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Ninety percent of published information is stale: customers are overloaded with information but usually cannot find what they need; the field force is dispatched to service calls with incorrect instructions; help desks desperately shuffle through a myriad of papers to find obsolete answers; organizations frequently publish incomplete or outdated information. It's no wonder that customer satisfaction is low, service costs are high, and legal exposure is high.
Creating and using redundant, inconsistent and unstructured information for formal publishing requirements is a recipe for failure. Just as you could not tolerate uncontrolled data in your organization's financial management systems, you can no longer afford to handle your intellectual content in an uncontrolled, unconstrained, error-prone and highly labor-intensive manner.
By using traditional publishing software, authors typically waste 30% to 50% of their time formatting documents instead of focusing solely on content creation and improvement.1 Often, authors must recreate content that already exists because that content can't be located. Inconsistencies in the sequence and structure of information across similar documents make the information difficult for readers to understand. Finally, lack of automation forces authors to manually update multiple documents when a product or service changes, which is a time-consuming and error-prone process.
By using an enterprise content management (ECM) solution designed for optimizing your technical publications process, your organization can gain a significant competitive advantage and achieve lasting differentiation from your competition.
This paper will discuss how you can improve the quality of your publications and why a special purpose content management solution is optimal for solving your information quality problems.
Poor Information Quality Impacts Organizational Performance and Corporate Profitability
The inability to reuse information and automate publishing is one of the largest areas of inefficiency in today's corporate environments. When totaled, these inefficiencies have a dramatic, but typically unrecognized impact on internal costs, revenue recognition, productivity, time-tomarket, and customer satisfaction.
In today's competitive environment, customer demands for greater innovation must be met by bringing products to market in a timely fashion at the lowest possible cost. Technical publications are a necessary part of the overall product or service introduction. Senior management often overlooks the impact of technical documentation, but an inefficient publishing process can have a significant effect on the financial success of a product or service. Technical publications (product or service manuals, installation guides, warranty information, sales and marketing materials, etc.) must always incorporate the most accurate product information. A common practice among companies that employ traditional publishing software is to postpone documentation development until the conclusion of the product or service development phase, when all design changes have supposedly been made. Often, this strategy leads to product launch delays, missed market opportunities, and revenue losses. Alternatively, such last-minute publishing cycles place undue pressure on the publishing team, resulting in overtime and inaccurate product information. The net impact of this approach is inevitably a loss of customer satisfaction, higher service costs, and possible liability exposure.
Traditional Technical Publications Systems Limit the Benefits of ECM
Organizations with limited content management experience believe that deploying a content management system alone will solve their technical publications problems. Content management systems offer organizations the ability to impose controls over the process related to content creation and publishing. As a result, users can have a formal, predictable and secure way of assigning tasks for creating new information or updating existing information. However, traditional publishing systems such as word processing and desktop publishing software waste organizations' time and resources while limiting the benefits that Enterprise Content Management (ECM) can deliver. This waste arises from the way that traditional word processing and desktop publishing software lets authors create and publish information.
The primary limitations of traditional word processing and desktop publishing software include:
- Manual updates. Copying/pasting content is a common method for making changes when using desktop publishing. Although this method may add to authoring efficiency when creating a stand-alone document, it greatly complicates the maintenance of documents. Changes to content require authors to manually search and update redundant content in multiple sections within multiple documents. This is the writer's nightmare and accounts for a major portion of authors' "wasted effort". Additionally, the process is error-prone and often causes inconsistencies or inaccuracies in published content.
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