7 Steps to Structured Content

Posted by Mark Brousseau

Structured content can be a powerful change agent within the organization. But to reap the power, Tom Magliery, an XML Technology Specialist at JustSystems, says organizations must first embrace the change. Magliery offers the steps below to help make the change happen:

Companies that adopt structured content have consistently seen it accelerate the creation, simplify the maintenance, and improve the quality of their content. They've seen structured content drive higher quality information, reduced publishing costs, and faster times to market for their technical manuals, policy documents, financial information, and other content and content-based
products and services.

So how does an organization - a department, division, or an entire company - get on the structured content bandwagon? Or, if it's already on the bandwagon, how does it expand the use of structured content within its operations? In either instance, the organization needs a strategy for moving to structured content and managing the change such a move creates. After years working with companies and helping them with their structured content adoption, I've found several common steps in the process.

Step 1 - Find a champion. You need a manager to sponsor the project, someone with a vested interest in the success of the structured content project. The champion's title is not as important as his or her commitment. Depending on the size of the organization, the title may be relatively modest. Department managers can be just as effective in the champion role as senior vice presidents. In fact, the department manager may be more effective than the senior VP in a department-level adoption. Regardless, the champion needs to be someone with a strategic vision and influence in the organization when it comes to content processes, and someone who stands to benefit by the move to structured content.

Step 2 - Understand the problem. What are the problems associated with your current content practices? And what are those problems costing today in terms of money, lost time, redundancies, inefficiencies, etc? Companies in regulated industries or litigious fields need to consider costs associated with penalties and litigation. For most companies, a typo is embarrassing, but it can lead to a huge fine or worse for companies in financial services or pharmaceuticals or other regulated industries. Finally, consider opportunity costs, the opportunities you can't pursue due to unstructured content constraints - e.g., adding multiple languages in a product line or publishing content in new formats.

Step 3 - Propose the alternative. Given the problems revealed in the previous step, define how structured content is going to resolve them. Map structured content's key functional attributes - content reuse, separation of format and content, etc. - to the challenges currently posed by unstructured content. Identify how reusable content could drive down costs by eliminating duplicate content creation or mitigate risk by ensuring the right content is used in all technical, legal and financial documents. Explain how the separation of format and content accelerates time to market by simplifying the creation of new content deliverables. Bottom line, you need to provide your champion with a vision of how structured content will solve those specific business problems that you just articulated.

In step 3, you also begin gathering requirements for the new structured content systems. This is a good place to start engaging the people who will be using the new tools and working with the new processes. You get a better idea of users' needs, and you get users invested in and excited by the new system, all of which promotes successful adoption.

Step 4 - Implement the change. Most organizations starting from scratch with structured content are better off starting small, getting their feet wet with a departmental pilot project instead of a broader departmental - or enterprise - rollout. Even organizations expanding their use of structured content are encouraged to move slowly, racking up a series of small successes rather than risking one spectacular failure. So start small and get professional assistance with the technical details rather than trying to do it all, even the tasks that are within your skill set.

Similarly, don't reinvent the wheel when it comes to using structured content within your specific business. If DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) or some other schema is an appropriate solution for you, use it. The proof of concept is the proof of value. Later, you can expand the pilot into a larger implementation.

Step 5 - Hold users' hands. The last thing you want to do is implement a structured content solution only to have writers sneak off, create content in Word, and then copy and paste it to the structured content system because they're not comfortable. Make the users comfortable, especially the power users who others look to for how-to tips and advice. Too many organizations implement a project and move on, forgetting the people who have to use the new tools. Don't underestimate the amount of training and support users will need to be successful. And don't forget to give the users a voice in the adoption process. Implement a feedback cycle that lets them communicate their challenges and requests, and nurtures the feeling of investment that you initiated during Step 3.

Step 6 - Adjust and extend. Pilot projects are highly recommended for organizations that can afford them. The benefits of the pilot are the lessons learned from experience in the pilot. A pilot project reveals areas that can be improved and ways to make structured content tools and standards better fit the organization. So the pilot lets the organization make adjustments and corrections as it moves forward and builds out its structured content system.

Note the typical pilot project advice is "avoid customizations." In structured content, the pilot advice is "don't worry about getting your customizations perfect." Customization and specialization is inherent in the value of structured content. You can modify the systems to best serve your business needs. So as structured content adoption grows beyond the pilot, one of the key issues involves selection of the right products and the right standards. Those choices give you the right balance between what works out of the box and what is flexible - i.e., customizable - enough to meet future needs. You don't want a system that requires a lot of customization to be usable, but you do want a system that is capable of such customization to meet your evolving needs.

Step 7 - Acknowledge the success. No matter what size the organization or project, success needs to be communicated to project champions, project stakeholders, and the organization at large. This helps stakeholders look to other business units that may be suffering similar problems and help drive change in those areas of the organization. Ideally, those successes will be supported by before-and-after metrics that demonstrate quantifiable improvements - time or money saved, process efficiencies realized, etc.

What do you think?

Business Intelligence Trends for 2009

By Mark Brousseau

Even in a weak economy, demand continues for enterprise business intelligence, Vickie Farrell (vickie.farrell@hp.com), manager, Neoview market strategy & development, software division, at HP said today during a presentation at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2009 in Washington, D.C.

“IT spending has dropped precipitously in this economy,” Farrell noted. “But studies show business intelligence should grow by 7 percent this year, off from 8.6 percent growth in 2008. Business intelligence remains strong.”

Farrell thinks businesses will be well served by their business intelligence investments. “Businesses that maintain and build analytic capability will survive and thrive when the economy improves,” she said.

Farrell made her comments during an afternoon presentation in the HP Solutions Theater on the emerging macro and business intelligence trends for 2009. Among the trends she presented:

… The consumerization of IT. IT technology innovation is shifting from the enterprise and the military to consumer technology, spawning a new wave of IT adoption, Farrell said. The impact on business intelligence is increased visualization, greater collaboration, and new sources of data. Farrell believes that social networking will increasingly dictate information delivery and use.

… Business intelligence is increasing in importance. Farrell cited a Computerworld survey finding that 42 percent of respondents expected overall expenditures for business intelligence tools and solutions to increase from 2008 to 2009. And the economic crisis may actually drive some of this growth as more organizations realize that analyzing data can help them better deal with new government regulations, understand and manage their business, decrease their risks, and enhance their ability to compete.

… Business intelligence buyers are much more scrutinizing. Farrell said organizations are dealing with stricter requirements for clearly-defined business objectives and quantified value. Farrell also is seeing requirements for shorter payback periods and self-funding business intelligence initiatives.

… The market is demanding lower business intelligence complexity.

… Analytics are moving to the front office. Advanced analytics are top initiatives at many companies, Farrell said, noting that organizations with a culture and infrastructure for analytics and fact-based decision-making are better poised to compete and grow.

… Data integration is gaining momentum. Surveys show this to be a top business intelligence project challenge and key IT initiative, Farrell said. “As enterprises recognize data as a corporate asset, data management becomes a strategy corporate capability,” she explained.

… Structured and unstructured data are converging. “Integration of unstructured data increases the accuracy of business intelligence analysis,” Farrell said, noting that recent technology advances enable text mining and queries.

What do you think? Post your comments below.

Compliance Drives Automation

By Mark Brousseau

Many document automation vendors will tell you that compliance and audit issues are a major part of the business case for unstructured documents solutions, and the results of a recent Question of the Week on the TAWPI Web site confirm it.

Forty-nine percent of respondents to the online survey said that compliance and audit issues are playing a “very big” role in their need for unstructured documents solutions, while another 29 percent of respondents said compliance and audit issues were a “somewhat big” component. This means that compliance and audit issues were a significant factor in the need for unstructured documents solutions at 78 percent of the organizations that responded.

Just 18 percent of respondents said compliance and audit issues were a “somewhat small” issue in their need for unstructured documents solutions, while only 4 percent said they were a “very small” factor.

What is the story at your organization? E-mail me at m_brousseau@msn.com.

Structured Docs Going Image

By Mark Brousseau

Despite all the industry talk about automating unstructured document processing – and it’s sure to be a hot topic at TAWPI’s Capture Conference in December – to date, most organizations have focused their imaging efforts on structured documents. According to a recent Question of the Week on the TAWPI Web site, 80 percent of respondents said they imaged “mostly structured documents,” while 11 percent of respondents said they imaged “mostly unstructured docs.” Nine percent of the 87 respondents to the question said their organizations imaged “mostly semi-structured documents.” Where is your organization putting its efforts? E-mail me at m_brousseau@msn.com.