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November, 2006
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Content Management: Success is in the Planning
by Scott Abel, STC-NNE (Northern New England) Chapter
In order to meet the challenge of providing value to customers—and,
equally as important, to shareholders—content-heavy organizations
must take greater advantage of breakthroughs in information and computing
technologies designed to improve productivity, boost quality and reduce
time-to-market. To obtain the highest return on investment possible, we,
as technical communicators, as well as the organizations we serve, must
be open and willing to change. New ideas, products and technologies exist
that can help us reach—even exceed—our goals. Getting there
is certainly a battle—and a potentially risky one at that. But if
we step outside our comfort zone and consider fresh, promising alternatives
to managing the content we create, we can deliver value unsurpassed.
Enter Content Management
Content management is a paradigm shift; a new-and-improved way of strategizing
and organizing information in order to drastically reduce time-to-market.
It's also a popular buzzword in our industry, one that causes much confusion
and consternation.
Well-planned content management initiatives utilize proven, existing
technologies to automate many manual and repetitive tasks, reduce the
amount of time and resources necessary to generate documents and other
content, and improve the quality and consistency of the information we
provide our customers. Although it is a new area for most, the automatic
assembly of documents using computers (with little or no human intervention)
has been taking place in government, defense and aerospace industries
for several decades. Recent advances in computing technologies, the emergence
of first generation best practices, and the availability of web-based
authoring and publishing tools make content management an attractive and
necessary next step for corporations, organizations and government agencies
seeking to get the most bang for their budget bucks.
What Exactly Is Content Management?
Content management is not a software product, although it relies on certain
software components. Instead, content management is the next logical step
in the evolution of communication (technical, medical, marketing, scientific,
etc.). Specifically, content management is a set of software tools, organizational
and workflow processes, internal policies, procedures and training, that,
when coupled with targeted organizational changes and proper research
and planning, can deliver an excellent return on investment.
Content management is a smart risk because its implementation will not
only reward us with productivity gains, reduced time-to-market and knowledge
management benefits, but it will also help prepare us for the future.
Inherent to content management is the ability to deliver information in
computer-readable, open formats like Extensible Markup Language (XML)
and electronic/digital signatures. These open technologies are said to
help "future-proof" organizations because they do not rely on
proprietary software code and thus allow the sharing of information between
disparate computing systems, platforms, and Web browsers without the need
to develop costly interface layers between systems. They also make converting
information to voice, wireless, Braille, HTML, and other formats much
easier and cheaper than alternative methods in use today.
Success Is in the Planning
Software vendors are often some of the first folks we meet when exploring
whether or not to adopt a content management initiative. They often hype
the features inherent in their software, the training and consulting services
they provide, and a host of jargon-laden marketing factoids designed to
impress. The ugly truth is, while software selection is important, it's
not the key to content management success.
The key to success is research and planning. The amount of research and
planning might surprise, even delight you. Experienced software vendors
now realize this. That's why they are starting to promote 45/45/10 plans
(45% research, 45% planning, 10% implementation) and are more often partnering
with content management specialists who understand what's involved in
creating, maintaining, publishing and archiving content.
But software vendors came to discover the importance of research and
planning the hard way. Only after a few large content management initiatives
failed to deliver the return on investment promised by software marketing
mavens did content management software vendors discover research and planning
as an integral part of any successful implementation.
So, if you're interested in learning more about content management, look
no further. Below is a list of resources designed to help you get started
and make sure your content management project is a big success.
Additional Content Management Resources
This article originally appeared in the January-February
2005 issue of the Nor’Easter, the newsletter of the STC-Northern
New England Chapter.
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