Rock, Paper, Scissors or as it is otherwise known, roshambo, or ick-ack-ock, is a hand game usually played by two people, where players simultaneously form one of three shapes with an outstretched hand.
Rock – Stone Tablets
In the 3,000 years or so since the first recorded pictographic writings on stone tablets, there has been little disruption in the method of creating and distributing documents. For about 500 years, stone was the medium for conveying written information.
Paper – Papyrus/parchment
Paper and its ancestor’s papyrus and parchment are the earliest form of written documents and have been 
inexistence for about 2,500 years and the basic form of a document is still in use today. The advantage of papyrus over stone was that it was lightweight and could be written in ink-like material vs. carved with tools.
Parchment made from animal skins was superior to papyrus because it could be could be rolled in scrolls and folded in sheets like the early 19th century indenture and easily transported. The first books were made from folded parchment sheets.
Paper beats rock.
Scissors – Cut/copy/paste
In the mid 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press revolutionized the production of documents and books.
“The term “cut and paste” comes from the traditional practice in manuscript-editing whereby people would literally cut paragraphs from a page with scissors and physically paste them onto another page. This practice remained standard into the 1980s. Stationery stores formerly sold “editing scissors” with blades long enough to cut an 8½”-wide page”. Wikipedia
I remember the impact first IBM word processor had on proposal preparation in my first sales job at Control Data in 1981- it was a revolution over the typewriter. Prior to this, we had typists create original documents and we used copy-paste of prior material and photocopies of changes to create proposals.
My colleague Rajesh Setty wrote a wonderful article in LinkedIn entitled How we reinvented copy-paste and it’s a great segue into intelligent content.
Scissors beats paper.
Intelligent Content
Intelligent content is content, which is not limited to one purpose, technology or output. It’s content that is structurally rich and semantically aware, and is therefore discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable. Ann Rockley.
“Pass me a hammer and chisel, I need to copy a stone tablet” is a quip I used to promote a recent article dealing with disruption in content marketing bought about by intelligent content
Content is a strategic asset for companies today, yet for many companies, the same information exists in metaphorical stone tablets — scores of versions in dozens of different repositories. You cannot easily find it, you have to cut, paste and edit it to use it.
For content to serve the business and deliver an ROI, it must be intelligent and this means, you must be able to immediately find it, easily create it, combine, reuse and share it.
Intelligent content is disrupting our 3000 year-old document-based, cut-paste, portal and file-driven approach to managing document-based content.
Here’s why:
- Find and use the right content with a search query and 2 clicks without leaving the desktop.
- Drag – drop and combine information components of any type and length to easily create complex documents.
- Create reusable content components and hide complexity from the content creator and the end consumer.
- Discover, capture, tag and share content and mask complexity from users.
- Update content so that it is always current for all users.
- Provide a complete end-to-end content eco-system for creating, managing, sharing, ranking, delivering and maintaining the content.
- Develop and consume content on the same system.
- Low startup cost and easy on-ramp to use aid user adoption
- Consume content on any device, anywhere.
Intelligent content has a profound effect on personal productivity, speed of response and the consistency of message use. With the ability to control content access, rank and promote favorite content – in context, intelligent content is set to disrupt and transform our document-based culture.
Intelligent content beats scissors, beats paper, beats rock.
Use Cases for Intelligent ontent?
The use cases for intelligent content are only limited by your imagination. Here are four that we think are important.
Sales Enablement: Eliminating time lost searching for and recreating documents is an obvious use-case. Intelligent content can raise individual & team performance through delivering insight in context, industry knowledge and responsiveness and improving the speed and quality of customer engagement.
Marketing Messaging: Capturing, sharing and maintain the brand and value-message over time and using it every part of the company helps companies improve clarity and speak with one voice.
HR and Recruiting: The HR use case is a lot like sales and marketing, intelligent content helps amplify the brand values and makes it easier to find what’s needed and track and share what’s working to improve individual and team performance
Customer Service: Intelligent Content helps CSR’s to serve your customers by faster helping them find and use relevant information to resolve their issues in a timely fashion, ideally the first time.
Join us for an Intelligent Content Webinar on Thursday 17 April and learn more about how you can use intelligent content in your business.
