Cheryl McKinnon on the Future of Documents

By Deane Barker
From Issue #56

My friend Mark referred me to this piece by Forrester’s Cheryl McKinnon where she explains how she sees the content authoring experience changing in the next half-decade or so:

The Future Of Documents: Content Creation Is Ripe For Its Own Digital Disruption

We still assume that documents are files. Increasingly, they are not. […]

We’re still trapped by the mental model of paper – pages, folders, files, labels. It’s time to learn the term “skeuomorphism” and understand how it limits our imagination when it comes to born-digital information. […]

Heroic efforts – such as content fracking – are needed to get usable data out of documents. There is a mismatch between the needs of document authors and document receivers.

Technically, this is just a blog post in support of their full research paper (which I have not read), but Cheryl does a great job painting a picture of how content authoring has stagnated and is being held back by our current experiences with CMS and even the legacy of desktop authoring.

(Also, skeuomorphism is a great word)

This is item #278 in a sequence of 305 items.

You can use your left/right arrow keys to navigate