Perspectives on content strategy, information architecture, DITA, metadata strategy, iiRDS, and the future of technical communication.
Most organizations try to fix poor findability at the point of retrieval. iiRDS changes the economics by adding a shared metadata layer that lets existing portals, search systems, and AI assistants work with precision instead of guesswork.
AI in documentation creates value when leaders stop treating it as a shortcut around weak content and unclear ownership. The strategic payoff comes from bounded use cases, human accountability, and a content system strong enough to make AI reliable.
Most technical documentation teams are measured on output — topics written, tickets closed — not on business outcomes. Without executives having clarity about what they need content to accomplish, individual contributors will optimize based on how they're measured and their paycheck.
Search rarely fails because the search box is missing. It fails because the organization never settled how content should be named, grouped, and described. Taxonomy gives content teams the controlled vocabulary needed for findability, personalization, and AI work that does not drift off course.
Microcontent is not content that is merely short. It is content that is complete at its own scale — scannable, self-contained, typed, and linked — and that definition has direct business consequences for AI retrieval, localization economics, and support deflection. Here is the framework, the diagnostic, and the measurement model.
Management information architecture — the content models, metadata schemas, and controlled vocabularies that govern how content is created and stored — is the structural investment that determines whether every downstream system can deliver what it promises. Organizations that underfund it do not just have a documentation problem. They have a compounding infrastructure problem that surfaces as a search problem, a personalization problem, a localization problem, and an AI problem simultaneously.
Information architecture gets funded where it is visible — navigation, wireframes, page redesigns — and starved where it is structural. This post explains why the invisible half determines whether the visible half holds, and what a strategic investment in both looks like.
Mark Baker's Every Page Is Page One principle is more than a topic design pattern — it is a strategic argument about where organizational assumptions collide with how users actually find and use content. Here is the business case.
The business case for user assistance content is not one argument. It is two, and which one you make depends on where your product sits in its lifecycle. Mature products need to protect margin. Growing products need to accelerate revenue. Most content teams are making the wrong case to the wrong person.
Delivery information architecture is not navigation design. It is the discipline of designing channel-specific experiences on top of a structured content foundation. Organizations that conflate the two — treating a navigation redesign as an information architecture investment — keep rebuilding surfaces while the structural problems that make surfaces fail go unaddressed.
When AI synthesizes answers from your documentation corpus, users may never reach individual topics. This changes what Every Page Is Page One means — but the principle doesn't die. It deepens, and the standard becomes more demanding at every level.
