“Content Management and the need for change in Technical Communication.” Written by: Scott P. Abel Presented by: Ayodele Smith

Introduction  Corporate content use  Writers in the Silo  Multichannel Delivery: First Approach  Single Sourcing: Next Step  Content Management  Success is in the Planning.  Conclusion

Corporate Content Use  There was a belief that organizations found it challenging to find contents they needed when they needed it, in the appropriate format and language.  This belief was later considered to be a side effect of doing business in the digital age.  Organizations realized that recreating content that already existed was an un-necessary and expensive symptom of a much larger problem.  Organizations believed that failing to manage content as a business asset was the problem.  Organizations that managed content as a business asset can avoid preventable and potentially expensive content dilemmas.

Writers in the Silo “Writers in the silo” is a term given to authors often working in isolation from one another who are forced to recreate the same type of content over and over again for different purposes. E.g. web, online help, print etc People who are referred to in this manner, take shortcuts, skip steps and are likely to bend, even break rules just to get the job done on time. Content silos and process deviations negatively impact your organization’s bottom line because they don’t promote collaboration, fail to leverage existing content creation activities, and are often counter to the overall goals of the enterprise. Far too often, silos and process deviations create inconsistency, inaccuracy, and the unnecessary expense of recreating content. They slow time to market, decrease both the quality and usability of your content, damage both workplace and customer satisfaction, and waste unique opportunities to innovate.

Multichannel Delivery: First Approach  When improving the content processes, different approaches are used to create content once and identical copies are published to a variety of output formats.  These initial attempts to improve content creation and delivery are often aimed at saving time, allowing you to create the multiple outputs demanded of you from a single source of content faster and with fewer manual production tasks.  Multichannel publishing is indeed a step in the right direction. It fails to provide much value to content consumers, and it does little or nothing to address issues of control: content re-use, access control, usability, workflow, version control, change control, content personalization, and translation management.

Single Sourcing: Next Step  Single sourcing is a methodology that enables you to selectively reuse pieces of information, assemble them into different formats, and automatically deliver them via various channels to various audiences.  Single-sourcing content helps you get closer to content management and it allows you to create and deliver more targeted content.  At the same time, single sourcing fails to deliver the key component of content management, control. Content management extends control. It’s about empowering you to do your job better, faster, and without wasting resources.

Content Management  Content management is a new and improved way of strategizing and organizing information to drastically reduce time to market.  Content management is not a software product. Instead, content management is the next logical step in the evolution of communication (whether technical, medical, marketing, scientific, etc.)  Well-planned content management initiatives use proven, existing technologies to automate many manual and repetitive tasks, reduce the time and resource necessary to generate documents and other content, and improve the quality and consistency of the information they provide customers.  The better the content management, the better the finished product.

Success is in the planning.  The key to success is research and planning.

Conclusion  Content management is a smart risk because its implementation will not only reward organizations with productivity gains, reduced time to market, and knowledge-management benefits, but will also help prepare them for the future.