For the past month, my manager Marc Lunness and I have been running events showcasing the opportunities of connected content and information architecture.
After my introductory session, we have had omnichannel expert Noz Urbina presenting about how to go beyond webpages, to structuring content for an artificial intelligence future. Over 120 people were riveted to his session, where he brought to life concepts that can feel technical to some, by focusing on how we use structured content keep humans at the centre of our decision-making.
I presented with my service designer colleague Lynsey Brown on how we can deliver personalisation ethically. We showed how connected content can help us deliver the experiences people increasingly expect, and outlined the personalisation principles we have developed in collaboration with digital ethics experts.
We heard from Ailsa Wilson and Therese Hooper on the inspiring work they have done applying some of this thinking with composable content. They outlined the governance work they did to make this happen across teams in a complex stakeholder environment at Social Security Scotland.
Today we were joined in person by content strategy and operations specialist Rahel Anne Bailie for a workshop and presentation about content integrity, operational efficiency, and the types of structure we can apply. She helped us identify the next steps we can take towards a high-efficiency production-grade content ecosystem.
The response to these sessions has far exceeded my expectations. We wanted to reach the teams we work with in Scottish Government. We ended up attracting interest from the wider public sector, and across the UK civil service. Today we have even had people travelling from England to join our in-person event in Edinburgh.
There is a long road ahead. But people are now telling me they are beginning to understand the opportunities we face to deliver more effectively and more efficiently while meeting users’ rapidly evolving expectations in the AI era.
My colleague Therese Hooper said today: “The future of content design feels closer than ever.”
Our programme of events has to take a pause for the next several weeks. This gives us space to plan how we will implement some of the ideas we’ve been talking about together.
In May we plan to host a few more events. We hope to bring on board colleagues from Renfrewshire Council and the Government Digital Service to talk about the work going on applying connected content in different tiers of government. We will also talk about some of the structured content work we are doing to help make the mygov.scot mobile app a reality.
Then it will be time to get on and start making the rest of it a reality. 💪
Thank you to everyone who has been part of our events so far!