In August 2010, we sent a survey to our clients and other subscribers to our monthly newsletter, The Short List. The following is a summary of the results. To download a PDF of the detailed results report, click here. The raw data is also available upon request.

Key results:

• Business environment remains difficult; budgets are smaller with less hiring.
• Component content management solutions are being adopted at an increasing rate with more implementations planned for 2011.
• The greatest challenge for 2011 is to improve customer experience. There is not, however, a clear indication of how to meet this challenge.

Demographics of the participants

This year Lasselle-Ramsay collected 104 completed "What's On Your Mind?" surveys. The respondents considered themselves technical writers (40%), holding managerial roles (30%), and information architects (10%). The participants represented a wide spectrum of industries: about 24% identified themselves as hi-tech workers and 36% placed themselves in the "Other" category that mostly consisted of IT and software industry workers. The manufacturing sector accounted for 10% of the population.

Business environment

Budgets reflect the tough economic conditions and only 22% of the respondents have content development budgets that exceed $1 million. Hiring lagged and only 29% added new roles to their team this year. The most frequently added role was a Content Architect to support a CMS implementation.

Work environment

The survey respondents indicated they are developing the following types of content: technical product content 76%, technical support content 45%, learning and online content both at 35%. Marketing content trailed at 22%. The formats utilized reflected the content development areas with 88% working on technical documentation, 43% on external websites and 40% on internal websites, followed by FAQs, training, knowledge bases, and wikis.

A small segment, about 20%, are developing content for mobile devices, mostly smart phones, such as iPhone or BlackBerry®.

The respondents indicated that images and product content were the most common types of content being stored in repositories. This was followed by technical support and copyright information.

Structured content methodologies are being adopted with 60% of the participants indicating that they are using structured content methodologies to some extent. Within the group of respondents using structured content, 29% are using it for more than 50% of their content, and 6% are using it 100%. Half of the 35% that are not using structured content will implement it in 2011.

About 62% of the participants have a document control system in place and about half are translating content into multiple languages.

Setting goals for 2011

The survey respondents stated that they would like to add new formats next year. Approximately 12% are planning to add a knowledge base or wiki, 8% are planning to add CMS, 7% online content, 6% DITA, 6% XML, and 6% social media, excluding blogs.

There was a broad range of responses to the question asking what you would like to do, but two key scenarios emerged. About 34% would like to implement component content management or put in place strategies for structured content and content reuse.

Greatest challenge for 2011

The survey participants agreed that the greatest challenge to be addressed in 2011 is improving customer experience. On the scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the highest, they rated improving customer experience 4.3 followed by publishing content to multiple outputs. A single solution to address the challenge of improving the customer experience did not emerge from the data. Participants are considering using a new toolset or a technology platform, revising their content strategy, reviewing user requirements, and moving to component content management as ways to address the challenge. All of these solutions rated between 3.7 and 3.4 on the scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being the highest.

A clear majority, almost 80%, agreed that the best way to get information about customer content and learning requirements is to ask customers and get input from surveys, customer stories, and use cases.

Approximately 40% of the participants stated that lack of funds, budget and resources is keeping them from reaching their goals and another 22% stated that it was lack of management support. Only 27% of the participants felt that they have the necessary resources to meet their goals and 77% selected training the existing team as a critical activity to meet new requirements.