Just after lunch today, Murry Christensen and Chris Beckman of Jet Blue delivered a 50-minute presentation entitled “A Year Later and a Year Wiser: Lessons Learned from Implementing an Authoring and Delivery System Based on MarkLogic, Sharepoint and Word”. The popular and innovative airline was working toward creating a modular content-oriented, structured content creation, management and delivery system — and methodology — that would help the airline better manage the intellectual property of the organization and meet regulatory mandates (like ATOS requirements), where appropriate.
Jet Blue had all the typical challenges: the need for various employees with different skillsets to create, edit, and deliver content; collaborate on projects; access the content offline; reuse content, etc. They also had a number of industry-specific / regulatory requirements to meet or exceed, as well as corporate requirements and organizational needs.
This situation led to the new system being developed, using a decentralized content creation model. Authoring templates in Microsoft Word helped enforce style and structure, a metadata manager allowed users to enhance the content with rich metadata, and an impact functionality panel provides users with the ability to track content resue. The impact feature is very useful as it can help users understand how their changes may impact content repurposed elsewhere. The new system also provided multi-channel publishing capabilities and content management functionality (things like change tracking, revision control, workflow).
“The point is, when someone asks for a piece of content, they get the most current version of it,” Christensen said. “When you’re in the airline business, flying folks around in the air in large aluminum tube, there’s no room for error.”
Chris Beckman, Manager, Corporate Publications for the airline provided a technolgical overview of the system and shared some best practices and lessons learned.
One critical piece of funtionality that helped the airline meet its regulatory requirements is the ability to map (via cross-references) procedures to the regulations that govern them.
One interesting thing about these presenters is that they weren’t afraid to tell you what they did wrong, what they would do better next time, and what challenges they had. One challenge that some readers may recognize from their own experience revolved around the changes Microsoft made to the graphic user interface in Word. Such changes, while a welcome remodel for some, caused some users to become paralyzed. With some additional training, JetBlue was able to address the problem and get users back into their comfort zones.
