Beating Data Redundancy With Content Reuse

DCL study reveals up to 70% of data can be redundant in many firms and organizations. Big savings result from simply identifying duplication and reusing content, writes Mark Gross, president of DCL.

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If you maintain a large document collection, you’re probably aware that information is frequently repeated throughout that collection. In technical documents, repair procedures, parts lists, and warnings will crop up in identical or near identical form throughout the manuals that accompany different versions of a product. In the legal world, contract clauses will be the same or very similar throughout many types of documents. And in the finance industry a large amount of boilerplate text is used and repeated on forms, regulatory documents, sales literature, and in the “small print” sections. It’s the same story with software Help files.

What surprised us was the extent of redundancy. At DCL, we recently surveyed a number of document collections using our new measurement software. We found that in each case duplication was over 40% and in some cases over 70%. Furthermore, in every case, the calculated number was far higher than the number guessed by the document owner.

"Don’t drown in content - reuse it."

This has major cost implications. Why? Because managing less content means lower costs. The data we’ve collected would suggest that the return-on-investment (ROI) for content management and for XML is far higher than usually thought. It’s even more pronounced in cases where documentation is deployed globally and has to be translated into multiple languages, or where documentation has significant regulatory review requirements.

Why so much redundancy?

In many areas, new documents lean heavily on information you’ve already put together in the past. When new documents are created or compiled, the traditional approach is to grab the stock information you need by copying and pasting it. Not only is this slow and prone to human error, it creates more and more content, which is costly to maintain. The result? You end up drowning in content because you are storing a lot of copies of what is essentially the same thing.

While this is the way documents have been managed since the advent of modern computing, it doesn’t have to be this way now - not with the latest content management tools.

"Our new measurement software found duplication was over 40% and in some cases over 70%..."

At DCL, we’ve been interested in this issue for a long time. Much of our business involves preparing documents so that they can be integrated into Content Management Systems (CMS) - which allow you to take advantage of content reuse. With this in mind, we have been particularly interested in helping quantify the benefits you might expect, and particularly the potential for content reuse in clients’ data sets.

Time & revenue savings

We found that most people have a lot more redundancy than they think. This became apparent when we started objectively measuring redundancy with software tools. Simpler approaches underestimate the amount of repetition because either they work primarily through intuition or they are only looking for exact matches. Beneath the surface, as our tools revealed, there are the “close matches”, such as small changes in wording and slight errors, and even sections of the text that have been forgotten about.

Once you realize the extent of duplication, it becomes clear that there is real potential for saving time and revenue by finding and removing repeated data, then implementing a content reuse strategy. Just imagine how much easier your life will be with half as much content to manage.

Mark Gross
July 20th, 2004

>>>Stay tuned for future DCLnews articles on the specifics of implementing content reuse in your organization.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Content Reuse - The Unseen Revolution
http://www.dclab.com/unseen_revolution.asp

Content Reuse, The Killer App
http://www.dclab.com/content_reuse.asp

Technical Documents Go Online At Continental Airlines http://www.dclab.com/coair_digdocs.asp

Documents Pulped By Bulldozer - XML To The Rescue! http://www.dclab.com/xmlrescue.asp

TI's Tech Docs Travel At The Speed Of Light http://www.dclab.com/texas_instruments_case_study.asp

Tech Docs Down The Well
http://www.dclab.com/schlumberger.asp

Interested in putting your data on a diet?

We are accepting a limited number of applications to join an “Early Adopters” program that affords you leading edge technology that won't have your budget on the bleeding edge. Interested? Please click here for more details.