be stored in one place and reused. This reduces the potential for error, as corrections are only made one time in the source document.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JoAnn Hackos</span> Consultant and writer on technical communication

JoAnn T. Hackos is a lecturer, consultant, and author of a number of books about technical communication. Now retired, Hackos is the founder of the Center for Information-Development Management (CIDM) and the president emeritus of Comtech Services in Denver, Colorado. She is also a fellow and past president of the Society for Technical Communication. She is a member of the IEEE Standards Association and active in the ISO SC7 Working Groups that is developing standards for information developers. She is the co-author of the standards on content management and information-development management.

Enterprise content management (ECM) extends the concept of content management by adding a timeline for each content item and, possibly, enforcing processes for its creation, approval, and distribution. Systems using ECM generally provide a secure repository for managed items, analog or digital. They also include one methods for importing content to manage new items, and several presentation methods to make items available for use. Although ECM content may be protected by digital rights management (DRM), it is not required. ECM is distinguished from general content management by its cognizance of the processes and procedures of the enterprise for which it is created.

The term cross-reference can refer to either:

In technical communication, topic-based authoring or topic-based writing is a modular approach to content creation where content is structured around topics that can be mixed and reused in different contexts. It is defined in contrast with book-oriented or narrative content, written in the linear structure of written books.

Minimalism in structured writing, topic-based authoring, and technical writing in general is based on the ideas of John Millar Carroll and others. Minimalism strives to reduce interference of information delivery with the user's sense-making process. It does not try to eliminate any chance of the user making a mistake, but regards an error as a teachable moment that content can exploit.

SIGDOC is the Special Interest Group on Design of Communication of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), an international learned society for computing. ACM SIGDOC was founded in 1975 by Joseph "Joe" T. Rigo.

A component content management system (CCMS) is a content management system that manages content at a granular level (component) rather than at the document level. Each component represents a single topic, concept or asset.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XMetaL</span>

XMetaL, or XMetaL Author, is a software application people use to create and edit documents in XML and SGML. It has some features common to word processors, but is a native XML editor that can be configured to work with various standard and custom DTDs and XML Schemas. XMetaL was first released by SoftQuad Software in 1999 and is currently developed by JustSystems.

The web content lifecycle is the multi-disciplinary and often complex process that web content undergoes as it is managed through various publishing stages.

Janice "Ginny" Redish is an American usability writer and consultant. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College and holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard University.

References

  1. ↑ Ann Rockley, content management expert Archived February 16, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
  2. ↑ The XML & Component Content Management Report 2008 Archived December 4, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  3. ↑ Fawcett, Heather J. Using Tagged Text to Support Online Views. Technical Report OED-89-04. Waterloo, Ontario: University of Waterloo Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary, July 1989.
  4. ↑ Rockley, Ann. "Ontario Hydro and SGML." Technical Communication: Journal of the Society for Technical Communication 40/3 (Third Quarter, August 1993) 383-386. ISSN   0049-3155. Author affiliation: Information Design Solutions.
  5. ↑ Toronto STC
  6. ↑ History of Toronto STC Archived 2008-05-13 at the Wayback Machine
  7. ↑ STC list of fellows (PDF file) [ permanent dead link ]
  8. ↑ Rockley, Ann; Kostur, Pamela; Manning, Steve. Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy. October, 2002. 582 pages. New Riders Press, Berkeley, CA. ISBN   0-7357-1306-5
  9. ↑ Rockley, Ann; Cooper, Charles; Manning, Steve. "DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers." May, 2009. 148 pages. The Rockley Press, Schomberg, ON, Canada. ISBN   0-557-07291-3
  10. ↑ Rockley, Ann; Cooper, Charles; Abel, Scott. "Intelligent Content: A Primer" September, 2015. 144 pages. XML Press, Laguna Hills, CA ISBN   978-1937434465
  11. ↑ Rockley, Ann. Putting large documents online. pp 273-281, Proceedings of the 11th Annual International Conference on Systems Documentation, SIGDOC 1993, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. ACM 1993. doi : 10.1145/166025.166088 ISBN   0-89791-630-1
  12. ↑ Rockley, Ann. Designing an Effective Intranet/Extranet. pp 313-316, Proceedings 1998 International Professional Communication Conference, Québec City, Canada, September 23-25, 1998, Volume 2 - Technical Papers. IEEE Professional Communication Society, 1998. doi : 10.1109/IPCC.1998.722113 ISBN   0-7803-4890-7
  13. ↑ Rockley, Ann. Putting Large Volumes of Information on an Intranet. Suave Lobodzinski, Ivan Tomek (Eds.): Proceedings of WebNet 97 - World Conference on the WWW, Internet & Intranet, Toronto, Canada, November 1-5, 1997. AACE 1997. ISBN   1-880094-27-4
  14. ↑ Information modeling for single sourcing. pp 177-178 Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Documentation, SIGDOC 2002, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 20-23, 2002. ACM 2002. doi : 10.1145/584955.584981 ISBN   1-58113-543-2
  15. ↑ "More papers by Ann Rockley". Archived from the original on 2008-12-27. Retrieved 2008-12-06.
  16. ↑ Rockley, Ann. Fundamental Concepts of Content Reuse. InformIT, October 2002
  17. ↑ Rockley, Ann; Kostur, Pamela; Manning, Steve. The Importance of XML to a Unified Content Strategy. InformIT, December 2002
  18. ↑ Content Management community of practice
  19. ↑ The Rockley Group, Leadership
  20. ↑ OASIS
  21. ↑ Goals of the Enterprise Business Documents Subcommittee of OASIS
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