(Original image from the Bell System Technical Journal, 1922)

The world we live in is awash with information — awash with content. There are more documents being generated and data to sort through than anyone can make sense of on their own. One of the ironies of the digital revolution is that computers, the internet, search engines, etc., were all developed to wrangle this information, but in turn became tools to generate even more of it, cheaper and faster.

Enter artificial intelligence: the latest and greatest cause of (and solution to) all your content problems.

In the broadest sense of automating tasks that traditionally have required human labor, artificial intelligence has been around for a long time, first in the research and industrial fields, then in the world of the consumer. It’s an umbrella term, a family resemblance concept, used to group things that aren’t necessarily identical. (We used AI transcription technology to help compose this newsletter.) But recently there’s been a hyperfocus on the section of digital automation that uses large language models to generate documents. Since creating, understanding, categorizing, and presenting digital documents is very much in Autogram’s wheelhouse, we figured we should address the subject.

Headless is the new hotness. Every organization using a CMS is either moving to a system that decouples the presentational head from the content body or is looking wistfully at their tech-savvy peers who’ve successfully made the transition.

“We’ve now reached a critical mass where even if not everybody’s doing it, everybody is aware of it and thinks of it as an ideal that they should be doing,” says Jeff Eaton. “I think that's the biggest shift I've seen in a long time for our industry.”

But like any platform migration, switching to headless creates common pain points that not every organization or even every migrator has the experience or resources to address.

Let’s face it: most CMS replatforming projects aren’t happening because a management team’s fallen in love with structured data and APIs. They’re done for financial or operational reasons: the current platform (cough AEM cough) is too expensive, the CMS is at its end of life, or there's some other really dull contractual reason why a business decides to terminate its agreement with Sitecore and implement a new CMS. One way or another, the impetus is more about getting off the current CMS than properly planning for its replacement.

Last week, Autogram’s Jeff Eaton gave a keynote speech at Confab titled Content doctrine: Bridging the gap between strategy and tactics. The talk identifies a terminological gap in how we talk about teams making decisions. It also highlights a significant problem for people at organizations who haven’t articulated the principles that guide those decisions — or, as Jeff says, their “beliefs about how things work and why.”

Jeff’s positioning of strategy and tactics as unified by a third body called doctrine comes from studying the military, how it works, and how it thinks about how it works. The military might be the field that’s thought longest, hardest, and most publicly about the strategy/tactics divide and how to standardize its own operations.

This is what doctrine is: the shared principles and terminology that organize the tactics, techniques, and procedures we use every day. It’s an organization’s worldview of how it works and the fields it operates in. It’s what doesn’t change even when strategies, tactics, tools, and operations get rethought or refined. But it’s also ideally in a constant feedback loop with those on-the-ground decisions and data points, refining them based on successes and failures.

You don’t need to wade into Sun Tzu, US Army manuals, or the minutiae of Soviet tanks to see the idea of doctrine at work. Other parts of the business world, like logistics or manufacturing, also think about their practices in terms of doctrines. (Besides, as Jeff says, military research is also what gave us Cheetos and the McRib sandwich. It may extract huge amounts of capital for death and destruction, but it’s only fair that we cherry-pick its very best ideas.)

The Autogram newsletter intends to cover:

1. news about Autogram and what its partners have been up to;
2. news about the world we research for our clients: the business and technology of online publishing.

This issue is mostly about the former: a next-generation web crawler, developed by Autogram as an open source project called Spidergram. But, as you’ll see, it’s intimately bound up with the latter, since Spidergram was developed not just to fill a gap in the software landscape, but to help the company’s partners ask better questions to serve our clients.

Autogram frequently works with organizations that have large, complex websites. These sites publish massive amounts of documents, authored by multiple teams, in different formats, and delivered to multiple places on a wide range of devices and platforms. Interlocking architectures, content strategies, and design systems are required to preserve a consistent experience and brand identity while also allowing for enough variation to serve different needs, users, and contexts.

Welcome! You're here either because you just subscribed or are thinking about subscribing to Autogram's newsletter. Here's a short note on what you can expect from us.

The Autogram newsletter is written by and for people who want to understand how complex websites work. Every two weeks or so, we’ll send subscribers our latest thoughts about content strategy, content management, and information architecture; how that work intersects with design systems; and other critical aspects of digital design, like performance, accessibility, and analytics.

We will never sell, give, or trade your data to third parties, spam you, track you around the web, or otherwise abuse your inbox.

About Autogram