Every organization, and every department within an organization, faces challenges in successfully meeting goals. To build an effective unified content strategy you need to understand your organization’s goals and needs. When implementing a unified content strategy, it’s good to start “where it really hurts”—wherever there are significant content management and authoring issues.
Start in areas with the most “pain”—where processes, tools, and technology are failing or inadequate, and where your organization is seeing the most negative results and hearing about it from customers or management. This will help you to realize a higher return on investment; it will also show other areas in the organization how a more effective, unified authoring and publishing methodology can help them, getting your unified content strategy project off to a good start. Change typically occurs when the “pain” of existing authoring and publishing processes becomes too great, when tools no longer meet authoring needs, or when organizations are held back from both meeting ongoing requirements and taking advantage of new opportunities. Deadlines are missed, content is inconsistent, content is missing…and customers complain.
To discover where your organization is hurting the most, you need to understand the dangers and challenges facing your organization, the opportunities that can be realized if change occurs successfully, and the strengths your organization can build on to implement these changes. In most organizations, individual departments know the specific pain they are feeling; users may be frustrated by their inability to find relevant content, by duplicating their efforts, by tight deadlines. However, talking to both the management and individual members of other groups is also beneficial in identifying where it hurts across the organization—where the focus of your unified content strategy should be. Management has a broad-picture perspective on issues and can assist in determining the key issues and goals that must be addressed. And a mix of management and user feedback will paint a more realistic picture of the organization’s issues.
This chapter discusses ways to identify the organizational dangers, opportunities, and strengths, as well as the goals you want to achieve to move ahead with a unified content strategy. This identification process helps you to position a unified content strategy in the context of the bigger organizational issues and goals, ensuring that you are addressing the real issues of the organization and better positioning yourself to differentiate your product or service to meet ongoing customer needs. This identification process also helps you to identify some strategies for helping your organization to achieve its goals.
Identifying the dangers, opportunities, and strengths [1]
In a competitive business environment and sometimes difficult economy, every organization faces dangers, such as lost customers, lost sales, and subsequently, lost revenue. Yet even in difficult and challenging times, organizations can pursue many opportunities and build on their strengths. In fact, challenging times are often the best times to improve processes. However, before charging ahead, you need to first determine the dangers. Then you can address them by identifying opportunities and strengths.
At some point, every organization faces danger. This is especially true in a competitive environment in which it is difficult, if not impossible, for organizations to maintain their desired competitive position. After all, someone else is always coming up with a newer and better solution and customers’ needs are always changing. From a business perspective, potential or perceived danger reflects the fear of losing something—the fear of losing competitive position, the fear of not meeting desired revenues, the fear of missed opportunities, and so on. Your organization’s dangers can be enterprise-wide or related to a specific department. The first step in overcoming dangers is to identify them: danger can be a positive impetus to effect change. After you know what dangers you face, you can define strategies to overcome them.
To help you identify the dangers specific to your organization, ask key people to identify the three top dangers the organization faces, or will face if you don’t meet your goals.
The dangers facing your organization can be many and varied. These are a few of the common dangers and the ways in which a unified content strategy can help to address them:
The economy
Business goes through repeated cycles of boom, slowdown, and even bust. As the economy enters a slowdown, revenues decrease. Decreasing revenues lead to tight budgets and reduced resources.
A unified content strategy leads to reduced costs for content development and maintenance (see Chapter 3, “Assessing return on investment for a unified content strategy”). This can help to reduce the pressure on budgets as well as to reduce the resources necessary to maintain the current workload.
Missing the market window
The constant fear of losing market share is common. New products and services are being developed and marketed at an ever-increasing rate. Much cost and effort goes into building a new product or service, and if another company makes it to market first, you may lose your development cost and possibly market share.
If your product is content, your ability to get content out faster and in a form that is relevant to customers’ needs is key. A unified content strategy can reduce the time it takes you to create content. Plus, it gives you a definite market advantage if you can deliver customized content, designed to more effectively provide your customers with the information they need, when they need it.
Alternatively, if content supports your products and services, a unified content strategy can assist you in making the content available as soon as, if not before, the product or service is available.
Legal liability
If your organization produces a product or provides a service that involves safety risks, the danger of legal liability is very real. Sometimes a lawsuit can revolve around missing information, unclear information, or contradictory information. You may also face legal liability through false representation of your product, misleading information, or incorrect information.
If specific information must be included with a product (certain warnings, for example), a unified content strategy can ensure that information appears everywhere and every time it is supposed to appear. In addition, it can ensure that content is identical every time it is reused, eliminating con-tradictory information. Finally, if a change is made to the content, a unified content strategy can ensure that information is changed wherever it, or a derivative of the content, appears.
Even when there are a multitude of dangers, opportunity exists. In fact, opportunity often arises from danger. However, when there are few dangers, there are even greater opportunities available: opportunities that you can pursue without feeling pressured by the need to address dangers, opportunities you can pursue solely with the prospect of success.
With many opportunities available, it’s important to focus on key ones. To identify where your best chances for improvement lie, ask key people in your organization to identify the top three opportunities that they hope to take advantage of.
Frequently the opportunities an organization identifies are the corollary of the dangers (for example, missing the market window becomes faster time-to-market). The following list includes a few of the common opportunities and the ways in which a unified content strategy can help to support these opportunities.
Faster time-to-market
Bringing a product or service to market faster than your competition can result in increased revenues and market share.
A unified content strategy enables an organization to create all the supporting content faster, more accurately, and more efficiently, thereby reducing the content creation and delivery cycle and subsequently, getting the product or service delivered faster.
New/improved product or service
New or improved products or services can help to retain existing customers and attract new ones.
A unified content strategy can help you use existing content for new or improved products in two ways. If your strategy includes modular reusable content, you can rapidly modify existing modules to reflect changes. If your strategy specifies content reuse across all supporting information products (for example, in a brochure, web site, supporting documentation, or training guide), you write content once and use it wherever it is required. This can greatly reduce the time required to create and deliver content.
Improved customer support
Customer relationship management involves tracking and acting upon everything you need to know about your customers: their buying history, budget, timeline, areas of interest, and future requirements. It also involves ensuring that customers have exactly the right information at exactly the right time and in exactly the right form.
Combining detailed customer profiles along with a unified content strategy can help you build and maintain an even better relationship with your customer. A unified content strategy that specifies modular reusable content enables you to deliver the right modules to the right customer at the right time and in the right format. Rather than getting bombarded with information, customers receive only what is relevant to them. Customization can occur right down to the medium in which customers want information delivered to them. Customers are happier because they’ve gotten exactly what they needed, which results in cost savings to the organization because retaining a customer is much more cost effective than acquiring a new one. In addition, you can ensure that your branding and your message to customers are clear and consistent regardless of what information they receive.
Every organization has its strengths. Recognizing and building on your strengths is important because strengths allow you to realize your opportunities. Sometimes in difficult times it is easy to overlook your strengths and focus on the negatives. Focusing on your strengths provides a positive focus for moving forward. Ask the key people in your organization to identify what they feel are the organization’s greatest strengths and why.
These are a few of the common strengths and the ways in which a unified content strategy can help to support them:
The people
The people in your organization can be a source of strength. Often they are well-educated, eager to learn, and hard working. Good people are often the catalysts for change.
A unified content strategy brings with it change in the form of new and better ways of creating, managing, and distributing content. People who are open to change will benefit from changed processes. People will also help you to make the changes happen.
Market recognition/customer loyalty
Your organization’s market recognition indicates that customers have valued what you have provided them with in the past. Customers will continue to value you if you continue to produce products and services that meet, or better yet, exceed their needs. Retaining customers is cheaper than obtaining new ones.
Customers are quick to respond to new and better products and services. Although the unified content strategy remains behind the scenes of your organization and hence is transparent to customers, they will respond positively to the more effective content they receive and will be more likely to remain loyal.
Innovation
Organizations that innovate internally to improve the way they do business and provide innovative products and services to their customers continue to retain their customers.
A unified content strategy is an innovation in the way an organization creates, manages, and delivers content. In addition, creating modular content enables an organization to rapidly reconfigure their products and even more rapidly reconfigure their content to match the new product and service offerings.
All organizations have many goals, often reflected in corporate and department strategic plans. Naturally, goals are based on the opportunities organizations have available to them. Although not all corporate goals can be addressed with a unified content strategy, you need to identify which ones can be. Your goals may be the same as your opportunities; however, they should be more tangible and measurable.
Determine goals by examining strategic plans, and by asking key people what their specific goals are for the coming year. It is important to have long-term goals, as well. You can also ask about two-year, three-year, or even five-year goals. In fact, many organizations have five-year strategic plans, broken down into what they hope to accomplish each year.
These are a few of the common goals related to content and the ways in which a unified content strategy can help to support them:
Reduce cycle time.
Content takes time to develop. The time it takes to create content can significantly influence your ability to get the product out the door, whether your content is part of the product or service, or it is the product itself. Often content creation and sign-off approval lags behind product completion. Delays can be significant at times.
Writing content once and reusing it many times reduces the amount of original content that must be created. This in turn reduces the amount of time required to create and approve content. Review times can be reduced because only new or revised content is reviewed and approved. The further addition of appropriate authoring and content management technologies coupled with appropriate business process improvements can reduce the cycle time even further.
Create flexible content that can easily be reused to create information products for multiple products and multiple media.
The ability to reconfigure content rapidly is both an opportunity and a necessity for many companies. As products change rapidly, so must the content. With a goal such as this, it is worthwhile to measure the time and resources required to reconfigure content in your current environment, then qualify the word “easily” with an exact measure of time.
Modular reusable content can make it easier to build a definitive information source. From the source, authors can retrieve and opportunistically or systematically reuse content for multiple products.
Reduce the cost of translation.
Translation is often a large and growing expense within an organization, so the goal of reducing translation costs is a common one.
A unified content strategy reduces translation costs because less original content is translated. Improved standards for the creation of content make content more consistent, thereby increasing the probability of translation memory matches and reducing the requirement for new translation.
Making content accessible to people with disabilities is an important aspect of content. It has even been mandated in the “Americans with Disabilities Act.” But making content accessible can be costly because it requires multiple media to deliver content.
Some accessibility costs can be reduced with a unified content strategy. Separating content from format makes it possible for content to be displayed automatically in a format appropriate to the disability (for example, in a different font size).
Along with goals come challenges, whether they are challenges of money, time, technology, or people. It’s important to identify challenges before forging ahead with change, so that you can address them successfully during implementation. The best way to determine what the challenges are is to ask key people what they perceive as the challenges that may impact your ability to meet the goals.
These are some of the common challenges and their impact on your unified content strategy:
Time and money
There is never enough time to get your regular daily tasks completed, never mind new tasks. In addition to lack of time, there are usually insufficient funds to do both daily and new work.
In the long term, a unified content strategy will increase the time available (fewer people can do more) and decrease costs (fewer people means lower costs; lower translation, accessibility, and customer support costs further decrease total costs). However, these savings are not realized until after implementation. To realize savings, you need to allocate some time and money up front. You can optimize the time and money you invest by starting small with a proof-of-concept, a pilot, and a small rollout.
See Chapter 22, “Transition plan,” for more information about addressing this challenge.
Resistance to change
People become comfortable in their approach to their tasks, even if they are aware that their processes are ineffective or more difficult than they need to be. Change brings with it the unknown, and the fear of the unknown can be even stronger than the pain of continuing to work in the same way.
Resistance to change is a real challenge in a unified content strategy. A unified content strategy brings with it many new changes that are unavoidable, but opposition can be reduced through ongoing communication, participation, and strong management support for the changes.
See Chapter 21, “Managing change,” for more information on addressing this challenge.
Maintaining existing deliverables
When an organization introduces new processes or technology, there is a period of time required to implement these changes. The time required to implement the change can impact an organization’s ability to meet current deliverables. In addition, the resources required to effect the change are usually also the same resources required to complete the deliverables.
The most effective way to address this challenge is to create a strategic planning and implementation team to devote attention to the new strategy and implementation. This is the team that will conduct the analysis of your content and processes, then develop the plans to move ahead with a unified content strategy, both in processes and tools. If possible, you can supplement this team with consultants, and supplement the deliverables team that handles the day-to-day work with subcontractors.
See Chapter 22 for more information about addressing this challenge.
Lack of support from management
You may not receive the support you require to move forward with a unified content strategy; you may lack budget or management “buy-in” for the concept. Management is cautious when expending money, and unlikely to provide the support you require unless you build a solid business case and show tangible ROI. Take the time to establish the credentials for a unified content strategy so you have the necessary support right from the beginning of the project.
See Chapter 3 for more information about addressing this challenge.
A unified content strategy will not be a solution to all the dangers you identify (such as employee turnover, for example). Its focus is on helping to solve the problems your organization is experiencing in the areas of content creation, management, delivery, and communication with your internal and external customers. A unified content strategy is just one piece of your overall corporate strategy to address your dangers, realize your opportunities, and build on your strengths, not the whole solution. As you gather your information, ensure that you and the rest of the organization understand what a unified content strategy will help you to do and what it won’t.
To successfully move ahead with a unified content strategy, you need to determine where content management and authoring issues are really causing pain in the organization. You do this by determining the dangers and challenges facing your organization, the opportunities that can be realized if change occurs successfully, the strengths your organization can build upon to implement these changes, the goals of the organization, and the challenges you may face while implementing a unified content strategy.
Ask the following questions to gather your information for analyzing your organization:
What are the three top dangers your organization is facing, or will face if you don’t meet your goals or make changes in the organization?
What are the top three opportunities the organization hopes to take advantage of?
What are your organization’s greatest strengths?
What are your organization’s goals for the next year?
What are the challenges your organization will have to overcome to meet these goals?
[1] The concept of dangers, opportunities, and strengths is adapted from “The D.O.S. Conversation,” a concept and trademark of The Strategic Coach Inc. All rights reserved. http://www.strategiccoach.com