|
|
The following summarizes questions asked during the "Reuse: A Substantial Factor in Determining ROI for Content Management" webinar sponsored by the Rockley Group and by Data Conversion Laboratory (initially delivered March 1, 2005.) If your question was not adequately answered, or if you have other questions please write to us at reuse@dclab.com.
Q&A
|
Reuse: A Substantial Factor in
Determining ROI for Content Management
|
|
Encores Presentation; More Information
|
|
Q:
Are slides available? What other resources are available?
A:
Click here to view Mark's slides.
Click here to view Ann's slides.
The archived live version of the presentation with voiceovers is available at http://www.visualwebcaster.com/event.asp?regd=y&id=27540 until May 31st.
Q:
I would like everyone on my team to attend this seminar. I would like to move to XML and structured writing, but many writers on my team are skeptical. Ann’s presentation is inspiring.
A:
Thank You. An encore presentation is available at http://www.visualwebcaster.com/event.asp?regd=y&id=27540
|
| |
|
Content Audits & ROI Analysis
|
|
Q:
Is there a typical length of time to conduct an enterprise-wide ROI audit for a Fortune 500 company? If an outside consultant is not used for the audit, who in the company’s organization typically conducts the audit?
A:
We typically estimate 6-8 weeks for an enterprise audit. Anyone can perform an audit, but we recommend a business analyst or content owner who is interested in helping to make content management happen.
Q:
How many organizations can perform a content audit on their own and how many require the assistance of an outside consultant?
A:
You can perform a content audit on your own or use a consultant. We find that companies who ask us to do an audit do not have the time or resources to do it themselves, would like to have an unbiased external consultant do it for them, or feel that they do not have the knowledge or skills to make appropriate recommendations. If you want to do it yourself I recommend reading our book “Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy” which provides a lot of detail to help you perform your own audit.
Q:
If a consultant was hired on, what is the typical hourly rate of a consultant like this?
A:
Hourly rates vary widely. Our practice is to fix price our audit based on the scope of the audit. You are better off having a fixed price rather than hourly as your costs are known in advance.
Q:
We’ve put together some numbers regarding savings in layout and production costs. Are there industry standards that we could measure against? We are going from FrameMaker to XML stored in Vasont.
A:
Most of our numbers relate to savings based on reuse. Typically savings are based on the percentage of reuse you have in your organization. As the webinar discussed, the actual reuse in your organization can vary widely form industry norms and therefore an assessment of your materials is valuable to help you determine your anticipated savings.
Q:
You mentioned improved quality - how do you put a number for ROI on improved quality?
A:
It’s hard to put a number on ROI resulting from quality. However, you should consider that, with more consistent data, (a) would you avoid lawsuits?; (b) would costs decrease?, and (c) will customers be happier?
Q:
Is there a correlation between developing content management and offering Prescriptive learning?
A:
I think these are quite different. Content management is a strategy, a methodology, and a new technology.
|
| |
|
Content Management
|
|
Q:
For a 20 person team, do you need a low-end or middle sized CMS?
A:
It depends on the nature of your material and their volatility. You should define your requirements and then see which solutions best meet those requirements. You should probably segregate requirements into “must have” and “nice to have”.
Q:
We are using Frame 7 and considering moving to CMS. What are we sacrificing by staying with Frame and using structured docs instead of doing a purely XML/CMS solution?
A:
If Frame 7 is working for you, then there’s not much lost. Frame 7 can operate as “XML” in most aspects. Implementing a component level management system and reuse will give you a world class solution.
Q:
What is the typical reception of customers on migration services... My experience tell me that during the sales cycle of a CMS - this is sometimes overlooked.
A:
You’re right. “Migration” is often overlooked in sales cycle in the interests of focusing on the software benefits – but as consumers get more educated it becomes more apparent that migrating data effectively is key to a successful installation, and modern tools like Harmonizer™ make a potentially tedious process much more efficient.
|
| |
|
Tools for Harmonization
|
|
Q:
What tools are used to analyze identical and similar content?
A:
The only one that we know of is Harmonizer™ by Data Conversion Laboratory.
Q:
But I thought a localization vendor who uses tools supporting TRADOS memories doesn’t really translate 4 or 6 times, even if the content exists in multiple sources.
A:
That’s true – there is software, particularly in language translation that will track identical sentences and identify them in the translation process so that they do not need to be retranslated. But that's not enough! DCL’s Harmonizer™ adds the capability to identify similar text that is NOT necessarily identical. This capability often doubles the reusable content, drastically improving your results.
Q:
With the programmatic analysis software, what’s the ballpark price-tag for an application that provides this reporting and how difficult is it to apply or integrate?
A:
Currently this programmatic analysis is being offered by Data Conversion Laboratory as a service. The price is typically less than $5,000 but you should talk with DCL to get a firm price based on your situation. E-mail us at reuse@dclab.com for more information.
|
| |
|
Formats Supported
|
|
Q:
Are there specific electronic DTP formats supported by programmatic analysis?
A:
Almost all DTP (Desk Top Publishing) formats are supported.
Q:
What is the format of source documents? Do you convert documents to XML before performing the analysis?
A:
Typically Interleaf, Word, FrameMaker, etc. (word processing formats). Documents are converted to DCL’s normalized XML hub for the purpose of analysis. This allows reuse analysis to be performed across a wide variety of formats.
|
| |
|
Specific Industries & Applications
|
|
Q:
Would you say this type of programmatic analysis tool could apply well to financial services where there are many policies and regulations?
A:
That is precisely were we see the fit in financial and legal services, and there are active clients in these industries using this approach. Content reuse in financial and legal services is often much higher than 50%.
Q:
There is a tremendous amount of data that can be repurposed in the nuclear utility industry. Have you worked there?
A:
We have done significant conversion work in the nuclear utility industry to convert procedure and maintenance documents, but there are not yet any active projects to evaluate and harmonize reusable content. This clearly is an industry that can benefit from improved content management and content reuse.
Q:
These examples of similar content are trivial, because they’re cases where the content CAN be made similar. But what about content where a paragraph or topic is mostly the seam, but there are real, technical differences in a few words or sentences. Differences that are not easy to isolate by restructuring. In traditional authoring tools, you can handle this with conditional text... how do you handle this with XML in order to enable reuse?
A:
You are correct that often, a paragraph cannot simply be restructured to make all versions into one, but yet there are still parts of the paragraph that are identical, and it would be best to have one version of that. A typical way that this is handled, is by using tagging that the military refers to as "effectivity" tagging, whereby text fragments within a paragraph can be tagged in such a way as to indicate for which version a particular string applies to. For example, a paragraph might look like this:
<para> The minimum amount of fuel needed to start the engine is <eff model="m12">12</eff><eff model="m17 m19">between 11 and 14</eff> gallons.</para>
This involved defining tagging to contain this 'effectivity' tagging, which is a little harder to define in an XML schema or DTD than it was in SGML, which allowed a construct called inclusions.
Another possibility is the use of conditional text (which both SGML and XML allow), which allows you to put tagging around particular fragments of text, and activate them during document generation, by turning a switch on or off inside documents.
Both of these methods allow you to reuse as much text as possible while allowing for differences in various versions of text.
Q:
I work with the internet in Brazil. I’d like to know what is your closest example of a work reusing content based on a website to write or produce a new format of content to the same website. In other words, I'm trying to get the techniques of reuse and use it in websites reality. PS: I'm reading Ann Rockley's book "Managing Enterprise Content"
A:
Reusing content on a website makes a lot of sense. For example, content in an e-catalog and content in the e-store. You’d be surprised how often we find that the content is different between these two areas of the site and they really should be the same.
|
| |
|
Grammar Notes
|
|
Q:
Data (plural) "are" redundant...not "data "is" redundant. :-)
A:
You’re right – technically the word “data” is in the plural, but this may be one of those cases where common usage has overtaken the dictionary definition as noted below in the excerpt from www.answers.com:
The word data is the plural of Latin datum, “something given,” but it is not always treated as a plural noun in English. The plural usage is still common, as this
headline from the New York Times attests: “Data Are Elusive on the Homeless.” Sometimes scientists think of data as plural, as in These data do not support the conclusions. But more often scientists and researchers think of data as a singular mass entity like information, and most people now follow this in general usage. Sixty percent of the Usage Panel accepts the use of
data with a singular verb and pronoun in the sentence Once the data is in, we can begin to analyze it. A still larger number, 77 percent, accepts the sentence We have very little data on the efficacy of such programs, where the quantifier very little, which is not used with similar plural nouns such as facts and results, implies that data here is indeed singular. (excerpted from answers.com)
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
CIDM Best Practices Conference
September 13–15, 2010
Hampton, Virginia
Vasont Users' Group Meeting
September 27–30, 2010
Hershey, Pennsylvania
Internet Librarian Conference
October 25–27, 2010
Monterey, California
Journal Article Tag Suite Conference (JATS-Con)
November 1–2, 2010
Bethesda, Maryland
SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting
November 8–9, 2010
Baltimore, Maryland
More Events »
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
