October/November 2004

Volume 45, Number 2

September Chapter Meeting Review: Controlling Your Content: Value-based Content Management

by Ruth Gaulke

Are you trying to develop a strategy to get control of your data, find the high-value content your customers want, and deliver it so that customers can use and reuse it?

Ben Martin and Greg Laugero, two of three partners at Industrial Wisdom, LLC, opened the new season of STC RMC member programs on Sept. 16 with a discussion of that very problem—implementing value-based content management.

Technical communicators often face the daunting challenge of producing valuable content at low cost for a variety of audiences. Martin lived through such an experience and shared the problems he faced and the solutions.

A few years ago, his company produced content with multiple outputs in multiple languages, and of course it had to be delivered under strict deadlines and with limited resources. One change could cause havoc because it had to be made manually in all outputs and translated for each language. It became impossible to keep the content up to date. The problem had to be solved.

Limited tools and time made this challenge more difficult. Initially the solution included purchasing a high-end authoring system, optimizing the cost of producing the content, and streamlining the content with a single set of templates. This effort drove down cost and optimized staff time and quality. However, no one looked at the content value and discovered that, after all that work, customers did not consistently use or value the content created.

Back to square one: staff talked with the customers and determined their needs and desires for the content. The company then replaced the expensive high-end authoring tool with an in-house tool that resulted in a solution that could be adapted to other business-critical content applications and allowed the customer to be a hub for content, not just a destination.

The message here is clear: focus your content on the value it brings to the customer, both internal and external, and you may be able to drive revenue. Solutions need not be as elaborate as the case study presented by Martin and Laugero. Study your customers and find out what they do with the content you produce. This will determine what needs to be done to meet their need—and you may find that the solution need not be complex, high-tech, or impossible to implement.