Reuse: A Substantial Factor in Determining ROI for Content Management (Part 2)

(Click here for Part 1)

Last month’s issue talked about how to determine where reuse can positively impact your ROI. This article identifies how you can identify your percentage of reuse.

How to identify your percentage of reuse

The calculation of return on investment for reuse depends upon the percentage of identical reuse in your content. Before you can calculate your ROI you need to determine this percentage. You can calculate the percentage of reuse in two ways:

About Ann Rockley

Ann Rockley is President of The Rockley Group, Inc, a consultancy that has an international reputation for developing enterprise content management strategies, unified content strategies, and information architecture for content management. Rockley is the author of the best-selling book "Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy" with TRG Senior Consultants Pamela Kostur and Steve Manning, New Riders Publishing ISBN 0-7357-1306-5 (Buy from Amazon.com). She can be reached at 905-415-1885 or moreinfo@rockley.com, www.rockley.com.

• Conducting a content audit
• Programmatically analyzing the content for reuse

Conducting a content audit

When you perform a content analysis, you review materials for content that is identical, similar, and unique. Take a representative sample of your content and analyze it for reuse. Look for:

• Identical content
  
  Identical content is content that is absolutely identical (wording, tense, capitalization, punctuation). Identical content can be easily reused. However, many times you will find that content is almost, but not quite identical. This is similar content.
  
  
• Similar content
  
  Similar content is content that is very similar to another piece of content. It may only vary by a few words, tense, punctuation, layout, etc. When looking at similar content you need to determine if the differences are valid. Sometimes the differences are not really necessary and content could be identical. You will find this a lot when content is copied and pasted and minor changes made to it, or if multiple people write the same thing, when it really could have been written once and reused many times.
  
  There are times when content should be similar, not identical, to meet the needs of different audiences or uses of the content. In this case it may need to remain similar (we call this derivative); however, you need to look at it more closely to see if there is some way to retain as much as possible that is identical through the use of building blocks of content or variables. The more that you can keep identical, the higher your percentage of reuse and the more savings you will accrue.



• Unique
  
  Content which is unique is just that, unique. It does not occur elsewhere in your information suite. It is specific to the product/service etc. that you are writing about and is a necessary component of effective information.

When you have completed your content audit you need to make an estimate of what percentage of content you think can be identically reused. This is the number you use to calculate your ROI.

Programmatic analysis of reuse

You can use a software application which identifies the content that is identical and similar in your information set. The software goes through your information set and identifies matching strings, passages and whole sections of content. It generates reports that provide a clear indication of reuse and enables you to look at the reuse that was identified.

We like to do a programmatic analysis because it gives us a “real” number to work with, it is not an estimate and it can provide a more extensive analysis of the content. We also like to combine it with a content audit because the software will point out many of the areas of reuse, and the content audit will enable us to determine if the content could be made identical rather than similar. Together, both the content audit and a programmatic analysis of your content will provide a clear understanding of your potential for reuse.

Conclusion

Once you understand your percentage of reuse and you understand where reuse can impact your ROI you can calculate your ROI. To learn more, join us for a Webinar on this topic.

Related Articles

Beating Data Redundancy with Content Reuse http://www.dclab.com/contentreuse.asp Content Reuse - the Killer Application http://www.dclab.com/content_reuse.asp Content Management Workshop Series http://www.rockley.com/workshops.htm Harmonizer™ – Fact Sheet http://www.dclab.com/content_reuse_harmonizer.asp Content Management Systems - Hot Out Of Kindergarten http://www.dclab.com/content_reuse_tony_byrne.asp Harmonizer™ - because 50% of your data is redundant. http://www.dclab.com/harmonizer.asp