Super Software Solutions - About Enterprise Content Management

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The role of content

A typical organization has multiple content creators who design, create, manage, and distribute information. Virtually every department within an organization touches content in some way. For example there are:

	· Multiple content creators within the organization
		· Marketing/Communications
		· HR
		· Engineering/Product development
		· Technical publications/product support
		· Training
		· Customer support
	· Creating numerous information products
		· Brochures, product information sheets, proposals, press releases, speeches, presentations, annual reports
		· Employee training materials, policies and procedures
		· User guides, online help, reference documents, application guides
		· Product specifications, design documents, test plans
		· Regulatory materials
		· FAQs, customer support materials
		· Classroom or web-based training
	· For multi-channel delivery
		· Paper
		· Web
		· Wireless
	· For multiple content users
		· Customers
		· Suppliers
		· Channel partners
		· Employees

Too often, content is created by authors working in isolation from other authors within the organization. Walls are erected among content areas and even within content areas, which leads to content being created, and recreated, and recreated, often with changes or differences at each iteration. We call this The Content Silo Trap.

Content silos can have detrimental effects on organizations, resulting in increased costs, reduced quality, and potentially ineffective materials. While it has been possible to more effectively create, manage, and deliver web content, the web content process has created a silo in most organizations.

Web content managers frequently have to take content originally designed for paper and convert it to HTML or take files created in authoring tools designed to create effective paper-based materials not online materials. Not only do they have to convert content to HTML, the content often has to be rewritten and redesigned to ensure that the web materials are effective.

This is a time consuming and often onerous task. If content originally designed for the web needs to be reused in paper the process is reversed and often just as onerous. Some content management systems make it possible to repurpose content into multiple media, but content is not optimized for the media reducing its effectiveness for customers.

Enterprise content management and a unified content strategy can help your organization to avoid the Content Silo Trap, reducing the costs of creating, managing, and distributing content, and ensuring that content effectively supports your organizational and customer needs.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the creation, capture, delivery, customization, and management of content across an enterprise/division. A unified content strategy is a repeatable method of identifying all content requirements up front, creating consistently structured content for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling content on demand to meet your customers’ needs.

A unified content strategy is a coherent content strategy. Organizations can rely on content being the same wherever it appears, providing both internal and external customers with a consistent message, brand, and accuracy.

No longer do organizations have to worry about contradicting themselves with differing information; where duplication occurs, it is the same content. Additional benefits include:

	· Faster time to market
		Faster time to market is achieved through shorter content creation and maintenance cycles. Authors spend less time repeatedly authoring content because they reuse existing content wherever possible, supplementing it with new or modified content where appropriate. Reviewers also spend less time reviewing content because they only have to review the content that is new or changed; existing content has already been reviewed and signed off.
	· Better use of resources
		In a unified content strategy, resources are optimized because the repetitive processes of creation and maintenance are reduced. Because they are required to do less repetitive work, everyone involved in the content creation process can do more value-added work or respond to new requirements.
	· Reduced costs
		In a unified content strategy, the costs of creating and managing content are reduced. Less work is required to get a product to market, not only decreasing internal costs, but potentially increasing revenue. Content is modified or corrected once instead of multiple times, reducing maintenance costs. Translation costs are reduced because reusable content is translated only once instead of multiple times; derivatives of that content are eliminated or reduced.
	· Improved quality of content
		A unified content strategy helps to improve the quality of content. Content is clearly modeled for consistent structure; increasing its readability and usability. Most importantly, content is accurate and consistent wherever it appears. Issues of inaccurate content, inconsistent content, or missing content are reduced or eliminated.

Creating content once, extracting appropriate content for each of the deliverables, and automatically formatting that content appropriately can significantly reduce costs and speed time-to-market. Organizations we have worked with have identified 25-60% of their content as reusable, with some as high as 80%. Some of that content can be identically reused (no change to the content) while in other cases it can be used derivatively (reuse much of the content but change a portion of it). These results are the same in pharmaceutical, medical devices, finance, insurance, high tech industry, and any other industry we have worked in.

The process

Creating a unified content strategy involves four phases:

	· Analyzing existing content and the processes to create and manage it
	· Designing information models and supporting metadata
	· Creating unified processes to create and manage content
	· Implementing your strategy

Analyzing content and processes

Analysis is key to a successful unified content strategy. You need to figure out “what’s going on” with your content, how it’s being used, how it’s being managed, as well as the processes you use to create, publish, and store it. Not surprisingly, you will find that these processes vary across the organization. During the analysis phase, you:

	· Determine where it really “hurts”
		To discover where your organization is hurting the most, you need to understand the dangers and challenges facing your organization, the opportunities that can be realized if change occurs successfully, and the strengths your organization can build on to implement these changes.
	· Identify your content life cycle
		To implement a unified content strategy, you need unified processes so that everyone involved in developing, storing, and publishing content does it the same way, or at minimum is able to interact effectively with each other and share content. To understand where you need to focus your efforts, though, you need to examine your content life cycle and any issues associated with it.
	· Perform a content audit
		Before you can model your content—and subsequently, unify it—you need to gain an intimate understanding of its nature and structure. During a content audit, you look at your organization’s content analytically and critically, allowing you to identify opportunities for reuse and the type of reuse. The purpose of a content audit is to analyze how content is used, reused, and delivered to its various audiences. You need to understand how information—as well as the processes to create it—can be unified, eliminating the “cut and paste” method many authors employ in their attempt to unify content wherever possible. Once you see how your information is being used and reused, you can make decisions about how you might unify it.

Designing models and metadata

In the design phase, you build information models and define the metadata you will use to describe your content. Information models and their supporting metadata are critical to the success of a unified content strategy; they become the roadmap your unified content strategy follows.

Information modeling

Once you have identified opportunities to reuse content in your organization, you need to “model” the content you plan to reuse. Models formalize the structure of your content in guidelines, templates, and structured frameworks such as DTDs or schemas. Through information modeling, you identify and document the framework upon which your reuse strategy is based.

The information modeling process forces you to consider all information requirements (either for a specific project or within an entire organization) and to assess what information is available to fulfill those requirements. In a unified content strategy, the information model becomes the “catalogue” of all the information products and outlines the necessary information elements for each.

For example [1] :

The Reo Auto Company is preparing for the annual auto show and launch of its new vehicles. This year they are launching their first sports utility vehicle (SUV)—the Tsai. They require a variety of information products: a press release to announce their new line-up; brochures to hand out at the show and dealer showrooms; updates to the web site; and a show catalog. The web site team and marketing group sit down to figure out a unified content strategy for the materials. They determine that the information products are to be provided in three media; paper (show catalog, press release, brochure), web (web site, press release), email (press release). Each information product requires different content and design:

	· Show catalog for the entire line-up (photo, short description, and key features, three cars to a page; )
	· Brochure for the Tsai only (photo, long description with all the features and benefits)
	· Press release for the Tsai only (no photo, short description, features and benefits)
	· Web site for entire line-up (home page for each car with photos, list of full features combined with a pricing calculator)

The following table shows a portion of the information model for the Tsai product description:

Product Description
Element	Show catalog	Brochure	Press release	Web site
Product Name	X	X	X	X
Product Description
Product Desc. Short	X	X	X	X
Product Desc. Med		X
Product Desc. Long		X
Graphic	X	X		X
Features	X	X	X	X [2]
Feature title		X	X
Feature item	X	X	X
Benefits		X	X	Xa
Benefit item		X	X
Tag line		X	X	X

Designing metadata

Traditionally, metadata has been defined as "data about data". While this is true, metadata is actually much more. It is the encoded knowledge of your organization. Metadata can be used to describe the behavior, processes, rules and structure of the content. A sound metadata strategy is required for content search and retrieval, enterprise content management, and dynamic content delivery (personalization).

Metadata enables:

	· Effective retrieval
	· Automatic population of existing elements into placeholders for content reuse (systematic reuse)
	· Dynamic content
	· Automatic routing based on workflow status
	· Reporting

There are two types of metadata required for a unified content strategy:

	· Categorization metadata
		The increasing use of portals has encouraged organizations to make the portal the central location for access to organizational content. However, as each new piece of content is added, the ability for users to find content decreases. Corporate information needs to be organized into a logical structure (taxonomy), categorizing it, and using the categories to add metadata to the information. Some industries have created industry specific taxonomies, sometimes known as vertical taxonomies. Vertical taxonomies have been developed to help save organizations from the task of having to create it all themselves, creating inconsistent taxonomies from company to company, and to facilitate the sharing of content. Vertical taxonomies have been created for such areas as IT, Healthcare, Telecommunications, HR, Financial, Legal, e-Learning, Sales and Marketing, and Geography, and more are being created daily. These vertical taxonomies are being incorporated into tools, which assist organizations in the categorization of their content.
	· Element metadata
		Element metadata identifies your content at the element level, based on the elements defined in your information model. Authors use element metadata to help them manage content throughout the authoring process. There are three main types of element metadata (reuse, retrieval, and tracking). Metadata for reuse identifies the elements of content that can be reused in multiple areas. Before even beginning to write, authors can search the content management system by metadata for reusable content. Alternatively, the content management system can automatically search for appropriate reusable content (based on models and metadata) and deliver it (systematic reuse) to authors. In both cases, metadata is very important to correctly identify the elements of content. Metadata for retrieval is used to help authors retrieve content and may include much or all of the metadata used for reuse. However, metadata for retrieval is more extensive then metadata for reuse, providing additional information about an element that facilitates retrieval (e.g., author, version). Metadata for tracking is particularly useful when you are implementing workflow as part of your unified content strategy. By assigning status metadata to each content element, you can determine which elements are active. You can also control what can to be done to an element and who can do it.

The metadata for the example would be:

Element	Metadata
Product Name	All
Product Description
Product Desc. Short	All
Product Desc. Med	Brochure
Product Desc. Long	Brochure
Graphic	Show catalog Brochure Web site
Features	All
Feature Title	Brochure Press release
Feature item	All
Benefit item	Brochure Press release Web site
Tag line	Brochure Press release Web site

Creating unified processes

A unified content strategy also involves people and unified (collaborative) processes. The unified processes must create a collaborative environment in which authors throughout the organization can contribute to and draw content from a definitive source of information.

Collaboration ensures that the content elements, such as product descriptions, are consistent and can be reused wherever they’re required...in a printed brochure, on the web, on the intranet, in user guides, and so on. Processes should be redesigned to match the unified content strategy and support the way the authors work. Workflow can be used to support these processes.

Authors create structured content that is separate from format. Structured content relies on content standards rather than format standards. Content standards refer to the type of content in each element, and how it must be structured in order to be re-used.

Format standards refer to how the information must look, in the published outputs. While format is critical in helping users to read and comprehend information, it is addressed separately from content. This allows writers to focus on the content—ensuring the content is accurate and contains the necessary elements for comprehension and for reuse. Format is addressed through information design, and is normally attached to content elements through stylesheets (e.g., XSL or cascading style sheets).

For example, once the content is written, it is published to each information product; the format is applied based on the content’s use.

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