Content reuse - the killer app
Organizations with large pools of information can save 30% or more on the cost of maintaining document sets - that's big bucks! But for a number of reasons it's not yet the popular thing to do. DCLnews reports.
Content reuse looks set to be the next big killer application for businesses that publish and manage large amounts of documentation. But what does it mean? Isn't it just another buzzword? And more to the point is it really worth investing in?
Companies in the know echo a big "yes" to the investment question. They say the central benefit of content reuse is it allows you to write and maintain your text once, but have it appear multiple times throughout your document set, and it can radically reduce the cost of maintaining documentation.
According to industry insiders, installing a content reuse system can shrink the amount of content you need to maintain by half or even more. Since many of the costs of maintaining (and converting) document sets are proportional to volume, this means huge cost reductions.
Killer apps
DCL president Mark Gross takes up this point: "I've often said that when you're trying to improve efficiency, it's one thing to improve things by 5%-10%, but the killer apps are when you can eliminate entire operations. With content reuse you might eliminate 50% of the document set you're needing to maintain, and that's where the big savings come," he explains.
He goes on to say that any organization can benefit, but the "biggest bang for the buck, and the most obvious ROI, will be the content that's most expensive to maintain."
Examples of this include:
- Materials that need to be disseminated in many languages - reducing the content volume means less materials need to go through the expense of translation.
- Legal & Regulatory materials - reducing content means a quicker and less expensive legal and regulatory process.
- Technical documentation - reducing the content means that engineering reviews are quicker and less expensive.
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New content reuse
tool from DCL |
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Data Conversion Laboratory is developing tools that will comb through a corpus of documents to find sets of content that are similar to each other and present it to the corpus' editor to decide which content can be removed to be replaced with common modules. Send an e-mail to info@dclab.com with "Content reuse" as the subject and we will alert you when this powerful tool is ready.
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But why not keep content reuse simple (and cheap) and copy and paste the text you need to reuse?
Content reuse guru, Ann Rockley, says this is not a satisfactory method. Even the slight modifications that are made along the way will make each generation of "reuse" farther and farther from the original. That's why a formal process is needed.
"Over time," she says, "inconsistencies will layer themselves, until original inconsistencies become buried and you end up with two completely different content sources."
Rockley defines content reuse as the "process of linking to an element of reusable content. The reusable content is displayed in the document in which you are working, but it does not actually reside in the document. When the reusable element is updated, it is updated wherever it occurs. This saves a lot of time and money in maintenance (change once, automatically change many)."
Who needs content reuse?
Organizations most likely to benefit from content reuse will have a large pool of information that has a lot of duplicate material and requires expensive talent to maintain it. The fact is, if 30% of an organization's content was found to be reusable, that would mean a reduction of 30% in the cost of maintaining the documents.
Mark Gross, president of DCL, says the savings are magnified when there are multiple versions of similar documentation.
"A jet engine manufacturer who makes 20 models of the same engine with relatively minor differences, but each needs a manual, is one example of an organization that would benefit," he explains. "This scenario holds true with automotive, telecommunications, and many other industrial products. One of our customers was originally planning to convert 50,000 pages. But after extensive combing through the material to find reusable content, we ended up converting less than 20,000 pages. They found in the course of conversion that they had a lot more reusable content than they ever thought. Consider the long-term cost savings!"
Regulated industries
Prime areas to benefit from content re
use are regulated industries - such as pharmaceuticals, nuclear power plants, and aviation - where even the most minor change needs to go through multiple legal and regulatory reviews. It's also useful in complex documents, such as are found in the legal or accounting professions, where each paragraph needs to be reviewed and approved.
"Typically, many sections will previously have been approved and won't need the same level of review," explains Gross. "A well-organized content management system (CMS) will recognize which sections can be reused without needing approval and will highlight the ones that do need it."
Content reuse also makes a big difference with documentation that has multiple language requirements. One of the pioneers in this is the heavy equipment and engine maker Caterpillar, who need to produce their manuals in many different languages.
Reuse models have been adopted by large content-driven websites and by the educational and business learning industries.
The news media has also taken reuse on board in a big way. Reporters write content once and elements of that original source are published to different media in a variety of formats and languages. Content from one story may appear in a multitude of media - in a newspaper, on a web site, on web sites of others who purchase content services, in PDAs and cell phones, on portal pages, radio broadcast scripts, marquee signs, electronic billboards, and in various languages.
Where does XML fit in?
While content reuse can be implemented in many different ways, XML is particularly conducive to it since the infrastructure already exists to allow you to make content modular and to provide the information (metadata) that would indicate how the modules connect. In addition there are XML-based content management systems that support reuse functionality.
So what's holding it up?
Why aren't organizations embracing it en masse?
Mark Gross, an expert on the subject, cites the main reasons as:
- Few organizations have invested in the content management software needed to support reuse on a large scale.
- It's hard to change the way people work - writers have a set way of working and sometimes have limited knowledge of how to use software.
- It's hard to find your reusable content.
The first two issues need to be solved by management, says Gross. But his firm, Data Conversion Laboratory, is currently addressing the third.
"We're essentially developing automation that combs through a corpus of materials to find sets of content that are similar to each other and presents it to the corpus' editor to decide which content can be removed to be replaced with common modules."
Intriguingly, he says this is a process that, without automation, has taken at least one organization ten person-years to accomplish.
Gross also makes clear that the technology used to manage common content, once its been isolated, exists in several content management systems (CMS). "However, implementing content reuse, which involves building the database in the first place, is where we come in."
DCLnews editorial
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