Continuous Improvement in Content
September 26, 2003
The obvious advantage of single-source publishing is the ability to “write once and publish many times.” This begins to show benefits even if your goal is simply publishing to many formats, such as print and Web. The ROI becomes greater if you are also doing things like localization and translation of the single-source content. Larger organizations are beginning to reap great benefit from atomizing content in such a way that translation, as an example, can be better managed through a change control process. Write it once, translate it once, and use it many times.
But the real bang for the buck in content management will likely come when organizations reach a point where they are in a mode of continuous improvement on managed content. I have seen this a few times in my career, and the results were impressive.
I worked for a specialized software development and information publishing company in the early 1990s. We maintained large databases of dictionary and thesaurus data in English and a number of other languages. Because the data was highly structured (in SGML and in some relational tables), we could derive many forms of the data, including subsets of individual databases and supersets of multiple databases. As a result, we were able to help develop whole new product lines for the company, very efficiently.
This didn't happen all at once of course. In many cases, the content had to first be digitized, then structured. Little or no digitization and structuring happens without manual cleanup, and because we were doing specialized work in multiple languages, the cleanup could be expensive and time-consuming. But once structured, ongoing enhancement to the content became efficient. If we wanted to add a field, or amplify an existing field, we could easily extract the existing content and set up an editorial tool for staff or outside contributors to use. The edits were then made in a structured form as well, so re-import to the database was then automatic.
Over time, we developed comprehensive, structured, and editorially enhanced databases that drove significant new product development for the company. We also were able to do scores of ad hoc, quick turn-around projects for little or no additional cost. We could easily extract or subset a database, for example, with a single query or script. We also had an excellent set of metrics for estimating ongoing and future work. Moreover, most of the internal tools we developed were reusable, given that the data was so consistent
This is a model that both commercial publishers and organizations that use content in product support should consider. Long-living content benefits from continuous improvement, and such continuous improvement works best with structured content.
Posted by Bill Trippe at September 26, 2003 1:12 PM
