In a DCL exclusive interview with Diane Wieland, Ann Rockley and Steve Manning of The Rockley Group discuss some new ideas related to XML and DITA conversion. They share their thoughts on dynamic personalized content delivery and component content management, which is the topic of an upcoming CMS Watch report that Rockley is co-authoring. The Rockley Group was established in 1995 to serve the information creation community. Founding President, Ann Rockley, has more than 20 years of experience in online documentation, web design, instructional design, enterprise content management and content reuse (single sourcing). She is the author of Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy (with Steve Manning and Pamela Kostur). Steve Manning, Senior Consultant at The Rockley Group, has over 16 years of experience in the documentation field, and is highly experienced managing media and single source projects. Steve also teaches "Enterprise Content Management" at the University of Toronto and speaks and writes extensively on the topic.

DCL: Ann, can you tell us what's going on in industry right now, as far as conversion and reuse is concerned? What are companies asking for?

Ann Rockley: Companies are looking to do more, do it better, do it faster, and do it cheaper. And there is almost always a business need. They are coming to us saying, 'We've got some problems we need to fix. Is DITA the solution? Is XML the solution and how do we proceed?' They are looking at a move to DITA/XML as a competitive advantage.

In cases where you have a lot of people contributing to content, there are a lot of opportunities for people to diverge from content and it becomes inconsistent. So companies are looking for ways to move to common structures, common styles, and a consistent way to present information.

We have been working with one government client that publishes information on paper and on the web. They are finding that they need to eliminate some of the desktop publishing tasks they have used in the past. The way they are doing things is very time consuming and there is a lot of duplication of effort. A big part of what they need is simply to automate the process by which they create PDF files and HTML for web sites, and cut down on the expense of desk top publishing.

The idea of reusing content is spreading far and wide. XML is well past the leading edge and becoming very much a common technology. And the same is almost true for DITA. It's moving away from the leading edge and becoming a little more mainstream.

DCL: In what industries do you see this activity? Who is taking the steps to move legacy documentation to DITA, or some type of structured XML format?

AR: We work a lot in software and other various high tech industries, and pharmaceutical and medical devices. We are also being approached by all kinds of companies that are looking at their marketing content not just technical content.

We see companies in regulated industries that have had problems in their content pointed out by regulators. The regulators recommend a change that needs to made in several places. So then everyone has to try to remember all the places where they need to make the change. Which document is that in? Which file refers to that feature? That's where content maintenance comes in. XML and DITA can help eliminate those questions. Getting that content into a manageable, searchable, content management system will allow you the confidence of knowing everywhere that piece of content appears.

DCL: What is motivating companies to make these efforts and how are they selling the idea within the company?

AR: Again, there is almost always a business need of some type. For many of our clients who deal with things like computer peripherals or telecommunications devices, they have an explosion in the number of products they have to support.

It's a struggle to manage technical documentation and marketing documentation for those different types of products. In the past you would support new products or product changes with a new document each time. As companies start to maintain the content, and products are added or changed, all that becomes an expensive nightmare to manage. They are faced with an explosion of complexity and their manual processes are not efficient enough. They simply must have a better way to manage the content they create.

Other companies see how expensive local translations and localizations are. We deal with a lot of companies that either have a global presence or are seeking a global presence. They want to manage the costs of localization and translation. In the past you created a document and had it translated. If it needed to be modified, you would send it back and have it translated again-the whole document.

Even with translation memory it still costs more than it would when you look at translating component-based, or DITA-based, solutions where you can translate only the chunks of content that have changed. A translation company charges for every word that they process. If you send them a 50,000 word document they charge for every word. With component-based translations, you can send chunks for translation as they are ready and signed off on. You can send a little at a time. This also helps companies save money while meeting timelines and new product launch deadlines.

So there is a tremendous savings when moving to component-based content management when it comes to translation. We had a client who thought they would see a return on investment in 18 months. They saved so much in translation costs, they saw their ROI in 11 months.

DCL: Ann, in the book you write with Steve Manning and Pamela Kostur Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, you discuss the importance of analysis. Is this the same thing as a content audit?

AR: Analysis goes beyond a content audit. Going into a content management project is no different than implementing a new piece of software. Success will come from going though a full analysis. With analysis you look at content a little differently. You need to think about content as a process. You need to look at the processes you use to create it, how it is maintained, updated, and published.

And you need to look at the issues of the content and understand them. It begins with looking at similar kinds of content, such as user guides for different products, and looking at them from a structural perspective. Is it organized the same from chapter to chapter? Is it stylistically the same? Is there a place I can reuse content?

You can also look below that and keep breaking structure down into smaller and smaller pieces. You really start looking at content as building blocks. Then you can look at a user guide compared to a training module, or a user guide and marketing materials. Look at how things are documented. Ask, 'Is there a way I can document the procedure once, and automatically use it in the user guide and training module and still be effective in both uses?' When we look at the content we are looking for opportunities for smart content reuse that aims to eliminate problems caused by redundant and incongruent content.

The Rockley Group Inc. has an international reputation for developing customer-centric enterprise content management strategies and underlying information architecture. They have helped organizations develop structured content reuse and unified content strategies across departments, divisions, and the enterprise. Working with customers in the Life Sciences (Eli Lilly, Guidant, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, Wyeth), Financial (Citibank, Bank of Canada, Deloitte & Touche, PWC) and High Technology (Business Objects, Cisco, HP, Lexmark, Symantec) industries, The Rockley Group has developed structured content reuse solutions to reduce the cost and effort of complex information creation and management.

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