We're all content producers. And we're all about to live through interesting times with the dawning of The Age of Content. Industry is discovering content as a commodity, as inventory with value, and the rules are changing fast.

The new rules are not just for high-profit content like movies and music. What was once seen as the lowliest form of commercial content within an enterprise - technical manuals, support documentation, and other business content - is starting to take its place alongside other valued corporate assets.

Not in your company yet? Wait a bit - it will happen. The same market forces that propelled other technological advances will also push companies to keep up, if not lead the pack when it comes to the intelligent use of content assets.

What is content convergence and what's driving it?

Content is an asset that costs money to produce and maintain, so the more use organizations can get from their assets, the more value those assets have.

Content convergence is about being able to do more with your content; reusing content from multiple sources, automating reuse in new ways, allowing users to choose only the content they want. After all, content is an asset that costs money to produce and maintain, so the more use organizations can get from their assets, the more value those assets have.

Though organizations have many reasons for wanting -or needing-to adopt content convergence, it usually boils down to efficiency. Automating the processing - for example through an RSS feed so content can be integrated into other content without any manual intervention- increases the use of content and decreases the risks of errors, without adding to the overhead of producing it. For that to take place, however, content must follow a standard structure, thus allowing one to apply processing rules that automate its syndicated re-use.

Another driver for making content more consistent is to allow it to be integrated from multiple sources, (such as multiple databases), into a single repository where it can be sorted, searched, retrieved, and perhaps syndicated. Consistency at the structural level affects how much of the content processing can be automated.

Perhaps the most important driver is freeing up content producers to concentrate on the human aspects of content development, letting technology take over rote tasks of formatting pages and tracking translation versions.

Content convergence and the Call Center: A case history

One company in the life sciences sector quickly learned the benefits of content convergence when more than thirty years of product knowledge was about to walk out the door with gold watches on their wrists. This company, like many others, provides support on its products through a call center where customer service reps respond to phone calls from customers around the world. The goal is to provide accurate information as quickly as possible, creating more satisfied customers. The reps each had large books stuffed with sticky notes, bookmarks and notes in the margins. Being paper resources, they were out of date as soon as they were printed. Yet the extensive annotations made the reps reluctant to replace the books with the updates, leaving each rep with a different version of the facts.

While there were some online resources - a collection of documents on a shared drive, such as PDFs of manuals (copied from TechComm), illustrated parts breakdowns (copied from Engineering), current and past catalogues (copied from Sales), and files accessed through a browser (copied from various other departments), inevitably, the files went stale, and the rep would cite incorrect information at the worst possible time. But the biggest pain point came when experienced reps started to retire. The average call response times doubled, sometimes quadrupled. The company had no idea how much of the information had been in the minds of the old-timers who knew the products inside and out.

The company quickly realized the value of getting control over their content in a way that could be continually maintained in a searchable knowledge base. This meant getting the diverse content into a knowledge base from a number of sources, making it available in a consistent format - in a word, convergence.

There is no one "right" way to converge content, but getting a searchable, topic-based knowledge repository does require a certain amount of consistently-structured content.

There is no one "right" way to converge content, but getting a searchable, topic-based knowledge repository does require a certain amount of consistently-structured content. Consistency is what makes it possible to transfer content between systems in an automated way, syndicating updates out from the content producers to the repository of the content users. From that repository, the reps can pull up the right content at the right time to provide better and faster answers, resulting in happier customers and more efficient reps. And it that repository, the content can be updated in real-time, as each contributing department updates its own documents, drawings or content files.

The importance of standards

Similar principles apply to any organization wanting to do more with content. They can publish content as usual, let users contribute content to be integrated into the site, and offer the opportunity for users to keep up with content through a subscription or syndication.

It's not the size of the organization that determines the success of a content convergence strategy, but the planning that goes into the strategy, and most importantly, a willingness to explore the potential of internal and customer-facing content assets and find ways to exploit that potential. The challenge for an organization is in moving content into what is becoming known as "Content 2.0," the type of content that makes convergence possible. First, there is a need for governance guidelines - who gets to decide about the content--a policy level decision. Second, there is a need for technology to automate the processing of what could be thousands (and for multinationals, hundreds of thousands to millions) of content pages.

Automating content processing requires that content be exchangeable among multiple databases without losing file integrity. In order to do this, the content needs to conform to certain characteristics that allow portability (between systems) and independent use (as each chunk of content will be retrieved through a different search). Together, these attributes make up Content 2.0 - where content is able to meet the criteria for use in a Web 2.0 world. This calls for content to be converted to a standard format, likely the ubiquitous XML, be given appropriate attributes, and be organized in a way that facilitates automation. The content structures need to be codified and enforced to support automation, and the technologists need to build the business rules into the content management system to enforce whatever governance guidelines have been set up.

Convergence and integration is just the beginning

Once the corporation has taken the big leap to treating content as the valuable asset it is, it's a short hop to the next level, the creative use of content to solve problems not yet identified as problems. Once the content conforms to a standard that enables it to be integrated with content from other sources, it can also be syndicated. In a single organization, content could be used to:

• Converge technical content from various sources into a customer service database, leveraging existing content for new business purposes within the company.

• Integrate procedures into technical training courses, to reduce the training development cycle and to ensure that the content is always up-to-date from its sources.

• Integrate product features with marketing copy on the company web site, so marketing communicators don't have to locate or recreate that copy.

• Syndicate product updates out to customers, so customers can be assured they stay current with product changes.

• Syndicate comments from product discussion forums through a notification mechanism, to stay on top of what customers are saying.

• Notify internal stakeholders of critical-path changes through an RSS feed, replacing the less reliable and less customizable group email method for notifications.

• Download technical updates automatically to remote laptops rather than using CDs or other outdated modes of communication.

• Personalize marketing information to potential customers and newsletter subscribers, ensuring they receive content tailored to them, and preventing the email fatigue that causes unsubscribers.

• Publish standards-based (microformat) content such as events, jobs, and news releases automatically to other sites, saving the rote copying of content to multiple sites.

• Push variations of Web content out to mobile devices, delivering readable and usable content in a small-screen format to cell phones and PDAs .

Content convergence and integration may be the key to the next Internet wave

Content convergence and integration may be the key to the next Internet wave but it is not yet a well-understood concept to those outside industries where these types of technologies get discussed. Content producers learn a bit about XML here, a bit about content management there, a bit about customer relationships there, and until now, have had to leave the overall strategy in the hands of the IT folks who may not have been included in the overall content strategy, even if the organization has one.

Learn More

You can learn more about content convergence at Content Convergence and Integration March 12-14, 2008, where content producers and their managers can congregate to learn about the various aspects of producing portable content, to solve business problems

DCLNews Editorial
February 2008