Acrolinx Implementation in Rockwell Automation Marina SedmakManager of Information Development and PublishingRockwell Automation 10/7/2014

About Rockwell Automation

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• World’s largest company dedicated to industrial automation and information

• Core offerings include automation hardware and software products, as well as solutions and services

• Website: http://www.rockwellautomation.com/rockwellautomation/about-us/overview.page

• Customers in 80+ countries• NYSE trading symbol: ROK• FY2013 sales of $6.35B• 22,000 employees worldwide• Headquartered in Milwaukee, WI

Current Deployment Overview

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• Acrolinx is a key enabler of our content automation strategy

• Deployed in technical, marketing, and Web authoring teams• Three rule sets with a common core of rules for high-

quality translatable English• A single unified terminology managed as a neutral

asset • ~90 users

• Implementation managed by the technical communication team

Scope Decision #1: Customer-Facing Content

• Identified all teams in our marketing organization that create externally-facing content

• Talked to smaller focused groups within those teams to provide awareness and confirm interest

• Scope for year one– Marketing communicators– Technical communicators– Web

• Core team from technical communications took on bulk of implementation work

Scope Decision #2: Upstream and Downstream• Built-in advantage: translations and technical

communications functions live in the same organization • We already think in terms of “information supply chain”• Expanded scope to cover both upstream authoring and

downstream translation goals• Benefits of Acrolinx accrue at all stages• Multilingual terminology management project

dovetailed perfectly

Broader scope forces you to think in terms of high-level strategy

Content Automation Strategy

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Automate our content environment in order to create more consistent and higher-quality content faster, and make it easier to translate that content into all of the languages that our customers require

Automation resonates deeply given our core business

Key Elements of the Content Automation Strategy

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• Quality management rules, terminology, tools, and processes

• Transparent, governed consistency of content standards and processes across functional groups

• Integration of both upstream authoring and downstream translation tools and processes

• Roadmap that shows how we will build capability over time

Example: How To Tell an Automation Story About Editing

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Manual Editing Automated Checking

Limited primarily by time • Work measured in hours

Limited by processing capability• Work measured in seconds

Scope directly limited by headcount

Unlimited scope• Everyone with a license can be

checked

Execute one-by-one Batch checking supports analysis of wide swaths of content

Manual reporting Automated analytics

Highly repetitive and monotonous tasks

Not a factor in automated paradigm

Variability in execution (human nature)

Same rule checked the same way for every user, every time

Unmatched in checking for accuracy and meaning

Only finds errors that have been programmed as rules

Important to compare on all key characteristics—show the trade-offs fairly

Content Automation Linkage to Machine Translation Capability

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Improved source quality

Control of English

terminology

Multilingual terminology

control

Full control ,

ownership of

translation memory

Future machine

translation technology

Building momentum and speed

Decreasing

costs Success depends on how far upstream you start

Growing our capability for machine translation is a key future benefit for early Acrolinx adopters as well as senior management

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EN copy oftermbase

Synched copy of multilingual

termbase

Quality rules database

Terminologist (new role)

Acrolinx administrator (new role)

Authors create content in their native tools Check

quality, terminology

Real-time markup

Reporting

Translation Memory

Workflow

Authors request translations Translation project

managers, validators, and global translation

vendors

System returns

translations

Where Acrolinx Fits in the Content Ecosystem

Terminology governance

Quality governance

Managers consume reporting on quality and

term conformity

Managers consume reporting on translation activities and metrics

TMS

TMS=translation management system

Communication Strategy

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• Share your vision with all teams who will benefit because

• They create a lot of content • They create very visible and high-value content • They review or process large volumes of content

• Connect the tool to the vision explicitly by audience • Enforcing rules: managers• Helping writers be better writers: writers • Improving translatability: translation team• Managing rules and processes: senior leadership

Create a compelling visual that illustrates the shared audience landscape for content creators

Focus on “Happy Adoption” First

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• The road to improved quality and consistency is not a straight line

• Paying attention to scoring too early can actually hurt progress

• Focus on finding pain points for key groups and solve them

• Respect existing processes and tuck-in new ones carefully

• Let writers benefit from Acrolinx without concern about scores for as long as possible

• Resolve to ignore scoring until rules and terms are settled

Happy adoption means writers embrace the tool willingly, and not because of the threat of negative

consequences

Select the Right Internal People To Help You

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• Engage skilled, passionate writers and editors • Best implementation support comes from

people whose work may appear to be negatively impacted

• Reward the implementation team • Identify super-users across all functions to represent

different teams• Hands-on help to work through problems• Speeds buy-in• Early warning system

Importance of Formation Roles

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• Establish short-term formation roles to set up Acrolinx • We defined two formation roles with formal job

descriptions• Acting Acrolinx administrator• Acting terminologist (also supporting a separate

terminology program)• Formation roles heavily impact success in a broad

implementation• The broader your implementation, the more

discipline-neutral your formation staff needs to be• “We” is everyone; there is no “they”

Planning for Sustaining Roles

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Putting the right people in formation roles buys you time to define sustaining roles

• Formation role employees may turn out to be best-suited for sustaining roles with their newly-acquired expertise

• Broad implementations require sustain roles whose allegiance is to the vision, and not to a department or function

• Early successes can draw positive attention and bring resources your way

Select the Right Partner To Help You

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• Find an integration partner who has done this before • A broad implementation means more users and more

complex scenarios to support• Critical that your partner has expertise in the type of

content you are running through Acrolinx• Rockwell Automation is working with Content Rules, an

Acrolinx partner

Metrics for Success: Big Picture

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• Think about where and how you want to track your metrics and who will tracking them

• Be open and honest about what you want to measure now vs. in the future

• Be able to explain how metrics will support the vision• Don’t forget happy adoption: measurement is not the

most important thing at the beginning

Metrics for Success in a Broad Implementation

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• Tracking source quality• Improvement per writer across checking instances?• Improvement in writers’ final scores across documents

over time?• Level of achievement against an arbitrary score?• Spelling, style, grammar, terminology...all of them?

• Tracking translatability• Improved speed to translate and validate?• Improved cost to translate?• Improved quality in translations?

Ask Your Partner for Advice

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• How well can I live with the existing out-of-the box rules?• How much should I customize?• What scenarios warrant a different rule set?

• Especially important if you are implementing across functions

• How do writers react to the results of content checking?• How do we balance getting our full value out of the

investment with giving writers autonomy in the creative process?

• What should I measure and when should I start measuring?

Best Practices for a Broad Acrolinx Implementation

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• Link your efforts clearly to your corporate strategy and mission

• Identify all nearby content-centric disciplines at the beginning, but start small

• Think upstream and downstream in the content supply chain

• Set expectations with roadmaps for future scope and functionality

• Tuck-in changes

Play the Long Game

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• Acrolinx is perfectly suited to tuning and improvement over time

• You don’t have to turn on all the rules at once• You don’t have to tune rules or processes to the

strictest setting• For year one, aim for “happy adoption”