Fixing the pain points

Nick Mongston explains how an XML authoring system can realise significant cost and time savings for your organisation.

A traditional content management solution is where a company uses a desktop publishing tool and a filing system or basic database to create and manage their content. However, in my experience there are two main problem areas in managing content in this way. From an organisational perspective the biggest issue for enterprise customers is the lack of focus that they put on authored content from a reuse and localisation perspective. I think that very often organisations undervalue the contribution that good content creation and management processes can offer. This leads to problems in effectively messaging and delivering their company's value proposition. From a more technical standpoint the inability to reuse content, and access and reuse legacy data is often experienced due to a lack of appropriate tools.

In order to resolve these issues they can identify in the enterprise where there is value in the management of content, for example they can find bottlenecks in their content creation process. This tends to be any area where there is the creation of lots of similar documents – a good example of which would be proposal writing in the sales function or user guides in the technical documentation department. Another thing they can do is define the value adding activities for a business function and then look for ways to reduce the cost of non-value adding activities. For example, the value adding activities for a sales person are identifying and converting opportunities, not in creating contracts and proposal documents. Companies should look to see how they can reduce the cost and time, and increase the accuracy, of these ancillary processes. One way to do this is to use an XML-based content creation/management system.

To be clear, XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. The core concept of XML in an authoring environment is to author once and deploy many times, and to do this across a number of different output formats. In an environment where you are creating a lot of similar documents that require minor changes, XML authoring allows you to make updates and changes without rewriting or copy and pasting any content that does not need changing. This makes the process faster and creates significantly less errors, while enabling you to ensure that all of your documents look exactly the way that you want them to. In addition to this it allows you to output to many different formats using the same content, for example, the same piece of content used for boiler plate information used in a sales proposal can also be used on your website or in your user guides. All of this leads to well-structured content that is the way you want it to be, and that is created very efficiently and accurately.

The whole of enterprise content management is geared up to offer two major benefits: time savings and cost savings. What I am suggesting will certainly further these goals however there are other benefits which are not as obvious. If content only has to be created once then you can afford to operate rigorous quality control during that process and you can be sure that the quality of your content will always remain exceptional. Also, you can drastically reduce the duplication of reviewing effort that we see so often in departments that have any kind of content creation function.

One of the greatest barriers to the implementation of XML authoring systems is the adoption of a new authoring tool with which casual authors may not be comfortable. Our tool addresses that barrier to entry by providing a graphical user interface that would be instantly familiar to anyone who has used one of the more traditional word processing software packages, and at the same time produces high quality structured content without the need for authors to understand the underlying programming language.

Nick Mongston brings over 20 years of business leadership experience to JustSystems. He has experience working in both North America and Europe. He held senior management positions at Gestetner, Olympia AEG, Bayer/Agfa, SoftQuad Software,and  Polycom. He is currently operating as the Sales and Marketing Director for JustSystems EMEA, Ltd. www.justsystems.com.