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The Future Standard in Providing Usage Information, Interview with the iiRDS consortium

2020.09.04
Cake
MD Div.

The iiRDS consortium, founded by the German technical communication association tekom, is now developing the iiRDS(intelligent information Request and Delivery Strandard), which will become the international standard for requesting and delivering intelligent information in the Industry 4.0 era. So what is meant by intelligent information in this context? To understand this, let’s first take a look at what “intelligent” means.

In other words, intelligent information can be said to be the future of usage information that must evolve in tandem with Industry 4.0, where machines, equipment, and entire sections of factories automatically exchange data with each other through information and communication technology.

When the development of iiRDS is complete and this new standard is applied to the market, how will it change the way we retrieve usage information? Let’s imagine this from the standpoint of a service engineer.

TodayTomorrow with iiRDS
1. See that the product is not working.
2. Find out why the product is not working.
3. Retrieve documentation related to the malfunction from the archive.
4. Look for ways to solve problems that skim through the whole section on malfunctions
5. Repair the product according to the instructions in the manual.
1. See that the product is not working and that an error code has appeared on the display.
2. Scan the code with the dedicated app installed on the smartphone.
3. Repair the product according to the solution delivered directly from the app.

What do you think? I have a feeling that our lives will become smarter because we will be able to find the information we want accurately, quickly, and conveniently. 😊

What is Hansem Global preparing for the future of usage information? Let’s find out through an interview by the iiRDS consortium with Yongsook Kim, CEO of Hansem Global!

(Click here to view the original interview article.)

< Welcome back to the iiRDS universe and more “Five questions for…” >

We asked our iiRDS consortium members what drives them to participate actively with developing the new standard. In our interview series, you’ll learn what visions are associated with the commitment for the standard for intelligent delivery of user information and how companies are simultaneously preparing for the transformation that Industrie 4.0 is bringing with it. Yangsook Kim has five answers for us today.

Yangsook Kim CEO of Hansem Global, South Korea

Ms. Yangsook Kim has three decades of industry experience, demonstrating a varied, vast expertise in content development and localization. She is founder, owner, and president of Hansem Global. Her company has been providing high-quality user guidance for consumer electronics, software, industrial and medical products for more than 25 years. She is the former president of the Korea Technical Communicators Association (2013-2015) and now oversees its foreign operations. She is also a member of the IEC TC3 Korean Standards Technical Committee.

1. As the iiRDS Consortium was founded for the further development of the standard, what was the motivation for you and your company to join?

As Hansem Global is the industry leading technical writing service provider in Korea, our motivation to join the iiRDS Consortium was based on a few things. First, we completely agree with the Consortium’s prediction of how information for use will evolve from being produced by the manufacturer and given to the customers unilaterally in a document format to customers receiving information for use based on their specific needs, on the device they want, when they want it – the essence of intelligent information request and delivery on demand. Believing that this is the future, we are greatly interested in the consortium’s role in establishing the standards that will shape how we write, deliver, and publish information for use.

Although not as elaborate, manufacturers in Korea are making various efforts to deliver information for use in new, creative ways. For example, they are now providing additional, user-friendly materials that introduce smaller documents containing a few interesting features for the customers who would not be willing to read an entire traditional user manual. Also, they are changing their e-manuals from simple PDFs to more fun, interactive formats, as well as providing video guides, so that there is less text for customers to read. In a nutshell, there is still no established methodology for creating the information for use for the future, but what’s certain is that the customers want their information in different ways and manufacturers are trying their best to satisfy customer demands.

Coming from this background, we could not agree more with tekom’s prediction that customers will want to get information in an intelligent information format, and we could not be more interested in the iiRDS Consortium, which will develop the relevant standards.

2. The roadmap contains numerous plans and ideas: what are you most hoping for from the Consortium?

I hope that the new standard can help create an information delivery format that can be driven by relatively lighter CCMS so that it can be designed lightly and practically. If it will make the process of implementation and operation complicated and expensive, the market will not find it attractive and will eventually abandon it.

3. What are you looking forward to in the internal work of the Consortium?

Although we are not a CMS developer, and thus do not have enough technology and knowledge to participate in the technical committee or contribute to development of the new standards, we are very interested in the activities of the technical committee and would like to be informed of their activities, achievements, and news. In fact, I think the Consortium is already doing a great job at sharing information with all of the members.

4. Which practical implementations do you see for using iiRDS in your company – now and in the future?

Our goal is to learn more about the future of information for use throughout our participation in the Consortium, introduce the iiRDS to the Korean industry, and assist manufacturers who want to implement it in their system by training our technical writers and producing user guides that comply with the new standard.
Thus, we are now building an environment for our technical writers to become familiarized with DITA, so that they can easily adapt to the new technology and the new standards that would come into effect.

5. Where do you see iiRDS three years from now?

Although it might take more than three years to break in to the market and get enough feedback from the customers, I think that the iiRDS could be regarded and respected as an international standard after three years of development.

Thanks a lot, Yangsook Kim!

About Hansem Global

Hansem Global is an ISO Certified and globally recognized language service provider. Since 1990, Hansem Global has been a leading language service company in Asia and helping the world’s top companies to excel in the global marketplace. Thanks to the local production centers in Asia along with a solid global language network, Hansem Global offers a full list of major languages in the world. Contact us for your language needs!

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