The eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is a language for the electronic communication of business and financial data which is revolutionizing business reporting around the world. It provides major benefits in the preparation, analysis and communication of business information. It offers cost savings, greater efficiency and improved accuracy and reliability to all those involved in supplying or using financial data. It is one of a family of “XML” languages which is becoming a standard means of communicating information between businesses and on the internet.

XBRL is being developed by an international non-profit consortium of approximately 450 major companies, organizations and government agencies. It is an open standard, free of license fees. It is already being put to practical use in a number of countries and implementations of XBRL are growing rapidly around the world.

Case Studies

• The National Bank of Belgium
• The Bank of Japan
• The Bank of Spain
• The Tokyo Stock Exchange
• The FFIEC and US Banking Regulation

Demonstrations

• Deutsche Börse Demo
• KOSDAQ Stock Market XBRL Demonstration
• Earnings Release in XBRL

A Simple Explanation

The idea behind XBRL is simple. Instead of treating financial information as a block of text—as in a standard internet page or a printed document—it provides an identifying tag for each individual item of data, creating computer-readable and consumable content. For example, company net profit has its own unique tag.

The introduction of XBRL tags enable automated processing of business information by computer software, cutting out laborious and costly processes of manual re-entry and human comparison.  Computers can treat XBRL data “intelligently”: they can recognize the information in a XBRL document, select it, analyze it, store it, filter it, exchange it with other computers and present it automatically in a variety of ways for users. XBRL greatly increases the speed of handling of financial data, reduces the chance of error, and permits automatic checking of information.

Companies can use XBRL to save costs and streamline their processes for collecting and reporting financial information. Consumers of financial data, including investors, analysts, financial institutions and regulators, can receive, find, sort, compare and analyze data much more rapidly and efficiently if it is in XBRL format.

XBRL can handle data in different languages and accounting standards. It can flexibly be adapted to meet different requirements and uses. Data can be transformed into XBRL by suitable mapping tools or it can be generated natively in XBRL by appropriate software.

To learn more about XBRL see: How XBRL Works and Benefits and Uses. A short video clip is included below to help you understand the standard and why it’s needed.

[Source: XBRL International]

By Jake Sorofman, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, North America and EMEA, JustSystems

The emergence of Web 2.0 has created the expectation for community contribution and user-generated content. This has the potential to turn the traditional publishing model on its ear. Historically, publishing was a one-way street — information was pushed from one to many, with no “closed loop” mechanism to make it a two-way exchange. But the reality is that the individuals who are consuming and working with information out on the edges of the enterprise are the ones with the most critical experience and perspective to share — experience and perspective that needs to somehow find its way back into the publishing process.

Traditionally, publishing processes have been more like a monologue than a discourse, with no formal means to facilitate this two-way exchange. This is finally beginning to change, and it has profound implications for the publishing model we know today.

The rise of dynamic documents offers an interesting parallel for this transformation. What if documents were the basis for — not just information dissemination — but a fully interactive conversation between the content publisher and the content consumer?

As I’ve discussed before, dynamic documents provide a document-based user experience that delivers all of the goodness of documents — portability, persistence, rich-context, etc. But dynamic documents function like live applications — information is always up to date and the user experience is fully dynamic. This makes dynamic documents a perfect vehicle for capturing knowledge on the frontlines — experience, observation, best practices, tips, tricks and things to avoid are all impounded back into the publishing process from within the document itself. 

Of course this all sounds vaguely wiki-like, doesn’t it? What I’m describing certainly shares the same intent as a wiki, but wikis lack the structure required for reuse and efficient information management. While wikis activate the wisdom of crowds, they also have a tendency for trapping that wisdom in yet another silo, only further challenging reuse, control and knowledge management in general. Like a wiki, closed-loop publishing invites content consumers to become content contributors and editors. Unlike a wiki, however, closed-loop publishing brings community-generated insight back into a formalized XML-based publishing process.

By combining wiki-like capture with the structure and control of a traditional publishing process, organizations can:

• Improve information accuracy, quality and value by ensuring content is continuously proved by the consumers who have the practical experience with it to know better
• Reduce the cost of content maintenance by transferring some of the burden to content consumers
• Improve customer intimacy and market awareness by capturing the voice and sentiment of customers, partners, employees, etc., and making that a part of the publishing process as well as the collective knowledge of the enterprise. Suddenly, organizations start seeing otherwise hidden patterns, trends, risks and opportunities surfacing within this conversation. And suddenly, the tech writer becomes one of the most market-attuned roles in the enterprise.

Scenarios for closed-loop publishing might include:

• A telemarketer’s contribution of a compelling way to overcome a common customer objection
• A maintenance technician’s notification of an incorrect procedure
• A contact center representative’s report of a product defect
• A customer’s gripe about the usefulness of a product manual

Issues, opportunities, problems and resolutions are all discoveries made at the edges of the enterprise which can all be captured and leveraged through the closed-loop publishing process. Organizations that miss this opportunity can pay a steep price in their understanding of the markets and constituencies they serve.

Closed-loop publishing holds a lot of promise, but organizations only pursue what they can see. The reality is that closed-loop publishing may be hiding in plain sight. They often say that creative solutions are merely making connections between things we already know — the application of known concepts to new contexts. In that way, Web 2.0 has taught us a thing or two about what publishing always wanted to become.

About the Author
Jake Sorofman is senior vice president of marketing and business development North America and EMEA for JustSystems, the largest ISV in Japan and a worldwide leader in XML and information management technologies. Contact Jake at jake.sorofman@justsystems.com.

Presenters: Chad Jackson - Research Director - Aberdeen, Michel Manago - Director Product Management - empolis GmbH
Description: The “one size fits all” approach to technical documentation is but a faint memory to most manufacturers. Now there are too many product configurations and demanding consumers who want only the content relevant to their configuration.

To create this type of precise and customized experience, manufacturers invest heavily in complex content management solutions, but often ignore the most crucial aspect of the content lifecycle – the delivery of information in a way that is useful and contextually significant.

This webinar features industry insight on the “dynamic publishing” trend from respected research firm Aberdeen. It will also explain how empolis GmbH. and Mark Logic have teamed up to help companies manage, retrieve, dynamically assemble and deliver targeted, personalized technical documentation.

You will learn how:

1. Best-in-Class companies are authoring, localizing and managing documentation for individual customers and markets
2. To improve your ability to deliver personalized and precise technical content
3. Enabling technologies like authoring applications, content management systems and XML work together in the documentation infrastructure
4. Adopting Best-in-Class practices can improve your bottom line and how to sell these changes to management
5. PLUS: Live application demo of personalized, dynamic delivery of complex technical information

About empolis and Mark Logic
empolis GmbH. and Mark Logic offer a complete, end-to-end solution that helps companies:

• repurpose existing content
• deliver just the right amount of information to each user at the time it is needed
• in a preferred format
• in a fraction of the time that is traditionally required by conventional ECM systems

By Sarah O’Keefe, Scriptorium Publishing Services, Inc.

Most people are risk-averse, and profound changes such as the move to structured authoring require new skills and workflows. To ensure a successful transition, XML implementers need to assess their team members, identify allies, and build their implementation strategy around the staff members who embrace change.

The term paradigm shift originally comes from Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn defined a paradigm shift as a new idea that required a change in basic assumptions. Because of this, paradigm shifts are often difficult to accept. This difficulty is reflected in everyday usage of the expression; it carries connotations of a change in thinking that is hard to assimilate or even causes cognitive dissonance.

The move toward XML-based authoring in technical publications is a classic paradigm shift. It requires content creators to change their writing process and learn new concepts.

The desktop publishing paradigm
The desktop publishing paradigm was introduced in the mid-1980s and is currently the dominant approach to content creation. Although exact details vary, desktop publishing environments usually have the following characteristics:

• WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)—Authors see the final printed version of their document as they are creating it. They can manipulate graphic position, page breaks, fonts, and other formatting attributes.


• Template compliance through author cooperation—Authors are provided with style guidelines and templates, but they have the option of ignoring those guidelines. To enforce consistency, verification by a production editor is required.


• Template overrides are easy—Authors often use template overrides (“tweaks”) to manage page breaks and other special items.
• Powerful, feature-rich tools—Desktop publishing tools are mature (some might say “elderly”) and provide a huge set of features.

The XML authoring paradigm
XML-based authoring is a dramatically different user experience than desktop publishing. The XML paradigm has the following characteristics:

• WYSIOO (What You See Is One Option)—Content is displayed with some formatting, but that formatting does not show the final published document. A separate process is required to create final output.
• Template compliance is mandatory—Templates are enforced by the authoring software, and authors are required to conform to the structure that is loaded into the authoring system. Consistency is enforced by the authoring software.


• Authoring and publishing are separated—The final appearance of a deliverable is controlled by stylesheets that are applied after authoring is done. Authors have no ability to fine-tune the layouts to improve the appearance of the final deliverable.


• Authoring tools—The XML authoring tools do much less than their desktop publishing equivalents. In part, this is because the publishing features are absent, but even the basic word processing features, such as change tracking and spell-checking, tend to be less fully featured.

NOTE: Structured FrameMaker provides both authoring and publishing environments for XML. As a result, some of the points here are not applicable to FrameMaker.

XML authoring changes the success criteria for authors. In desktop publishing, a successful author produces useful, well-written content that is nicely formatted. In the XML world, a successful author produces useful, well-written content that is valid (conforms to the required structure).

In the desktop publishing paradigm, successful technical writers need a combination of domain expertise (knowledge about the product they are documenting), writing ability, and proficiency in publishing tools. The first two do not change in an XML workflow, but the last item does. Instead of understanding how to make a document look pretty on a page, authors are now required to assign metadata to their content. After 20 years of desktop publishing with its WYSIWYG focus, the shift to an exclusive focus on domain expertise and writing ability is challenging.

The XML paradigm for managers
Given the generally unpleasant news on the authoring side, you might wonder why anyone would choose to move to XML. For managers, the XML paradigm provides the following improvements:

• Better content storage—Storing information in a text-based, application-neutral format allows managers to choose from a wide variety of authoring, publishing, and content management tools. Desktop publishing generally requires use of a specific, proprietary tool with a corresponding proprietary format, so groups are locked into a particular authoring and publishing environment. Using a proprietary file format greatly constrains the choice of a content management system.


• Automated formatting—In an XML workflow, authors are responsible only for creating content. The process of generating output from that content is shifted into an automated process. Setting up the publishing environment requires a significant effort, but once the process is created, it is
  automated. That is, the ongoing, repeated effort of document production is replaced by an automated process that requires significant upfront effort. This reduces overall document production costs.


• Better information—The programmatic enforcement of style and formatting rules results in more consistent information.


• Cost reduction—Although an XML-based process can result in improved document quality, the most common justification for XML implementation is cost reduction. In particular, companies that localize their content can show huge cost savings by moving to an XML-based workflow.

Managers face two significant challenges in implementing XML:

• Resource allocation—XML implementation requires significant resources, either from staff or consultants. Getting approval for those resources is often difficult.


• Writer resistance—Most of the benefits of XML go to manager; the problems affect the writers. Not surprisingly, this leads to skepticism about the use of XML.

Anticipating and mitigating change resistance
For true writing professionals, change resistance is usually minimal. They have already read about XML, and they understand why the organizational benefits are compelling. Some professional writers are very particular about their authoring tools and environment. They may be concerned about the difficulties inherent in XML content creation, but they are willing to make the leap.

Change resistance is not always unreasonable. If a new implementation does not meet writers’ legitimate requirements, you can expect significant resistance. Thus, it’s important to put together an implementation that addresses the unique requirements of your workflow.

The best way to minimize change resistance is to adopt a publishing system that is demonstrably superior to the old system from the authors’ point of view. If the old system requires certain tedious, repetitive actions, and these actions are automatic in the new system, the vast majority of writers will happily switch over to the new system.

As you begin planning an XML implementation, identify the content creators who love new tools and technologies. The technophile group will support change simply because it lets them play with new and interesting software. (They are terrible at evaluating costs and benefits of a new solution because they only see the benefits. That is actually a plus when you are building support for the transition.) Get the technophiles involved in the earliest stages of the XML implementation with prototypes, and use them as testers. Because of their positive attitude toward new technology, their reviews will be relatively forgiving.

Once you have approval from the technophile group, you can move on to the writers who are open to considering new technology but whose reactions are not always reflexively positive. These skeptics will find every potential flaw in your plans. If you can win them over, they will be powerful allies and great testers.

When the project is approved by the first two groups, you can start introducing it to other writers. Most groups have a resident curmudgeon--someone who rejects change on general principle. You will receive pointed criticisms when you involve this person in your project, so be sure that you have something solid to show at this point.

Finally, you’ll need to approach the content creators who are most resistant to changes in processes and technology. Broadly, you can divide this group into two categories--those who can (and will) learn, and those who will not. It’s important to provide education and training on the new concepts and the new business processes to help those who are experiencing difficulties with the transition to adapt. With support, the vast majority of writers can learn to work in an XML-based authoring environment.

Rarely, you will encounter somebody who either cannot or (more often) will not adapt to the new workflow. You can defer their transition into the new system as long as possible to give them time to learn. Another option to consider is a “maintenance team” assignment. Some organizations choose to leave some documentation in the old, unstructured workflow rather than going to the effort of converting the content to XML. If this is the case, resources may be needed to make updates to the legacy documentation, and this could be a good fit for the person who absolutely does not grasp the new paradigm.

A corollary to the maintenance team strategy is that you can make working in the new authoring environment a privilege rather than a requirement. When joining the XML implementation team is presented as an opportunity available only to a select few team members, it becomes more appealing.

Because of the change in tools, you may be in a position to reduce or eliminate tasks that are tedious in the current authoring and publishing environment. This provides a direct benefit to the authors and will make the transition more palatable.

Conclusion
Paradigm shifts require a change in thinking, and most people don’t much enjoy change. As a result, change resistance is a nearly inevitable occurrence during an XML implementation. Taken to an extreme, it can cause your implementation to fail.

You can determine whether change resistance is a significant risk to your project by consider at your authors’ attitudes. If they master new software easily, follow templates consistently, and are always looking for ways to improve the content creation process, your risks are low. If, however, the authors are hostile to new technology, refuse to following existing style guides, and have arcane superstitions about how to make software work, you can expect grievous difficulty as you attempt to implement a massive paradigm shift.

About Sarah O’Keefe

Sarah O’Keefe is founder and president of Scriptorium Publishing Services, Inc. The company develops and deploys structured authoring environments, and also provides classroom and web-based training for FrameMaker, XML, XSL, and other publishing topics. Sarah’s publishing credits include Publishing Fundamentals: Unstructured FrameMaker 8, FrameMaker 7: The Complete Reference, The WebWorks Publisher Cookbook, Technical Writing 101, FrameMaker for Dummies, and numerous white papers. 

Want to get involved in the formation of one of the most important XML standards impacting content professionals? You can. And, you should. The folks at OASIS—the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards—have made it easy for just about anyone to participate.

• Opportunity 1 - The DITA Maturity Model Community and Wiki—Share constructive criticism, make suggestions for improvement, and provide use case scenarios that can help enhance the model. Post comments between 1 June - 31 August 2008 to be automatically entered to win an 8GB Apple iPod Touch and two tickets to DocTrain East.
• Opportunity 2 - Join The DITA Adoption Technical Committee—Yes, it’s confusing—and the name is kinda stupid—but the DITA Adoption Technical Committee has nothing to do with the technicalities of DITA. It has everything to do with moving the standard into the mainstream, where widespread adoption can have maximum impact. Smart marketing folks and new media mavens are definitely needed, as well as sponsors to provide financial support for these efforts.
• Opportunity 3 - One Laptop Per Child, DITA, Wikipedia, Wiki Slice Project—The mission of this project is to deliver a proof of concept that demonstrates how to create custom curriculum materials from Wikipedia for the One Laptop Per Child program. Objectives include pulling content from Wikipedia into the DITA format, delivering Wikipedia resources in an interchange-friendly and semantically-rich set of DITA-specialized topics that can be used as classroom materials, integrating DITA topics using a DITA map derived from a wiki slice. Get involved. Add your name to the team roster.

So, what are you waiting for? Get involved today!

Sure, social networks are powerful, paradigm-shifting technologies that are changing the way software and services are being developed. They’re great tools for networking, finding jobs, locating information, and congregating together online (and in person) with others who share the same interests as we do. We’ve started our own global network of content professionals and it’s proved to be extremely popular, producing all kinds of positive interactions and experiences for our members. But, there’s also the dark side of social networks—people that are irritating in person, can be even more irritating online. Fortunately, most of the irritation occurs on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and any one of hundreds (maybe thousands) of online dating and match-making sites.

This parody video does a great job of marrying the ridiculous marketing tactics used by the folks at eHarmony.com with the irritating features many Facebook users often complain about. Take a peek. Go ahead. You deserve a chuckle.

By Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

Prediction: Hosted software solutions (software provided as a service on the web—aka Software-as-a-Service) will introduce the need for new vacation and benefit packages, something many human resource managers have yet to realize.

If you work in the information technology industry, for instance, especially in the software industry, chances are you are accustomed to having the same days off from work as everyone else: bank, religious, and national holidays—and, if you are creative about your planning—vacation days that you take before and after these holidays to create an extended break, usually coinciding with times others in your life are also away from work and school. But, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model will likely change all that. And, the changes don’t bode well for family vacations or extended holidays with your sweetheart.

According to Wikipedia, SaaS “is a model of software deployment where an application is hosted as a service provided to customers across the Internet. By eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer’s own computer, SaaS alleviates the customer’s burden of software maintenance, ongoing operation, and support.”

While shifting support and maintenance to a responsible, dedicated third party is good news for customers who need access to their tools via the web, it’s perhaps not-so-good for those who work at companies who provide their products using the SaaS model.

Here’s the problem. In order to avoid disrupting the fewest number of customers possible, companies who offer their software online, have to schedule ongoing maintenance and upgrades during the lowest traffic times. For some firms, this means updating on the weekends, usually at the same time each week, month, quarter, etc.

Email delivery service and contact management provider Constant Contact does this type of work regularly on Saturday mornings, when they think their actions will have the least impact on their customer base. Match-making site, Chemistry.com, appears to perform maintenance when it so chooses, and is somewhat unpredictable, as is the case with Ning, the software used to power The Content Wrangler Community.

While not having access to your online dating service or a social network may be irritating and inconvenient, it’s nothing compared to the financial losses businesses can face should they take their software offline during normal business hours. So, when larger organizations—like the enterprise application division of a powerhouse financial institution—need to role out a major upgrade (a process that can take days, not hours), they are increasingly performing these tasks during holiday breaks—the same ones listed in your employee benefit package.

Got plans for 4th of July weekend? Not if you work for a certain mortgage lender who will be upgrading their systems July 3-6. In that case, you’re not going anywhere. Instead, you’ll be working while your family, friends, and customers are enjoying the holiday festivities. You may be able to see the fireworks from your cubicle, but its doubtful you’ll be enjoying any beer and barbeque.

The same holds true for the IT department at a multi-national online retailer. This Labor Day, you’ll know the meaning of work, as many of you will be working over the holiday weekend—and, if anything goes wrong during you’re implementation, you’ll be working plenty of overtime (this may be one reason to rethink working on salary, instead of billable hours).

While the power of my crystal ball is limited, this trend shows no sign of stopping. It’s an issue human resource professionals and IT managers will have to address. Benefit packages will need to be changed. Employees will have to determine whether working in roles that require this type of commitment is congruent with their life situation and personal desires. Organizations who hire IT pros may need to consider the type of benefits they will provide those who give up the traditional offerings and give their holiday time to the firm.

Of course, some companies will no doubt attempt to outsource upgrades and maintenance to overseas development shops, when possible. But, it’s not las easy to make this switch in highly-regulated industries like pharmaceutical, aerospace, banking, and defense.

What’s your take on this topic? Do you think we’ll see different types of benefit packages or will we simply ship these tasks overseas to folks on different holiday schedules? What do you think employees who give up traditional holiday time should receive in compensation? And, has this already happened in your organization?

By Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) is seeking participants to help move the adoption of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) forward, pushing the value proposition of DITA outside of the technical documentation arena. It’s called the DITA Adoption Technical Committee—and ironically, there’s nothing technical about it.

The Purpose of the DITA Adoption Technical Committee

The OASIS DITA Adoption Technical Committee members will collaborate to provide expertise and resources to educate the marketplace on the value of the DITA OASIS standard. By raising awareness of the benefits offered by DITA, the Technical Committee increases the demand for, and availability of, DITA conforming products and services, resulting in a greater choice of tools and platforms and expanding the DITA community of users, suppliers, and consultants. Since DITA adoption is stronger in the US than in the rest of the world, especially the European Union, the Technical Committee will actively solicit participation from non-US members and help to facilitate providing information promoting DITA adoption globally.

I fully support the need for a committee designed to educate the marketplace on the value of DITA. It is exactly what’s needed in order to move the standard forward. But, in order to make the committee a success, we need excellent communicators with the gumption, know-how, and network to get the word out about the many ways DITA impacts the world and those who live in it. And, we need them to be paid for their efforts.

As a former journalist, I can speak to this issue with respect to publicity. Reporters don’t respond overwhelmingly to press releases, they don’t need (nor want) to understand the details involved in creating DITA maps, nor the convoluted way in which standards are created. What they want are sexy stories of interest to their readers/viewers. We need people who will use new media platforms to expose people to the many success stories that are popping up like weeds after a big storm. There are many cool and sexy uses of DITA that are in use right now. But, it’s unlikely most of our readers know much about them, because there’s no one whose job it is to promote them full time. And, if you don’t know about them, then readers of more general interest business publications—and the folks who run the major corporations around the globe—don’t either.

What’s Needed?

Volunteer PR folks don’t have enough at stake to work as hard as required to get the attention of the media. Sure, they can get DITA mentioned in the obvious places, which is not impressive. Blogs, magazines, and newsletters in the content and technical communication space are hungry for DITA news, but they don’t have a major impact on adoption outside of their own subscriber-base.

What’s needed is a concerted effort to educate major business magazines, airline publications, technology television shows, technology reporters for major newspapers, bloggers and podcasters influential in the technology and general business spaces to report on real-world solutions that just happen to be made possible because of DITA. We also need analysts and venture capitalists to understand the implications of adoption and the value proposition DITA may provide. Money flows from these sources, either directly or indirectly, and to ignore them is a bad strategy.

DITA cannot be the focus of DITA adoption and publicity efforts. Neither can OASIS. The approach we’ve been using is so 1996. It’s old-school and again, it’s not working or there would be no need for such a committee.

The focus has to be on the human impact. How does DITA help make the world a better place? How does it make it possible for humans to interact with one another? How will it help everyday humans in their everyday lives? How can it help governments better serve their citizens? And, more specifically, can it help save lives in a disaster? Yes. How about saving taxpayers money? Yes. Can it help middle school teachers provide better learning materials to their students? Yes. Can it help law enforcement better protect those they serve? Yes. Can it help prevent puppies and kittens from being euthanized? I’m not sure, but maybe.

All of the human interest topics that sell papers and tv shows need to be the focus. It’s no mystery that articles and TV shows about kids, puppies, love, sex, politics, religion, and other human stories are most interesting to the population at large. Therefore, it only makes sense that we find ways to tell the DITA story without making it (nor OASIS) the focus. There are many ways to do this, but again, it won’t likely happen with volunteer labor.

Filter Out the Noise and Non-sense

Promoting the adoption of DITA is not the same thing as promoting OASIS, and yet, I haven’t seen many news releases that focus in on the benefits of DITA without littering the news with way too much self-serving marketing hype designed to accomplish a totally different goal: keeping OASIS in the news (and therefore, attracting more sponsors). This same problem is also a byproduct of most—but not all - vendor marketing programs aimed at getting your interest in DITA to lead to you purchasing their products. Just when they get you interested, they have to declare they are the “world’s leading vendor” (which anyone with a dictionary knows is not possible for all vendors to be—one leads, all others follow) or they make up non-sense vocabulary phrases like “fully DITA-compliant” (there’s no way to validate this claim) or “smart elements” (as opposed to “dumb elements") that don’t mean anything. They just can’t help themselves.

In my book, this is one of the biggest hurdles to DITA adoption in the mainstream. Let’s strip away all the noise that prevents normal humans from understanding what we technology addicts find so wonderful about DITA, XML, content reuse, content management, dynamic content, personalization, and so on. Let’s find ways of getting ourselves noticed by the greater public by speaking to them in a language they understand. You would think in a community dominated by communication pros, this would be obvious. The first rule of good communication is to know your audience. The second is to understand the intent of your communication. And yet, most messaging about DITA ignores these rules. It’s almost as if the folks creating these materials don’t have any clue who we are nor how to get our attention. And, if they can’t figure that out, it’s no wonder their message is being filtered out by the general business press and by business leaders.

It’s so obvious to me. Delivering the right information, to the right people, at the right time, in the right language and format is the promise of DITA. Shouldn’t we try using these same principles while trying to attract attention to DITA and promote its adoption. When I am given the opportunity to make this case, most folks respond with a resounding, “Duh! Why didn’t we think of that?”

The Bottom Line

In order to get the attention of the mainstream media we need those with some “skin in the game” (a stake in the outcome) to provide the financial resources necessary to fund a proper outreach program designed to sell the interesting aspects of DITA in ways journalists and business leaders care about. We’ve relied on the volunteer labor pool long enough and it’s not working. Well-meaning consultants who help to form and improve the standard cannot be expected to have the time, energy, resources—nor skills—needed to promote the standard and be billable consultants and thought leaders at the same time. Until we have human cloning, this approach isn’t scalable.

The widespread adoption of DITA will require folks with a demonstrated track record of getting attention to help move these ideas into the mainstream. I have many ideas about how this might work, but the main stumbling block, as I see it, is our continued reliance on an outdated adoption model. If we expect the entire world to change and move toward XML, the very least we can do is to change right along with it.

I’m interested in what you think about this topic? Am I way off base, or right on target? What are your thoughts?

By Kristina Podnar, Senior Consultant, Welchman Consulting

Several years ago, I had a front row seat and watched in horror as a federal agency spent $2.7 million on a web site redesign and web content management system (WCMS) implementation, only to scrap every image on the site and every WCMS template created, and start from anew. All before the site’s first anniversary.

At the beginning of the project, there were such high hopes for what was intended to be a cutting edge e-gov site. It ended an absolute failure, classified as a “pilot”, and spun into a lessons learned for the organization.  You see, the Chief Information Officer placed an experienced Project Management Professional (PMP) in charge, and after the project plan was created and systems integrator selected, declared it a certain win for the department. Except that it didn’t quite work out that way.

So what made this web project, along with hundreds of others, fail?  And is your web project destined to end the same way?

Today there are over 180,000 certified PMPs in 175 countries. The credential is certainly the most sought after in the project management arena, and many organizations either are requiring, preferring, or encouraging staff with PMP letters behind their names to run projects. Specifically, web site projects. This started me thinking… why are so many organizations rushing to ensure their staff is PMP certified, with the premise that automatic success will be achieved on web projects and beyond?

In a quest to understand this phenomena, I performed a quick search on monster.com for “web + project manager” on a very popular job board site, and it yielded over six thousand results. A refinement of the search by adding “PMP” to the search parameters resulted in a much smaller number of results, but with very curious job position tiles, and even more intriguing descriptions. This exercise prompted me to think back to the last time I saw a government statement of work (SOW) that did not request or at least suggest a PMP on the project would be useful. After a short struggle, I realized I couldn’t.

So, is the sheer possession of a PMP intended to be the Holy Grail of successful web projects, known to fail at a startling rate, or simply a way to divorce oneself from whatever outcome may result from the web project? After all, we got the best person to ensure success - a certified PMP. Right?

The problem with our web projects is just that - we have conditioned ourselves to think of the web as a Gannt chart, with plan, design, execute and launch, or re-launch, of the website. That is where most project plans end, perhaps a few of them adding on a period of maintenance and support. Contract Closeout is the Project Management Institute (PMI, issuer of the PMP) way of addressing this phase, and reflects fairly accurately the governing perception of the web. The reality rests between this mass rush to hire the ideal PMPs, and the need to treat our web initiative as an ongoing program, and look for individuals who can in fact deliver on that perpetual evolution mentality. So should organizations turn their backs on PMPs and the PMI?

The answer to this challenge lies not in turning away from the PMI, but in:

1. Recognizing the web as a key organizational program, or what we at Welchman Consulting call Web Operations Management
2. Embracing the need for a web program management mentality versus that of a project manager
3. Moving beyond the simplified experience and knowledge of the PMP and into the realm where individuals have knowledge and are responsible for executing the web strategy through advanced skills

Unlike a marketing brochure that tells the world about the organization’s core competencies, or the video cast that was recorded by the director for the annual conference last year, the web is a collection of items that continues to change and evolve (sometimes on a daily basis) to meet the exact needs of a site visitor at a point in time. As such, this highly dynamic delivery mode for information is less of a project and more of a program, where bits and pieces can be treated as a project. Changing the color of the header or the managing executive’s photo is a project, with a defined start and end, but the collective web components are part of the bigger whole that require not only changes, but a continual examination of alignment with the organization’s mission, goals, and objectives.

The sooner we can retrain ourselves to think about our web presence in this comprehensive and perpetually evolving fashion, the sooner we will realize that a project plan is useful for day-to-day management, but irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. It doesn’t become the collateral we care about, nor is it the reason we hire a PMP. The project plan, no matter how excellent and beautiful, with 159 lines or more of detailed activities, will not ensure complete success. Only the recognition that a collective balancing act between the web managers and the organization’s leadership and staff members can ensure that the right web medium is delivered for the user’s need and benefit.

The real approach is not for organizations to stop hiring PMPs, but to start treating the web as a fundamental part of our strategic organizational plan and assigning to it the resources with experience and talent that it deserves. To succeed in operating the web as a true organizational asset, the project manager must hone the toolkit to include governance, with a focus on cross-cultural awareness, leadership, communication, influence, negotiation, and conflict resolution, as well as user community measurement, and tactical web skills such as information management and web technologies deployment.

Unfortunately, the PMI only requires a PMP have general experience in these areas, but there is no hard and fast prescription on how to approach the competencies nor a definition of what they truly are. Furthermore, we predispose ourselves to gaining experience on failed web implementations, ignoring the need to formalize and specialize project managers who are involved with the web. So, what should you do if your organization is in need of a web redesign and what type of individual should you hire to ensure you maximize your chances for success?

Your odds for success will highly increase if you can locate and staff an individual that has:

• At least 3-4 years of experience implementing governance initiative(s), preferably within the web arena, but considering how new this area is, you may have to settle for IT governance experience. The intended lessons learned from this experience are the negotiating sticky points and competing priorities within the organizational environment, with a value proposition for both executives and the organization at large.
• Battle scars of not only web implementations, but web operations and subsequent releases that have built upon each other in a greater capacity that goes beyond a web redesign.
• A strong functional understanding and commitment to business user needs, and the ability to align them with the technology. This presupposes the actual involvement in several successful CMS or portal deployments, as well as large web sites that have evolved and morphed through continual user feedback and realignment to organizational strategy.
• Either a PMP or non-PMP, who believes that the PMI has started a great initiative, and PMP certification is a potential platform for getting us to successful web operation management (but isn’t there yet)

If you are willing to move beyond the Gantt chart, you will learn that glory comes from taking risks and viewing the web through the lens of a new management world, your odds for success will highly increase.

About the Author
Kristina Podnar is a Senior Consultant for Welchman Consulting with over ten years experience helping organizations achieve their content management and portal solution goals. Her experience spans the government, private, and non-profit sectors, as a government employee, management consultant, and entrepreneur.

Prior to entering the consulting world, Kristina spent time in the intelligence community as an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency and a team member of BDM International, specializing in classified projects. Since then, Kristina has expanded her skills to serve government clients including the F.B.I., U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Small Business Administration, and the U.S. General Services Administration, private sector clients BEA, WorldCom, and Fannie Mae, as well as non-profit organizations St. Jude’s Hospital, CARE International, and PBS.

Kristina holds a BA in International Studies and an MBA in International Business, Pacific Rim from Dominican University of California. She is a certified Project Management Professional and an active volunteer member of the Project Management Institute.

As a convenience to our readers—and to those who attended the Society for Technical Communication Summit in Philadelphia this week—I’ve published the slide decks for three of my presentations here. If you have questions about any of the presentations, send me an email. I’m always happy to help others learn what I know.

Augmenting your Technical Documentation with User-Generated Content
Your user community can be an invaluable source of information about your product or service. Using Web 2.0 technologies, you can augment your existing technical documentation with user-generated content. The presentation, delivered June 2, 2008 at the Society for Technical Communication Summit in Philadelphia, PA explores the possibilities, as well as the perils, of leveraging this often-overlooked resource.




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Stop Wasting Time: Ten Things You Can Do to Make Yourself More Efficient

Most folks complain they don’t have enough time to move their careers forward. Most of the time, this is simply not true. There’s plenty of time in each day, but we’re used to wasting it on time-sucking tasks that provide little or no business value. The presentation, delivered June 3, 2008 at the Society for Technical Communication Summit in Philadelphia, PA highlights ten of the biggest time-consuming tasks we perform each day and how to accomplish them more efficiently.




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From Nightclub dj to Content Management Consultant—Developing a Business Career The Content Wrangler Way

A look at how Scott Abel moved his career from a dead-end nightclub job to a career as one of the foremost experts in content management and technical communication. The presentation, delivered June 3, 2008 at the Society for Technical Communication Summit in Philadelphia, PA explores Scott’s unique career path and examines the history of the remix and how it relates to delivering personalized technical content.




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Are you looking to drum up some new business? Want to get more dollars from existing clients? Are you a starving writer?

White paper expert Michael A. Stelzner, author of Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged, provides the following reasons white papers could dramatically increase your writing revenue:

1. Demand exceeds supply: There are not enough writers who know how to write white papers. Businesses are aggressively looking to write more white papers. Master the art and count your dollars.

2. You can charge more for a white paper: White papers help businesses generate leads and close sales-thus they are directly tied to revenue. For many businesses, only one or two sales from a white paper return the investment.

3. Businesses pay top dollar for white papers: Word for word, nothing beats a white paper. A good white paper writer charges between $3,000 and $10,000 for a 10-page white paper. This is the most lucrative writing business out there.

4. White papers can be multi-purposed: A well-written white paper can be converted into a contributed article or be used as content on a website. This adds more value to a white paper project.

5. Many businesses need multiple white papers: If you prove yourself with an excellent white paper, there is a high likelihood your client will want other white papers written. This can generate a consistent pipeline of work.

Stelzner, author of nearly 100 white papers for names such as Microsoft, FedEx and Motorola, says that every freelancer, journalist and budding writer needs to add white papers to their list of writing capabilities. Learn to master the art of writing white papers with Michael’s new book Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged. The book is available in hardcover for $34.95 from WhitePaperSource Publishing.

More than just discussing why reuse is valuable, in this article from DCL News Pamela Kostur tells you how to do it. Pamela advises on how to convert your unstructured (or loosely-structured) legacy documentation into something more suitable for reuse. Why not just re-write everything from scratch? For starters, it’s cheaper to re-organize previously-written materials than to start all over, and it’s safer to use documents that have already been used in the field and already been tested in the line-of-fire.

However, restructuring is more than just “fitting” content into a structure. It often requires some rewriting. Restructuring should be done with a view to moving forward (otherwise, why bother), so it’s best to think of structure that you want, rather than what you have. But, sometimes you have to include some of each. In this article Pamela shows you how to plan an information architecture and move into developing structure and guidelines for a new reuse environment.

By Pamela Kostur, Parallax Communications

When it comes to converting legacy documentation, where possible, I’d advise the following:

• Design what you want and roll that new structure out to authors to be used on a “go forward” basis
• Try to convert legacy documents as much as possible into that new structure, keeping in mind that you can’t force content to fit a structure. Rearrange where possible; rewrite in others
• When designing new structures, start by analyzing the legacy documents. Analyze to see where structure needs the most improvement (e.g., to enhance usability, to assist authors in reusing content); restructure giving the most attention to those areas
• Design new structures with existing structures in mind and with a view to how existing content will best convert to the new structures. For example, figure out where large chunks of content can be put into new structures relatively unchanged.

Writing reusable content-and reusing content others have created-is efficient for you, for the company you work for, and for your users. However, writing for reuse is different than “starting from scratch” or from writing in the narrative form that many of us have learned and followed for several years. This article discusses the importance of writing for reuse and provides some guidelines for getting started. It covers these topics:

• Why reuse content?
  
  • Issues with reusing content
• Planning for reuse
• Writing in modules
• Following a structure
  
  • Accommodating different uses and users
  
  

Why reuse content?
Writing modular content that can easily be reused is important not only when working in a content management environment, but also in the world of “everyday” technical communication. Technical communicators are being called upon more and more to create reusable content and to reuse content that others produce. There are several good reasons to adopt writing for reuse, among them:

• Writing for reuse is efficient—It’s costly for several people to create the same product description (or procedure or error message) over and over again. Instead, one person can create it for all uses, based on a standard that accommodates all uses. However, for reuse to be efficient, you need to plan for it and create standards.
  
• Writing for reuse helps to ensure consistency—When the same product description is used for the manual, the online help, and the brochure, you can rest assured it is consistent.
• Writing for reuse helps to make content more usable. When writing for reuse, it’s critical that you follow standards, which are based on usability. Standards ensure that similar types of content are structured in similar ways. Everyone writing a product description follows the standard for the product description, making it both reusable and usable.
• Writing for reuse helps users to navigate through content—Reusable content is written in modules with clearly defined labels identifying the content’s purpose. Modules can be arranged to accommodate different uses and users; the modularity can also help users to easily identify and select the information they need.
  
• Writing for reuse provides continuity—When users follow a link “for more information,” they expect to see something similar to where they came from. Reusing content can provide this continuity.

Issues with writing for reuse
Although writing reusable content makes sense, it’s not as easy as it sounds, as illustrated in a July 2006 article in The Content Wrangler, in which Scott Abel describes 10 DITA Lessons Learned from Tech Writers in the Trenches, Lesson #5 is “some writers CANNOT write reusable content” and interviewees reported:

• Technically, DITA is a very sound approach, but you need to consider the psychological impact on writers. Writing in books, chapters and sections is a very different approach than creating DITA topics and topic maps.
• I found that authors who did not understand the reasons behind structured authoring often directly or indirectly resisted the move.
• Authoring for reuse is different. Each topic must be authored as a standalone item. If you think this is no major feat for some technical writers to accomplish, a move to DITA will definitely show you who is-and who isn’t-capable of thinking in the way that DITA requires.
• The main difficulty writers had was to make the switch to writing topic-based material. We were used to writing documents for a particular product or particular audience where we now write topics which may fit in multiple publications for different products and different audiences.

The theory of reuse is great regardless of how you are authoring your content (DITA, or another method), but the key problem lies in creating content that is genuinely reusable and in helping writers to make the switch. It is not impossible, but there are a number of challenges, including:

• You need to plan ahead; you need a reuse strategy based on a thorough analysis of your content. You need to ensure that you don’t compromise content simply to make it reusable.
• You need to create and follow guidelines to ensure that the content can indeed be used in different places/different media. Guidelines will help to ensure content is consistent, regardless of who writes it.
• You need to make sure that content is identified properly (metadata) so that others know what it is and can find it. If they don’t know what it is or can’t find it, they can’t reuse it.
• You may need to create content outside of its context, yet understand that the content will be used within a certain context.

Planning for reuse
Reuse doesn’t just happen-you need to plan for it. Planning where and how to reuse content will help you to overcome some of the challenges. Your first task is to figure out where content will be used. User guide? Collateral? Online help? Handheld device? Web?

Determining where content will be reused and thinking about how it will be structured for reuse is the beginning of your information architecture. The information architecture describes which modules (elements) your information products contain, in what order, and the structure of the individual modules.

Example: You work in the documentation department for a wireless communications company. Your group produces documentation for customers (user guides, brochures, content for the web), for the call centre where customers call for assistance, and for third-party vendors who sell your products. There is a great deal of overlap among your documents, so you decide to reuse content. This will allow you to be more efficient and to ensure that content is consistent wherever it appears.

At a very basic level, the information architecture might look something like this, with M indicating mandatory, O indicating optional, and a blank cell indicating a component is not required in that information product:

Knowing that you will reuse certain components such as product descriptions, you can plan how to structure and write them to support reuse.

Writing modular content
Modular writing allows you to more easily reuse content, whether you are working in a content management environment or not. Modular writing makes sense for several reasons:

• Documents can be constructed from modules—For example, a summary or procedure module can be used in a number of different places, as specified in your information architecture. The entire document can also be a module that is part of a larger set.
• The modular design makes it easier for users to navigate through content—Well-designed modules have clearly-defined purposes and substantive labels, helping users to find their way to the right content.
• Modular units of content can be isolated and updated quickly and easily—Modules can be accessed apart from the document as a whole.
• Modularity allows you to rearrange units as required—Reusable content helps you accommodate different users’ needs or different publications’ needs.

Modular writing requires defining what your modules are, describing how they are structured and how to write them. Modules must be consistent to support content reuse so that reuse is transparent to your users.

Want to learn more about reuse?Read part two of this article.

About the Author
Pamela Kostur is a partner in Parallax Communications, a full-service communications consulting company in Toronto, Canada. With a focus on content and writing, Parallax specializes in content management strategies, structured writing, corporate and marketing communications, technical communication, and content development.

Kostur has authored several articles and taught workshops on topics such as miscommunication, usability, content management, information architecture, content modeling, writing for reuse, and structured writing. She is also a co-author of the best-selling Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy (New Riders, 2002).

Learn more about Writing for Reuse at Pamela’s upcoming workshops at DocTrain Life Sciences in Indianapolis, IN, June 23-26, 2008. Contact Pamela via email or phone—+1 416.850.0636.

By Jake Sorofman, JustSystems

From Cost Center to Value Generator

There was a time when technical writing was seen as a cost center—a necessary function, but hardly a key lever for competitive advantage. This is quickly changing as globalization and hyper-competition put customers in control and organizations scramble for new and different ways to strengthen relationships.

Today’s customers are the beneficiaries of virtually unlimited choice, with growing expectations for cost, quality and service. In an age of globalization and hyper-competition, the only remaining sustainable advantage comes from the customer relationship itself—specifically, the two-way conversation occurring with customers around the world and around the clock.

This conversation is how relationships are formed and how they’re strengthened over time. Each and every day, customers and other stakeholders count on product documentation, marketing materials, policies and procedures, aftermarket service and maintenance manuals, and other content to do their jobs and solve their problems. This information must be accurate, consistent and accessible. When it’s not, the promise that binds the customer relationship is broken, putting loyalty at risk.

Structured Authoring as Competitive Advantage

Many organizations already know that customer relationships are their most valuable asset. What they may not know is that relationships aren’t built on product or cost advantages—they’re built on this two-way conversation. Relationships are strengthened and weakened slowly over time through a series of subtle and often mundane interactions. Taken in isolation, these interactions are seemingly low-value. But in aggregate, they represent the customer relationship itself.

Smart companies recognize the value and importance of the technical communications process—not as a cost center, but as a value generator and as the gateway to the customer relationship. Increasingly, tech writers are central to this two-way exchange with customers, moving this function from the basement to the corner office.
This realization is casting a new light on the role authoring and publishing plays in competitive advantage.

The challenge, of course, is learning to become an organization that values authoring and publishing, not as a cost-center, but as a value generator with game-changing potential. This requires a hard look at the process itself and a commitment to what it takes to transform authoring and publishing from an afterthought to a key lever for competitive advantage.

Challenge #1: Authoring is Collaborative

Technical writers and their less specialized counterparts have always been two worlds divided, but forever interdependent. Many technical writers are experts in the science of writing, but not necessarily the subject matter itself.  This creates an inherent interdependency between tech writers and the broader community of business people, subject matter experts, and other contributors. As a result, content authoring is a fundamentally collaborative process, involving stakeholders with varying skills, perspectives, tool preferences and tolerances for complexity. Organizations must make collaboration fundamental to their authoring processes, seamlessly bridging the disparate needs of all contributors to the process.

Challenge #2: Publishing is a One-Way Street

Conversations require two-way interaction, a give and take that leads to insight and alignment between exchanging parties. The reality is that the rise of social media technologies such as blogs and wikis have given customers a voice and created an appetite—indeed, an expectation—for a two-way exchange.

The problem is that today’s publishing process is not a conversation—it’s a one-way street. As a result, important customer insight—out on the edges where information is consumed and applied—is lost. How, then, does experience make its way back into the publishing process? Organizations must incorporate a feedback loop into their publishing process to bring the voice and sentiment of customers and other stakeholders back into the authoring process.

Challenge #3: Everyone is an Author

The reality is that occasional and “accidental” authors represent more than 95% of the organization. How do you capture this knowledge as structured information without imposing new tools and process on end-users or dramatically modifying the tools they already use? The key is to conduct a top-down assessment of existing content-generating processes and transparently weave structured authoring into applications where the most critical content is being produced. Make it seamless, transparent and in-line with an existing process and end-users will get on board without resistance.

From the Basement to the Corner Office

As product innovations and cost advantages slip away to rising global competition, the strength of the customer relationship takes on unequaled importance. With the speed, accuracy and quality of communication so fundamental to the conversation that forms this relationship, structured authoring and publishing has risen considerably on the business-side agenda—moving out of the basement and into the corner office, and securing its place as one of the essential levers for competitive advantage. It’s time for organizations to think outside of the box—structured authoring is central to competitive advantage.

About the author
Jake Sorofman is senior vice president of marketing and business development for JustSystems, the largest ISV in Japan and a worldwide leader in XML and information management technologies. Contact Jake at jake.sorofman@justsystems.com.

Enterprises looking to fast track their content strategy and minimize the risks of a “big-bang” initiative are choosing DITA--one of the most popular information models to suit today’s content–rich, multi-channel environment. But how do you know where to begin? How do you move the enterprise content strategy from the back room to the board room and develop a framework for success?

Amber Swope (JustSystems) and Michael Priestley (IBM) started the ball rolling with the release of the DITA Maturity Model, a document that divides DITA adoption into six levels, each with its own required investment and associated return on investment. The Maturity Model can help you assess your own capabilities (DITA readiness) and business goals and assist you in choosing the appropriate initial adoption level for your needs and schedule.

Now it’s your turn. We’ve modularized the DITA Maturity Model and created an online community dedicated to helping improve the model. The goal of the DITA MM Community (DITA MMC) is to elevate the discussion of DITA adoption and provide practitioners, managers and executives with a working forum to share knowledge and practical guidance, develop DITA MM Business Cases, test out DITA MM implementation scenarios and get peer-to-peer advice.

This community is designed to bring the DITA Maturity Model to life, applying the “Wisdom of the Crowds” to the evolution and refinement of this approach to DITA adoption. The premise is that none of us is as good as all of us. The DITA MMC is an evolving resource that will grow and change over time with your active participation and contributions.

Please take some time to visit the site and share your thoughts about the DMM, suggestions for improvement, and use case scenarios.

Gian Fulgoni, Executive Chairman and Co-founder of comScore, Inc., likes to quote Henry Ford when he was asked whether he listened to customers when he created the automobile. Ford’s reply was that had he listened to customers, he would have built a fast horse; the automobile was the result of innovation.

Fulgoni is very much, like Ford, an innovator. When he and his partner, Magid Abraham, launched comScore as an organization that would gather digital marketing intelligence from internet statistics, he was very clear about not listening to popular wisdom about what was to be measured. The traditional measurement of counting number of clicks or number of visitors to a page was immediately apparent to Fulgoni as a false measure of success. Recalling the words of H.L. Mencken, Fulgoni says, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple - and wrong.”

For digital marketing intelligence to be effective to the sectors with a need - ecommerce, marketing, and consumer platforms - the data needs to go far beyond a numbers game. It must have some effectiveness and be used with some efficiency - for example, what the information do you need to design an effective online marketing plan? When companies turn to ready sources of information such as server logs, Fulgoni is quick to dispel the notion that those statistics bring meaningful value .

It’s easy to be lulled into thinking that computers “automagically” tally all your stats, and report back with accurate counts. But the situation is actually the opposite; it’s easy to let the computer count everything and not apply human thinking. Or, in Einstein’s words, everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted. Fulgoni cites the example of using server logs to determine audience size; because of cookie cleaning, the audience overestimation is generally set at a factor of 2.5 - in other words, your audience is probably 40% of what you estimate it to be.

When calculating audience reaction to ad campaigns, Fulgoni also reminds us that the World Wide Web is called that for a reason. US sites get almost half of their traffic from around the world - international traffic unlikely to count toward potential sales. These numbers generally don’t get separated out from server logs. Nor is bot activity often separated out from the server log numbers.

Harder to separate is the qualitative data. For example, recent research has shown that people who click on ads are younger and less affluent, so other than for direct response ads, using number of ad clicks is not a good measure of effectiveness for an online ad campaign. Nor is cookie tracking behavior, really, as you never know if the person using the computer today is the same person who used the computer yesterday or last week.

The unreliability of such information, and the possibility of finding a way to provide it, was was motivated Fulgoni to start comScore. They convinced two million people - a million people in North America, and a million people elsewhere around the world - to let them track their internet use, to help them understand internet behavior. In the words of Albert Einstein, Fulgoni has been “passionately curious” and has been bringing the informative results of his findings to benefit of the industry ever since.

Don’t miss Fulgoni’s featured presentation, Maximizing the ROI from Online Marketing at Web Content 2008 Chicago (June 17-18, 2008). Fulgoni will examine how consumers are using the Internet and identify the ways in which advertisers can best market to them. This will also reveal the key metrics that marketers need to use as they plan and analyze their online marketing efforts so as to maximize their ROI.

The database used for this discussion will be comScore’s panel of 2 million people who have given comScore explicit permission to track the complete details of their online activities.

There’s not many humans on the planet that know more about wikis that Stewart Mader. Wherever folks are talking about wiki technology, you’ll find Mader, explaining how wikis work, how to get folks to use them, how to govern them, and how to use them to solve various real-world challenges. Mader was recently interviewed by Tom Johnson for his popular TechWriterVoices podcast. And, his book, Wikipatterns: A Practical Guide to Improving Productivity and Collaboration in Your Organization is a must read for anyone serious about using wikis in the workplace.

Mader recently spoke at Documentation and Training West 2008 in Vancouver, BC. His presentations were well-attended and highly rated. Scott Nesbitt provides a brief review of his presentations on the DMN Communications blog. His slide decks are included below for your review.

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Component Content Management (CCM) technology allows enterprises to manage text content as componentized chunks of information rather than whole documents or web pages. It has become increasingly important to modern enterprises, especially given the rapid emergence of the DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) standard. However, CCM technology remains largely the domain of a wide collection of smaller software vendors targeting narrower use cases, according to research from CMS Watch, a vendor-independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies.

These findings come from the XML and Component Content Management Report 2008, a groundbreaking evaluation of fourteen major CCM suppliers and five prominent XML Editor tools, based on extensive technology research and customer interviews. The 365-page report also documents industry best practices and common pitfalls to avoid when selecting and implementing a CCM system. Developed by CMS Watch and The Rockley Group, this report provides business critical background on the tools needed to effectively and efficiently deliver the right information to the right people at the right time in the right language and format.

In this exclusive interview with The Content Wrangler, we talk with Ann Rockley, co-author of the XML and Component Content Management Report 2008.

TCW: Hello, Ann. Thanks for taking time out of your extremely hectic schedule. Let’s dive right into today’s topic. Tell us about your new research report.

AR: The XML and Component Content Management Report 2008 report reviews both XML editors and CCM systems. We’ve reviewed 20 different products. In addition, it includes detailed information on what CCM systems are, why you need to use them, and how they fit in the context of all the other types of content management systems and sample scenarios where CCM systems are used.

TCW: Why did you write the report and whom do you see as the primary audience?

AR: There are a lot of content management systems out there and reports have been written about web content management, enterprise content management, etc., but nothing about the types of systems we and others use to manage structured content, XML-based content, and reusable content components. Forrester published a report on ECM which sparked a long discussion on the CM Pros listserv about why Forrester didn’t cover these types of content management systems. And so, the idea for the report was born. CMS Watch produces a number of well-respected reports on Web Content Management, Enterprise Content Management, Portals and more. We discussed the need for a report specifically focused on component content management and decided that it would be a good addition to the CMS Watch portfolio of reports.

The Technical Communication industry is one of the primary audiences for the XML & Component Content Management Report as technical communicators have been using these types of systems for more than a decade to create, manage and deliver software and hardware documentation. Others target audiences include content professionals who serve pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers, publishing and media companies, government agencies, and other types of enterprises. CCM systems are most often deployed to solve content challenges in customer support and call centers, in e-learning and training departments, knowledge management, multi-channel marketing, HR content management, content globalization, and integrated enterprise information.

TCW: How do you describe Component Content Management? What is it?

AR: Component Content Management is the practice of creating and managing content as building blocks or components of content rather than documents or pages. These components can be assembled and published to the appropriate output (e.g., web, print, mobile). Each component has its own lifecycle (owner, version, approval, use) and can be tracked individually or as a part of an assembly.

TCW: Okay, now that we know what it is, how does it differ from Document or Content Management?

AR: Web Content Management systems tend to manage HTML pages, which correspond to the published web pages. Traditional Content Management systems have typically managed content as files (documents). In other words, most content management systems manage documents or pages not chunks (components) of information. I was recently asked by someone if a vendor says they support XML does that mean it supports components. The answer is usually no. Some of the differentiating factors for CCM include:

• Manages components not documents
• Tracks components with independent versioning and workflow
• Ability to identify where content has been reused
• Support for component, filtered, and variable reuse
• Ability to create multiple “assemblies” of content from components in the repository

TCW: What types of industries would benefit most from Component Content Management approach and why?

AR: CCM has been implemented in many industries, including software, hardware, aviation, and pharmaceutical and medical devices.  However, it would be misleading to suggest that CCM fits specific industries. It is more accurate to suggest that it supports different types of content or different approaches to creating content. For example, CCM as an approach has also been applied to multi-channel marketing information (web, print, mobile, broadcast) and also general business documents.

TCW: So, most folks don’t yet believe this type of technology really works. That’s understandable since hardly any companies stand up and say, “Hey, we’re doing it!” So, who is doing it and why?

AR: I think I would argue with the term “most folks”, but I would agree that many companies who are having a hard time just trying to get a handle on managing their documents, let alone trying to conceive of managing components, are highly skeptical. And we would agree that CCM is not for everyone, nor for every type of information. So, where do we see this technology being used? Three of the industries just mentioned have been using these types of systems for more than a decade: technical documentation (hardware and software), aerospace, and training and development. Pharmaceutical companies started using these systems about five or six years ago with the advent of XML standards for labeling materials. Medical device manufacturers have been using it for about the same period of time, though they have no specific standards they have to follow, yet. As content has become more global and organizations are having to support localized content and global websites, CCM has started to gain rapidly increasing acceptance as companies can save a great deal of money through translation reductions if they manage their content as components and not documents. Publishing and media-oriented businesses have begun to embrace this approach to save money through multi-channel publishing. Some of the newest to adopt CCM are organizations producing multi-channel marketing materials or HR groups supporting multiple geographic regions or audiences.

TCW: What are three top reasons an organization would want to adopt Component Content Management? And, why?

AR: That’s a great question. Here are my thoughts.

1. Reason 1: Reuse -- All organizations reuse content to some degree. We have found when doing content audits that 25% or more of content is reused in most organizations. With CCM, you can store reusable content in components and reuse them whenever you need. The CCM system helps you to manage that reuse, with search tools to help you find reusable components, authoring tools that reference the reusable content, and management tools that help to show where content is reused.
2. Reason 2: Translation Management -- Translating and localizing content is expensive and time consuming. In the past, companies have sent whole documents or large sections of documents to translators. They have then relied on translation memory to find content that has been previously translated and identify where content is changed/new. It is faster and cheaper to send smaller pieces of content through the translation process. When a component has been translated, it can be also be reused when necessary. You do not have to retranslate content that has not changed or even compare it to translation memory until it is changed.
3. Reason 3: Collaborative Authoring -- Having multiple contributors has typically meant that you pass a file from person to person so each can add their content. Or, each adds their content to separate files, which is then passed to someone who has to stitch them all together, fix differences in structure and formatting and publish the content. With CCM, authors write content to a specific structure which makes it easy to mix-and match the content to form other information products. The technology makes the process of assembling and formatting the content easier, faster, and less error-prone.

TCW: When making such a change – and a big change this is – what are some of the common challenges and how do we avoid them?

AR: Probably the biggest change is the new way of writing. When you make the move to structured content, authors need to understand how to write in a different way, how to write to a consistent structure. They often find this change restrictive and they say it limits their creativity. The key to success is to gain an understanding of what they are writing, how they are writing it, why they write it a certain way BEFORE you model the content. The structure supports the way in which writers write, freeing them up to focus on what’s important—the quality of the content and its usefulness to the content consumer. Formatting and other manual tasks are replaced by more efficient mechanisms. At first, this approach will seem awkward, but most writers will gradually adapt. As one author said to us “structure will set you free!”

The second area of challenge is reuse. Authors write content in a specific manner for a specific reason and audience. They say that the content they create is effective for their readers, but content quality can be impacted when its not optimized for reuse. When you reuse content, content which is written for a specific purpose isn’t always the best for multiple purposes.

Recently at a conference I ran into a person from one of our clients that we had worked for a number of years ago. She reintroduced herself and then said “You know, I just wanted to tell you that I hated your guts when you changed all our processes”. I can honestly say I was taken aback, what does one say in response to this?! But she went on to say “But now, I wouldn’t create content any other way. It [structured content and content reuse] makes so much sense, we can do so much more than we used to be able to do. We’ve been able to innovate, and we can really focus on the customer”. So, yes change is not without some pain, but the long-term gain is worth it.

TCW: Many organizations want to adopt component reuse – what are the basics to developing a reuse model?

AR: You begin by developing a thorough understanding of the content. Let’s imagine that you wanted to develop a reuse model for marketing brochures and a marketing web site for a software product. You start by doing a thorough visual analysis of samples of the two types of content.  You look for specific pieces of content that are reused in the different products. For example, you might find that “system requirements” shows up in both brochures and and on the web site. 

The next step is to create content models. Content models are specifications that define the structure of content. Following the example of “product description,” a simple model might be “product name, positioning statement, features, benefits, value proposition” For reuse, content modeling is essential, as content must be structurally consistent to be reused and be effective. As part of your content modeling, you must also determine the metadata you need to collect. If you are going to store components of content, you need to be able to find them to use or reuse them.

A content model will then help you make decisions about the technology you might need to support reuse.

TCW: And, of course, this interview would not be complete without a mention of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). What is DITA and is it compatible with the Component Content Management approach? If so, why?

AR: DITA is XML-based approach to content that uses “topics” as the primary component. It defines four different types of topics, including tasks, concepts, reference, and generic topics. Each has a structure that is appropriate to the type of information be created. Because DITA is modular in nature and because it is an XML standard, it fits nicely into the component content management arena. DITA is commonly supported by software vendors and has been widely adopted by organizations of varying sizes who are attempting to improve their content creation, management and delivery processes. Those who adopt DITA often enjoy the cost savings and quality improvements of XML and content management without the challenges associated with developing a unique structure and approach.

TCW: In this increasingly global marketplace, how might the Component Content Management approach help or hinder an organization that needs to localize its content for various markets in numerous countries?

AR: Definitely help, not hinder. We have found that organizations that translate content have a huge opportunity for ROI, often 30-50% savings. Traditionally, companies create content then hand it off to a translation agency who runs it through a translation memory tool that identifies what content has changed and what content is new. Did you know that you will be charged by the agency to determine which pieces of content have changed and which have not? In a component oriented environment, only those components that have changed or are new will sent to the translation agency, immediately reducing costs by eliminating the need for the translation house to determine what will and will not be translated.

Another thing most companies don’t realize is that identical content in different formats (say HTML and in a .doc file) are considered different when reviewed by the translation memory tool. This is because HTML tags are different from rtf tags (.doc files) and are flagged as requiring individual translation. However, when content is stored in XML, the tags are always the same regardless of the channel of delivery. This means that all the costs being incurred to reformat the content when it comes back from the translation agency to return it to the original format (e.g., Quark, FrameMaker) are eliminated because the tags are the same and only an appropriate stylesheet is required to publish content correctly.

TCW: If I were an upper level manager, I’d want to know how Component Content Management impacts time-to-market. What are the potential impacts? And, how does the Component Content Management approach provide improvements in time-to-market that we can’t get from existing approaches?

AR: Time-to-market is improved through:

• Productivity gains— the “write once, use many” approach means that it takes less time to create, manage, and deliver content
• Less time needed to translate—less content to translate means that translation can be done faster and cheaper

TCW: Learning about Component Content Management is tricky. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of information available. So, how can our readers learn what they need to know to launch a successful Component Content Management project? Can you point us to some online resources of value?

AR: Our web site, blog and the Rockley Report are good places to start. You can also request a free, downloadable chapter from the report, which contains some useful information about CCM and a sample review of one product vendor. Other useful resources include: