In episode 77 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle talks with Chris Hill of DCL about content reuse and what it looks like across different industries.
“You really have to start seeing content creation as a collaboration and build trust between the people who create content.”
—Chris Hill

Related links: 

* Harmonizer
* Use cases for content reuse
* Reuse in DITA and beyond (podcast)

Twitter handles:

* @alanpringle
* @dclaboratory

Transcript:
Alan Pringle:     Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we take a look at content reuse with special guest Chris Hill of DCL. Hi everybody. I am Alan Pringle. And today we have a guest on the podcast. It’s Chris Hill from DCL. Hi Chris.
Chris Hill:     Hi Alan, good to talk to you.
AP:     Yeah, it’s good to talk to you as well. Today, we are going to talk about content reuse and what that looks like across different industries. And the first thing I want to ask you, Chris, is why should people even care about reuse from say the executive who has departments that create and distribute content to the content creators themselves?
CH:     Yeah, that’s a good question. And it’s one that’s evolved quite a lot over the last 20 years as we’ve moved more and more content to formats that support reuse really the critical things about content is there’s a cost to managing content regardless of how you do it and every piece of content you can think of as an expense. As you build up more and more content, the expense rises because you have more cost to manage it, to find it, to dig through it, to decide what’s relevant. And it slowly will build up to the point where it becomes daunting to deal with larger and larger volumes of content. So content reuse really came about to help control that.
CH:     And when we see documentation that maybe has similar procedures or similar warnings or similar boiler plate text, whether it’s a copyright statement, you need to keep these things consistent. And so your users, your consumers of your content, benefits from reuse in that you create a consistency in the content that’s reliable, and that will not lead to confusion about what you’re trying to say. The creator themselves is often responsible for trying to deliver that quality consistent content to the users. And so a reuse oriented approach lends a great deal to be able to control and make sure that content is consistent and is accurate.
CH:     If you have a lot of duplicated content and I find out that there’s a problem with that piece of content, or maybe something needs to be updated in that content. I suddenly am faced with a huge search task of digging through everything, to find where that content was used. If I’m using a real reuse strategy, that content should only appear once in the content. And so if I need to update it, it can be done so accurately by just going to the single source and knowing that it’s reflected in all of the places where that content might appear. So that’s from like a user and maybe a creator level. Now, sometimes management might say to themselves, well, I don’t really care. I’ll pay someone to do that work. It costs a lot maybe to move my content to a content management system. Why should I do that?