The ROI of a Content Management Strategy

WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT Ask Us About: The ROI of a Content Management Strategy

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WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT: Ask Us About: The ROI of a Content Management Strategy

The following transcript is from a webinar held with Vasont Systems and Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL) on the return‐on‐investment (ROI) of a content management strategy. The format of the webinar was a question‐and‐answer session. Audience members submitted their questions on this topic prior to the webinar, and the speakers from these partner companies addressed the questions regarding the ROI of a content management strategy during the event.

Moderator: “ROI is a hot and complicated topic, so we really appreciate your participation in this webinar. Our first sponsor of this event is Vasont Systems. They are headquartered in Pennsylvania. Vasont Systems provides component content management software and XML data services to global organizations from a variety of industries including manufacturing, technology, healthcare, publishing, and financial. Since 1992, Vasont Systems has helped companies organize their critical business assets, manage productivity, and disseminate information in many languages to multiple media channels while reducing their cost and shortening overall cycle times. Vasont Systems has been named four times to the EContent 100 list of the best and brightest digital companies.

Our second sponsor for this webinar is Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL), a leader in organizing, converting, and moving content to modern formats for wide access in new revenue streams. With expertise in many industries, DCL’s proprietary technology matched with the US‐based project management teams solve clients complex conversion challenges securely, accurately and on time, serving business, governments, individuals, and non‐profits by future‐proofing their content. DCL started in 1981 and has been named by one of the top 100 companies in the digital content industry by EContent magazine for the second year running.”

QUESTION 1: WHAT ARE THE CRITICAL FACTORS FOR A SUCCESSFUL CONTENT MANAGEMENT STRATEGY?

Vasont Systems: “When it comes to critical success factors, we think there is at least a few that should be brought to your attention. These include making sure you are realistic with your schedules when you are going into a content project. Don’t over promise and under deliver but recognize that you do need to show results in a prescribed amount of time in order to continue to fund the project and give it vitality. You also want to make sure to have the right people with the right skills and the right attitude in place for you initial core teams. Those skills will vary depending on the scope of what you are doing and breadth of it, but you want to make sure that you have the right people on your team to participate. The third thing: it’s very important to get the proper training to make sure you have folks that know what they are doing. It’s also useful to have consultants involved that have done it before and can help you keep your eyes peeled for potholes in your projects. Lastly and most importantly, make sure you have established benchmark measurements in hand before you go making any changes so that you have something to measure against while you chart your success. Often times you could have a very successful project, but without the necessary metrics to support the ongoing funding of the project, you find yourself high and dry.”

WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT: Ask Us About: The ROI of a Content Management Strategy

QUESTION 2: DURING OUR LAST CONVERSION OF CONTENT FORMAT, WE HAD QUALITY ISSUES THAT PUT OUR PROJECT AT CONSIDERABLE RISK. WITH ADVANCEMENTS IN CONTENT STANDARDS, CAN WE ELIMINATE THESE QUALITY ISSUES?

DCL: “I know you went through good projects and bad projects, and when you do postmortem of a bad project, you start looking through several different items that occurred during the execution of a project. I’m going to assume that whoever asked this question is working through an outside vendor and the first thing that happens on a conversional data is people think, “oh, it’s just conversional data, it’s simple,” so they don’t really plan how this is going to be done. Getting the resources involved, getting together the right content, and doing a constant monitoring during the project will ensure that you are going down the right pathway, and when you get down to the end conversion, putting into production when you actually have the structure and data that you want to be in. Also, as you start digging through the existing legacy content, you’ll find a lot of redundancy and messy data because it’s probably been written by two or three different authors through the history of the data. What you have to do is look at the content and see how consistent it is and how much it needs cleaned up before you go through the conversion process, because once you go through the process, it’s not going to clean the data for you. It doesn’t know that this word means that word or that it’s a different version of that word. The thing is, clean the content because when you have good data going in, you get excellent data coming out once you go to a new structure. Another thing is you have to involve the subject matter expert because they can look at a piece of information and say, “oh, that’s not right.” A person doing the conversion may not have dealt with the specific data in that industry, so make sure you have the experts available. And what we do at DCL and other companies that do conversion use automated tools that are available to do the conversion, supplying better results because it’s more consistent. You take out some of the human error involved and it really makes it much quicker, and if that data changes, you can run it through again to make sure the results are the same. Another thing is to have a defined process. While you’re going through, monitor your steps along the way, and monitor the process of the conversion. We have a process we establish to ensure quality data on the output, and then do the training. The people that are the subject matter experts are the managers so they all know what’s going on during this process and the steps so that they will be alerted and then after that we’ll do a briefing, “here’s what you have right now, here’s the quality that you expected and the data you expected” and the structured information will help with that. And QA is very important; you need to do at least two to three QA cycles along the way to ensure that it is good quality when you start up. Good structure can’t create quality data but QA can create good quality data, so ensure that your process is very rigid. I can tell you nobody has the time to do it well themselves and I don’t think there’s any staff out there that are overstaffed.”

Vasont Systems: “The symptoms of sub‐optimal projects tend to really occur and reoccur over and over again. In terms of data conversion, self‐conversion never saves time or money. It rarely does, and I think that’s a real good point to bear in mind.”

WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT: Ask Us About: The ROI of a Content Management Strategy

QUESTION 3: WHAT SHOULD I MEASURE TO KNOW THAT I AM GETTING A RETURN OR NOT?

Vasont Systems: “As far as we are concerned, using a component content management system is a combination of software and processes which will give you a maximum return investment primarily by optimizing reuse. Now, there are many phases to content reuse that include translation savings and savings in republishing to different formats to different modes and for different personnel types. At the end of the day that optimization is going to result in savings in time, labor, and out of pocket costs. Now there are a whole host of additional softer benefits that can be included. These tend to be things like transparency into your process, efficiency so people know what is going on and they aren’t surprised by any hiccups that may occur. Often times in the real world those softer benefits generate the larger ROI, but if you are going in front of a hard‐nosed CFO, you want to make sure to really nail your hard benefits to be highly provable.”

DCL: “When you work with a CMS, the ability to reuse information allows you to have a consistent look across your documents, whether it’s a training document or an operations manual. Additionally, once you go to advanced structures, this frees you from the delivery format, allowing you to create new products with new functionality and new deliverables. This takes the content that was of paper format and adds much more value to that content.”

QUESTION 4: IN WHAT AREAS SHOULD I SEE AN ROI USING A CONTENT MANAGEMENT STRATEGY?

Vasont Systems: “Vasont went out and solicited accurate self‐reported results from our own clients over a 10‐year period. We went to them, asked them to tell us their results, and then used that to guide them through their experience. The savings and categories were remarkably consistent and can be used as kind of a rough cut template that you might apply to your own processes. For example, in terms of cost savings: 52% costs savings in editorial and content development on average, a 58% reduction in production costs, and a 78% reduction in translation costs on and ongoing basis. A further reflection on savings proficiencies is: the reduction and editorial production time is 59%, the reduction of production cycles is 85%, translations were reduced by 80%, and, somewhere been 62‐93% content reuse. It’s also a consolidation of IT resources and operational resources. We don’t proliferate a million separate pieces of content management technology; we’d rather have a centralized approach to it. You find significant and consistent improvements in customer satisfaction. The customers of your content are showing increasing levels of satisfaction with the accessibility and the transparency of your content. You also reduce your time for managing customer support. A client basically demonstrated that their ROI estimates were not aggressive enough; they showed ROI in less the time that they predicted to their senior management. So there’s a reason that folks are moving to structured content management and these are the tools that help you get there and stay there efficiently over time."

DCL: “I tend to look on the other side of things. I have seen systems that content is managed in filing systems and I look at the cost at doing business that way. The fact that I’ve seen files lost, I’ve seen people modifying the same content at the same time, and the last one is the one who gets published, so information gets lost. I look at the actual cost of not going to a CMS.”

Vasont Systems: “That’s a great point and a lot of points folks don’t understand that something is broken if they haven’t experienced it before.”

WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT: Ask Us About: The ROI of a Content Management Strategy

QUESTION 5: GIVE SOME REAL‐LIFE EXAMPLES OF HOW STRUCTURED CONTENT PROCESSES (WRITING, DISTRIBUTION, AND MAINTENANCE) HAVE IMPROVED REGULATORY COMPLIANCE AND OVERALL QUALITY ASSURANCE?

DCL: “NDAs don’t allow me to mention any names but you’ll probably guess who some of these companies are. I’ve worked in the aerospace industry for nearly 30 years. I worked mainly in tech publications and different areas. The quality issues of insurance were very important factors. When dealing with manufacturers that produced airplanes, the safety of the operation of the aircraft was very important. Then, regulatory compliance working with the FAA and the military were important because if you had a hiccup in your information, it could cause things as flights being cancelled, airplanes going down, including maybe shutting the whole corporation because of compliance or safety aspects. The quick answer is that it doesn’t matter what institute you are in, aerospace, pharmaceutical or other, the more structured your content is always improves every aspect of your company from the internal to the external looking at your company. Internally you are under control; you can take this structure and reuse information from framing to operations to managing work units within the company. Both internally or externally, and in most industries, it’s virtually impossible to stay competitive and compliant while supplying the highest accuracy within your information unless you have it under a CMS so that you can break these units of information into controlled pieces. They make things very clear and easy to go back through your history to find the information that was distributed at a certain times.”

Vasont Systems: “The criticality of content is becoming more and more self‐relevant with the ability to self‐manage; it’s more and more important.”

QUESTION 6: MY COMPANY ALREADY HAS A CMS, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO LEARN HOW TO MEASURE ROI IN ORDER TO JUSTIFY ADDITIONAL TOOLS TO SUPPLEMENT THE SYSTEM PERFORMANCE. HOW CAN I GO ABOUT THAT?

Vasont Systems: “This is a great question. We ran across this a lot because we have a user group meeting annually that users currently using our CMS can attend and they struggle with this all the time. A couple of high level guidelines that I recommend: Number one, make sure that you have a consistently available measure of success. Sometimes our clients have engineered away the pain and they have a very successful deployment. Then the particular pain point that they were justifying their business dates on has been engineered out of existence by the establishment of a very successful project, but be aware of that. You need to be able to consistently measure your success. The second one is that if you are not continuing to get measures of ROI of the various area of a project, you need to seek out new ones and find what you need. Perhaps focus on translation optimization in order to get justification to do so. The biggest one is understand that almost without exception you will be called upon by your senior manager to re‐justify this CMS and these data conversion services. Folks are going to come to you 12‐18 months into the project and say why do we have to continue to hire these service providers, can’t we just use SharePoint or Microsoft Word? You need to re‐educate and be prepared to defend your project’s value to the organization. One of our most successful clients has done a fantastic job of this over the last 11‐12 years and has self‐reported a provable something ridiculous like 63 million dollars in savings. They are a big company with a lot of content but on a global basis. They have been able to prove obtaining 63 million dollars of profit that otherwise would have went out the door through use a CMS. Those are principles are important.”

DCL: “They will come back to you and say, “ok I just spent all this money last year, so get me that ROI that you told me I would get” and you need to be ready for that. I think you can also show the value that you have taken with your information and the ability you have to move forward in this quickly

WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT: Ask Us About: The ROI of a Content Management Strategy

advancing technical information environment. Things change on a monthly basis in technology, so you have to have a foundation to work on, like building a house. One thing I’ve seen in a CMS is that you need an engineering set to operate and to modify. I think if you get the right CMS in place as a foundation that will help you to continuously improve the way you do business, the way you work in the future and keep up with technology without putting up a lot of money to your technical implementation team.”

QUESTION 7: WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ELEMENT IN DETERMINING WHETHER I WILL HAVE AN ROI BY INVESTING IN A CCMS SOLUTION?

Vasont Systems: “I have a theory about this one that’s based on 30 years in helping to deploy complex software solutions for large organizations and companies. The main determination of success and ongoing success, in my opinion, is the expertise and commitment of not only the providers that you work with, be that software or service providers, but also of your own personnel involved in the result center deployment. There have been a number of times that I’ve appointed two virtually identical companies a CCMS that conclude with different results. Company A struggled with their project because it wasn’t well planned, well‐staffed and it lacked commitment. Two years down the road the CFO decided that they weren’t going to fund this project anymore and it was deemed a failure. Now company B that is in the same industry beat his budget, measured his results, and had folks that were really on board. They executed the project well. I would encourage you to pay attention to those types of elements. Vasont has always practiced that, we do our own deployment for our clients and we don’t outsource. We insist on doing it ourselves and working as partners with our customers to develop a complete solution that meets their needs. We’ve had a wonderful track record of highly satisfied clients.”

QUESTION 8: THEY HAVE CUT OUR TECHNICAL STAFF TO THE MINIMUM. NOW THEY WANT US TO START PRODUCING ONLINE DIGITAL OUTPUT. HOW DO I GET THIS DONE?

DCL: “Corporations have been cutting back staff quite a bit and now all these new digital standards have come out, such as EBooks, IPads, online information systems, and more. Even though the staff has been cut back to a minimum, upper management starts hounding to get your content on these digital deliverables. The staff starts asking how they are going to get that done. The fact is you are not going to be able to do it internally with the minimum staff you have that’s already working weekends. You have to let your managers know that you understand this is important for building your company’s market but at this point in time the main focus is keeping the business going. Hiring experts in this area will get you to the next stage to get these products out in the deliverables that management is demanding. This is a compelling argument because they can look at your staff, see what you are producing, and know that this it isn’t possible without the experts. Before the experts come in, you need to look around to see if you are wasting any resources. Converting a bad process doesn’t make you more efficient. Then you need to figure out how to approach upper management with the fact that, if you don’t bring in the experts, you will be losing market share because other companies in the industry are already producing their data to these new deliverables. This allows you to point out the fact that you can produce new products with these new deliverables and it will actually add value to your data. Your data is no longer a piece a paper; it will be a hyperlinked, dynamic piece of content. It can add value to the other data you are working with, so in the long run it will add value to your company and the revenue stream.”

Vasont Systems: “You are exactly right, if we don’t do it somebody else will.”

WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT: Ask Us About: The ROI of a Content Management Strategy

QUESTION 9: WE DON’T HAVE A BIG WRITING STAFF AND WE DON’T TRANSLATE OUR CONTENT TO FOREIGN LANGUAGES. CAN WE PROVE A STRONG ROI IN OUR CASE?

Vasont Systems: “That’s a great question; Vasont gets this all the time. The answer is, yes you can, depending on a couple things. Number one would be that you’re moving from a totally unstructured environment to some manner of structure in your content and you are trying to get the benefits of what that structure can deliver to you. In that case, having a CCMS is a big help. We have one client that had about three writers in a room. They weren’t big, but they handled a lot of content. They handled a couple hundred thousand content pages on an annualized basis and tens of thousands of graphics. They were doing ok except that they really didn’t have any extensive control, so they did not translate this content and they showed a really robust ROI of sub‐twelve months. More importantly they were able to show some pretty nifty soft benefits that improved the overall quality of their content. For instance, they were able to designate a certain amount of their limited number of staff as specialists. They were able to easily get those appropriate content tasks to the subject matter specialists very easily. All of the employees could perform all positions but some would focus on certain things like that. You don’t necessarily have a big giant multi‐zillion dollar staff in order to show justification, nor do you need to have a ton of translation to show it, although it does help to reduce those costs pretty significantly.

The last thing that I want to point out is when you have a lesser content requirement you can tend to scale down your content solution. I know with DCL it’s project dependent in terms of how they do what they do and same with Vasont. We are pretty flexible with being able to scale the software appropriately, including the ability to deliver the technology as SaaS (software‐as‐a‐service) content. SaaS eliminates the hefty burden of up front capital outlay when you get started on a project.”

DCL: “As you know we have a world economy out there. If you’re not outside the US, it won’t be very long before you start delivering outside the US. The question, besides the price will be: can you do it in our local language? Can you take these English documents and operational information and put it into the local language? That question has been out there for a long time. You have to develop a standardized approach to creating information and how you manage it and how you deliver the content. Then, you have to build in technical terms because they are normally the same whether you are in English, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, etc. The way the terminology of technical information is termed normally stays the same. That being said, you can take that information and put wrappers around it, create metadata tags, and say, “ok, this is a technical term.” This term is going to stay the same whether this is Spanish or other languages. The next thing you do is you take this information and chunk it into smaller pieces. This allows you to take information that has to be translated into a different language and only focus on getting a parallel path with English or other different languages for that certain piece of information. There are tools out there that will take English and do a pretty good job at translating it into different languages. We are getting to the point where it’s not automated and you have to validate it and QA it. You can at least get it a draft version of a different language of this type of document that you are producing for other countries.”

QUESTION 10: WITH PROLIFERATION OF NEW TOOLS AVAILABLE, IS A COMPONENT CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM REALLY NECESSARY?

Vasont Systems: “I am avid devotee of various blogs having to do with CMS solutions. Recently I ran across a blog post on LinkedIn editor. In this blog a gentleman was touting his ability to move to structured content without a CCMS and he was very proud of it. He then went on to explain the links and complexity of cobbling together various systems and software in order to get some kind of a comprehensive solution. The response that I would have to the guy is, congratulations, but you are

WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT: Ask Us About: The ROI of a Content Management Strategy

taking a risk with your most valuable assets, your content, by rolling your own solution that far outweighs the cost of doing it well and right from the outset. We believe that Vasont should be viewed as a modern day air traffic controller for your content. It allows you to use various editors, publishing platforms, DTDS, and all to publish your content to multiple content modes—digital, wiki tables, mobile devices, and languages. This isn’t just file type content, this is chunks of content that can get very complicated very quickly, and the work processes to manage it can spin dramatically out of control without some kind of system to help you rein it in.”

DCL: “Like I said before, file managed content—even if it’s structured content—it will work for a while, but pretty soon everything is out of control. Usually you have a recovery process which usually is very painful. Don’t go down that direction.”

QUESTION 11: CAN STRUCTURED CONTENT PRODUCE THE SAME ROI WITHOUT USING A CCMS?

Vasont Systems: “My answer is similar, no. You have to understand what a CCMS does. It gives you vital content control, particularly for organizations that are geographically or temporality dispersed. If you have folks in different time zones, different languages, geographies, working in similar content, you have to have some glue to bind that together.”

DCL: “You have to have that to produce an ROI. Everything will be short‐lived if you try to do it without a CCMS.”

QUESTION #12: WHAT DOES OUR TEAM NEED TO DO TO MOVE LEGACY CONTENT TO S1000D OR DITA? HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO COVERT AND POTENTIAL SAVINGS?

DCL: “I can tell you I always get the second question before I get the first question. In the potential savings, hire experts and start this process early because it takes time to do it correctly. They can lead you through this process and help you get the best results with a successfully executed project. Moving from legacy content to S1000D or DITA or any structure that is standard in your industry takes a very good understanding. You need to understand what they have in their data, what the content means, and how they identify that content within their data. Then we take that information and map that content into the structures such as DITA or S1000D so that you get the value that you have right now and you put it in a rigid, defined structure. That’s the thing you can do when you get into these types of structures. The team needs to understand what they have and how they identify these components. Then they can work with the experts in mapping that to the new structures. How much does it cost? It depends on where you are coming from. If you are coming from paper, it takes a little more money and a little more time. If you are coming from a structured piece of information, such as structured FrameMaker, it takes a little bit less time and a little bit less money. Those things will all be done in the project planning. The experts should be able to give you the ROI once they get there and they understand your business. The savings are reusability, efficiency, consistency, enhanced capabilities, moving to multiple resources.”

Vasont Systems: “I do think it’s like you said, it’s difficult to pinpoint precisely up front without the analysis of a sample statement of work done by experts, but with that in hand, you can get a relatively precise savings estimate that you can hang your hat on with senior management.”

WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT: Ask Us About: The ROI of a Content Management Strategy

QUESTION 13: WE ARE CLOSE TO PRESENTING A CMS TO OUR SENIOR MANAGEMENT TEAM AND WOULD APPRECIATE ANY ADVICE ABOUT ROI.

DCL: “This is normally the first thing that has to be done, and it takes time to do this. The management team is looking for what they are going to get out of this in the next six months to two years. Normally there are not a lot of budgets that are overflowing, so they tend to want the type of projects that have been requested and prioritize them. My experience through the years has been the normal process goes this way: First of all, they look at how much production is required—how much headcount there is going to be—to produce the same product or efficiency. I know nobody likes to hear that but with my experience that is the first thing they want to look at.

The second thing is the production of these new products we can produce with this new system or implementation. They ask questions like, “Can it be sold for additional revenue? Can we create a new revenue stream for this company and how much will that be? Will it pay off this investment in two years?” That’s the second thing they are going to be looking at.

The third thing they will be looking at is that they need to resolve a current event or issue. There have been issues that have caused many resources and money to be wasted, so those types of compelling events move the resolution up the list very quickly. If you have something like that going on in your company either now or down the line, you can utilize that to elevate your project to the front of the list to get resources available at quicker time frame. These events could be poor quality output that can result in customer complaints with your product, or any other legal action that’s due to injury because of the information you produced that was very unclear or inaccurate. Those types of things are basis for compelling events or issues that need to be resolved quickly and can bring your project to immediate execution. Take your own polls to your own company and look at your own information.”

Vasont Systems: “In the case of CCMS, like Vasont, we are able to help you reduce the size of the checks you are writing to translation companies. If you’ve been spending a million bucks a year on translations services, we can help you get back to half a million dollars a year. That’s not savings, that’s just doing it the right way. Second thing is, it’s not just headcount reduction; it’s also avoiding headcount growth that you might want to put out. Finally, bear in mind when you go to senior management, you are competing with your colleague down the hall who has a great investment option for them to use the same capital that you want for your project, and they have an ROI as well. You certainly want to be honest, accurate, and defensible, but you have to understand that it’s a competitive environment. You have to understand that if for some reason it doesn’t happen, don’t give up. Go back, reload, and continue to make your case. The last thing I’d say, typically this involves a degree in education for your senior management. They don’t know pain, they don’t know your processes or the process efficiencies that you are trying to sell them. Even if you don’t get the funding, you will at least get kudos for trying to make us more efficient and competitive.”

QUESTION 14: DO GEOGRAPHIES MATTER IN DECIDING THE PRICING FOR SUCH PROJECTS?

Vasont Systems: “It certainly doesn’t matter in terms of price of software or anything like that. You want to make sure you have the right people on your project team, and they are approximate to where the work is being done. That’s a consideration geographically.”

DCL: “Actually I have quite a view on this because I was very naïve when I first started going off shore and meeting with companies. In certain parts of the world, implementing a million dollar system to save on two‐three headcounts would not come close to evening out. The cost of resources and people to do the work is so cheap that that it would take 10+ years for them to see any revenue from the

WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT: Ask Us About: The ROI of a Content Management Strategy

system. The way to approach this would be to indicate to them that, by implementing this system, you will now have access to a specific portion of the world, as far as bringing your products in. You will pass the region’s rigorous requirements to start selling your product within this country. It also depends on what part of the world you are talking about. If you are talking about the England or France, personnel and number of heads you have is important. You have to research the areas you are going into and find out what type of costs the labor is, the agencies that are available in that area, and the economy of that part of the world. That all factors in on their decision to budget a project.”

QUESTION 15: SINCE MUCH DOCUMENTATION IS WRITTEN IN XML, WHAT ADVANTAGES DO CMS PROVIDE OVER SIMPLE FILE VERSIONING SYSTEMS SUCH AS CLEAR CASE OR SUBVERSION TO MANAGE OUR CONTENT?

Moderator: “I wrote a paper on this so I will jump in. When you are talking CCMS, I think some of the differences are that these systems can also manage processes in addition to content, so you can project manage all of your content. You can establish workflows to make sure your content is following the same processes all the time. There is a lot of complexity that goes with XML content. Also, it can be broken down and reused at the component level and not at the file level, which is where you get a lot more of the benefits and the return on your investment.”

QUESTION 16: IF YOU HAVE A HUGE RANGE OF ACQUIRED PRODUCTS EACH WITH ITS OWN CONTENT SET CREATED USING VARIED TOOLS, STYLES, AND PRACTICES, HOW CAN YOU START CONVINCING MANAGEMENT TO INVEST IN A CMS, AND WHAT ROI CAN YOU TALK ABOUT WHEN PRODUCTS ARE DISPARATE AND NOT TRANSLATED?

Vasont Systems: “That’s a great question. I think DCL can comment very knowledgably about the complexity of trying to convert multiple formats to a common format, whatever that might be on a reliable basis. In terms of a CCMS, you’re going to have to have that unless you want to operate separate tools and processes for each acquired content set. You might as well add it for each different language and user class. It rapidly becomes illogical and inefficient and, in many respects, pretty demoralizing for the people tasked with managing this. There’s no way they can get ahead of this. It’s kind of Chinese water torture of perpetually dealing with conversion processes.”

DCL: “I have a project right now that I’m working on designing that the customer has some PDF files. They have PDF files that are produced from three different sources to finally get it to a final PDF; this is a catalog‐type PDF. Then they have a DITA file that is actually a set of tables that has information about that part in the PDF. The project is to link all these different types of information sources, bring them into a relational type file, and then put it out into a structured data content in XML that brings all these different factors from different points together. I have no idea how they actually produced these files, but once they get this process and data merged, it will be 90% more efficient in producing the output, and their accuracy is going to be way off the chart than where they are right now.”

Vasont Systems provides component content management software and XML data services to Fortune 1,000 companies and global organizations from a variety of industries, including manufacturing, technology, publishing, financial, and healthcare. Since 1992, Vasont Systems has helped companies organize their critical business assets, manage productivity, and disseminate information in many languages to multiple media channels while reducing their costs by an average of 63% and shortening overall cycle times by 75% on average. The Company has been named multiple times to the EContent 100 list of “best and brightest digital content companies.” Vasont Systems is a member of the TransPerfect family of companies. For more information, visit www.vasont.com.