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Subject Matter Expert - Managed Services (PA)
Next Step Systems
US-PA-Wayne
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Enterprise
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:
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Faster time to market |
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| 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. |
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Better use of resources |
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| 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. |
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Reduced costs |
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| 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. |
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Improved quality of content |
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| 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. |
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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:
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Analyzing existing content and the processes to create and manage it |
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Designing information models and supporting metadata |
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Creating unified processes to create and manage content |
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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:
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Determine where it really “hurts” |
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| 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. |
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Identify your content life cycle |
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| 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. |
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Perform a content audit |
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| 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. |
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Created: February 18, 2003
Revised: February 18, 2003
URL: http://webreference.com/programming/professional/chap6/1