TSIA Research Journeys are our initiative to solve the top problems plaguing the tech industry today. Join us as we launch discovery research, build practical theories, and deliver industry-validated, board-ready insights designed to help empower every tech company.

The transformation to “Anything-as-a-Service” (XaaS) business models is rewriting the rulebook on how businesses operate and engage with their audiences. As companies pivot to this new framework, there emerges a colossal challenge: How can businesses keep their learning content as agile and dynamic as their products and services?

Training content is no longer a static entity; it’s a living, breathing organism that needs to evolve at breakneck speed. With artificial intelligence (AI) looming as a potential game-changer, coupled with the pressure to churn out timely and innovative content, how can businesses strike the right balance?

Join us on our latest Research Journey as we dissect the content conundrum of the XaaS era, exploring everything from AI’s role to the indispensability of the human touch. Whether you’re a learning content creator, marketer, or business leader, this exploration aims to uncover insights that can reshape your content strategy for relevance and impact in this transformative age.

So jump in with us as we:

• Define the Problem: By clearly identifying the business challenge, we can start tackling it.
• Launch Discovery: With polls, surveys, and interviews, here’s where we dig deep into the facts and contributing factors.
• Develop the Theory: With data in hand, our researchers and analysts can start developing and/or enhancing frameworks.
• Guide the Industry: Correlations to financial results lead to conclusions that will help your organization get on the road to optimized content development.

By participating in our Research Journeys, you become part of a vibrant community that seeks to push the boundaries of what’s possible in the tech industry.  

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Define the Problem: The Content Conundrum

With the relentless pace of technological evolution, businesses around the globe are rapidly transitioning to XaaS business models. This paradigm shift presents a multitude of opportunities, but comes with its own set of challenges—particularly in the realm of content development.

At the heart of the XaaS business model lies the continual updating and release of products or services, which is markedly different from the traditional six-month release cadence. This difference leads to a cascade of consequences for content creators and developers:

• Frequency of change: With updates occurring every few weeks, content must keep pace. Every minor change or tweak in a product means the associated content becomes outdated. This demands not just the creation of new content but also the continuous updating of existing learning material.
• Diverse content formats: Content today is multifaceted. It spans videos, articles, audio files, simulations, and hands-on exercises. This diversity necessitates versatile content teams that can manage a range of formats.

The XaaS model inherently leans toward subscription-based offerings, which require renewal. An essential factor for any renewal is product adoption. Education organizations contribute to product adoption by providing learning content. To this end, education organizations must do two things:

1. Get content into the hands of as many customers as possible.
2. Get customers to consume that content continuously.

This means that education organizations must do more than merely update existing material. There’s a consistent need to innovate and introduce fresh, novel content to engage and retain customers.

So, what’s the crux of the problem? Simply put: scalability.

Content development teams are drowning in a deluge of demands, struggling to keep up with the rapid changes in the XaaS world. AI offers hope in this context, promising to reduce time and costs dramatically. But it’s essential to remember that while AI can handle many aspects of content development, true innovation and thought leadership will always rest in human hands.

As businesses migrate to XaaS models, the pressure on content development teams intensifies. Addressing this challenge requires a holistic approach, blending the power of technology with structured processes and human creativity. This Research Journey promises to delve deeper into these challenges, offering insights and solutions for businesses that are navigating the turbulent waters of content in the XaaS era.

Who’s Affected?

While on the surface, it may seem that this problem only concerns content developers directly, but its ripple effects touch multiple departments within an organization:

• Education service leaders: As the backbone of content development, education service leaders are the frontline—both defense and offense—in the battle for relevant content.
• Marketing: Marketing plays a pivotal role in disseminating content, and their efforts are directly affected by its relevance and timeliness.
• Sales: Often tasked with promoting and selling a product, sales pitches and user onboarding processes hinge on the availability of quality supporting materials.
• Customer success teams: With a primary goal of ensuring customer satisfaction, customer success teams are often the first to face the heat when users are dissatisfied with outdated or unavailable content.
• Product management and partner enablement: Product management and partner enablement are by their very nature invested in ensuring that content aligns with product updates. They rely on up-to-date training to maintain certifications.

The issue isn’t just about pumping out content. It’s about creating timely, relevant, high-quality resources that support a company’s products and its users. While various departments might feel they can bypass formal educational content, the value of cohesive, well-structured, and timely training cannot be underestimated.

Today, content isn’t just king—it’s the entire kingdom. And any organization that undervalues its importance does so at its own peril.

The Research Journey: Content Development From AI to Z

After understanding the significance of content cadence and the imperative need for timely, relevant, and diverse content, the next step is to delve into solutions. That’s where this Research Journey comes into play.

Originally, this journey was primarily focused on AI and its role in expediting content creation and delivery. However, recognizing the complexity of the problem, we expanded our scope to touch on all aspects of content development, from AI to Z—encompassing processes, people, and technology. This means we are not only concentrating on a single solution, but exploring an array of strategies and tools, including:

• Processes: We aim to identify the best practices in content creation and delivery, especially in the context of the challenges previously discussed.
• People and resourcing: This research will make a point of delving into the human side of the equation. Is it best to create everything in-house, or is there merit in curating or outsourcing? Our objective is to establish the best practices for leveraging all available resources.
• Technological assistance: While AI stands out prominently, it’s not the only tool in the toolbox. We aim to identify how AI, among other technologies, is currently being used and how it can be harnessed even more effectively in the future.

The emphasis on AI isn’t just because it’s a trending topic. AI promises efficiency, accuracy, and scale, making it a crucial link to our overarching research. It’s our bridge to meeting modern content demands head-on.

If you’re feeling like you’re treading water in the vast ocean of content development and delivery, this Research Journey aims to be your life preserver. We don’t just aim to keep your head above water; we want to guide you safely to shore. We hope that by subscribing and following along, you’ll find solutions to pressing challenges, ensuring that your content remains timely, relevant, and impactful.

This blog will continually update our findings as we work through each step of this Research Journey. By subscribing to this journey, you can stay updated on each step, participate in finding solutions, and view our results as we work toward what it takes to create a successful content development strategy.

Timeline of This Research Journey

Define the Problem

By clearly identifying the business challenge, we can start tackling it.‍October 2023

This Blog (Above): The Content Conundrum

Today, the transformation to “Anything-as-a-Service” (XaaS) business models is rewriting the rulebook on how businesses operate and engage with their audiences. As companies pivot to this new framework, there emerges a colossal challenge: How can businesses keep their learning content as agile and dynamic as their products and services?

Training content is no longer a static entity; it’s a living, breathing organism that needs to evolve at breakneck speed. With AI looming as a potential game-changer, coupled with the pressure to churn out timely and innovative content, how can businesses strike the right balance?

Join us on our latest Research Journey as we dissect the content conundrum of the XaaS era, exploring everything from AI’s role to the indispensability of the human touch. Whether you’re a learning content creator, marketer, or business leader, this exploration aims to uncover insights that can reshape your content strategy for relevance and impact in this transformative age.

Launch Discovery

With polls, interviews, and more, here’s where we dig deep into the facts and contributing factors.‍October - December 2023

Check out the Industry Story: Real World Applications of AI for Technology Companies in Education Services

This report explores how OpenText uses AI to create educational content. By leveraging AI tools like generative AI and neural machine translation, OpenText has reduced content creation time, improved content quality, and reduced costs. The report also highlights the importance of embracing AI tools, leveraging subject matter experts effectively, and implementing change management strategies.

Read the Quick Poll Insights: AI's Impact on Content Development Process

In October 2023, TSIA’s Education Services research practice launched the Content Development Process quick poll to kick off the Content Development: From AI to Z Research Journey. The research journey focuses on best practices for the processes, people, and technology required to streamline content development, and assesses the impact of these practices on key metrics related to time-to-market, content consumption, and customer satisfaction. It covers how organizations are utilizing generative AI to support content development.

This report will focus on the findings from the poll and insights into how data from the poll is relevant for education services content development teams.

Watch the Webinar: Content Development Process and Practices

January 17, 2024

As companies move toward XaaS business models, Education Services content development functions are impacted in two fundamental ways. Firstly, because XaaS products are sold via subscription, product adoption is paramount. And since content consumption helps drive product adoption, content development organizations must be capable of producing fresh, new content regularly. Secondly, as product revisions are much more frequent for XaaS business models than for traditional models, content revisions are also much more frequent, resulting in a near-constant maintenance loop.

To solve these two content development challenges, TSIA's Education Services research area is conducting a new Research Journey, Content Development: From AI to Z, covering three pillars related to content development: processes and practices, technology, and people. This webinar covers processes and practices, discussing findings from the recent Content Development Processes quick poll, including:

• Defining "content" and the development process
• Criteria used to prioritize development efforts
• Adapting content development processes to support XaaS business models

Join Maria Manning-Chapman as she discusses how content development processes and practices can be refined to better meet the requirements imposed by a XaaS business model.

We're looking forward to seeing you there!

Develop the Theory

With data in hand, our researchers and analysts can start developing frameworks.‍

Read the Industry Story: Real-World Applications of AI, Leveraging AI for Content Development in Education Services

Insights from TSIA’s TECHtonic Podcast Episode with OpenText

In TSIA’s TECHtonic podcast episode “Change Management: The Key to AI Success,” Thomas Lah and Jillian Alexander discussed how artificial intelligence (AI) has impacted OpenText’s education services organizations through use cases.

Watch the Webinar - Using AI in Education Services: A Guide for Getting Started

March 13, 2024

One of the challenges with using any new technology is simply getting started, and AI is no exception. In fact, getting started with AI is probably all the more daunting because of its many unknowns. But for Education Services organizations looking to get ahead early and stay ahead, AI nevertheless holds immeasurable promise.

Wednesday, March 13, join TSIA’s Maria Manning-Chapman for our latest webinar, a lively discussion and Q&A with Jim Box, Cisco’s Learning & Development Lead, where they’ll be answering essential questions such as:

- What is the best approach to get started with AI in Education Services?

- How can Education Services organizations secure funding for AI, when it is likely that budgets do not contain a line item for AI usage may not be accounted for in budgets?

- How can successful pilot projects be integrated into existing workflows?

- How has AI impacted existing roles in education organizations?

- What are the critical metrics that companies should be tracking to gauge the success of their AI implementation?

We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Read the Quick Poll Insights: How Education Services Organizations Are Currently Using AI

While the adoption of new AI capabilities is still in its infancy in education services, it is slowly gaining traction. The 2024 AI Usage in Education Services quick poll was conducted to examine how education services organizations are currently leveraging AI across a number of areas, including content development, training delivery, and the use of data analytics. This publication will provide a comprehensive review of the poll results, and will discuss their implications for companies looking to adopt AI into their education services organization in the near future.

Read the Framework Paper: Aligning Training Content to a Product Adoption Curve

Many education services organizations are struggling to manage a content development strategy that is in transition. Historically, development began with the production of a long-form, monolithic, instructor-led training (ILT) course. As demand for e-learning increased, for ease and simplicity, ILT content typically was converted to e-learning.  During conversion, to enable posting content to the e-learning portal quickly, content often remained long-form in nature. Now, the next iteration for content is micro-content, short, task-based learning nuggets.  The challenge that arises is where and how to break existing larger units of content into smaller units of content. This report introduces the Aligning Content to a Product Adoption Curve Framework, which provides guidance for building a content strategy that aligns micro-content with a customer’s product journey.  Additionally, the framework can be used to guide development of net-new micro-content.

Read the Quick Poll Insights: Factors Contributing to Content Development Time

In 2023, TSIA launched the Content Development Process quick poll as part of the Content Development: From AI to Z research journey. The results of the 2023 poll revealed that getting content out in a timely manner was one of the biggest challenges content development teams faced. In March 2024, TSIA launched the Impact of Resources on Content Development Time quick poll, which delved into this content development time challenge further. The current report will review results from that poll and discuss its implications for content development teams.

Guide the Industry

Correlations to financial results lead to conclusions. We’re ready to present our findings!
May 2024

Read the Report: Content Development From AI to Z

What was once solid ground for content development functions is now a quagmire. Insufficient headcount, the emergence of new forms of content, customer demand for a continuous flow of content, and ever more frequent product development cycles have bogged down even the most stalwart of education organizations.
Many struggle to adapt to these changing conditions and use outdated processes, technology, and resources. As an example, the emergence of micro-content as the primary adaptation to XaaS business models is significant, but many organizations use a development methodology that is ill-suited to it. TSIA research shows that organizations that are flexible in development, leverage AI, and are creative in resource usage experience lower development times and costs. This report provides critical best practices to enable education organizations to draft a new content strategy, or revitalize an existing one, to address these content development challenges.