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This White Paper examines the use of XML authoring and publishing software to quantify the impact that inefficient content-related business processes have on the bottom line.
In the spring and summer of 2003, Arbortext and IDC developed and administered two surveys that probed the use of XML authoring and publishing software, the reasons for investing in it, and the savings either expected or documented as a result of that investment. The first survey was administered to a list of companies and organizations that had expressed an interest in XML authoring and publishing software. From this list, 349 responded. The second survey, which probed more deeply into reasons for and savings from XML authoring and publishing, was distributed to Arbortext customers, of whom 81 responded.
The profile for both groups was similar: The largest group of respondents in each survey stated that they were from very large (5,000 or more employees) organizations. When asked to describe the type of work they did, over 40% of respondents in each group chose technical publications/documentation. Professional services and discrete manufacturing represented, respectively, 38.2% and 23.6% of the respondents in the larger study, and those numbers were mirrored within a percentage point by the smaller study of Arbortext customers. Respondents described their jobs as creating, managing, and publishing content.
PORTRAIT OF CONTENT PROCESSES
Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Respondents were concentrated heavily in technical publishing. Technical publications accounted for 78.3% of the documents that they created, with service information a distant second at 47.1%, and field service manuals at 38.7%. Again, these results were mirrored by the smaller survey. Multiple responses were allowed on these questions; therefore, the total percentages add up to more than 100%. In the larger study, respondents indicated that they are publishing XML content to multiple media simultaneously, with print (84.4%), Web (84.1%), and CD-ROM (69.5%) predominating. Help files at 40.6% was the other significant area.
Our shorter survey asked respondents how much time they spent on a variety of content tasks. Table 1 shows the tasks and the average time that respondents spent on each task in an average week.
Not surprisingly, the greatest number of hours was devoted to writing copy for print publication (12.09 hours), followed by editing (6.01 hours) and then approving (5.19 hours) copy. Note, though, that a significant number of hours were devoted to relatively routine tasks, such as searching for materials that already exist (3.4 hours), updating copy that was originally published to print publication (3.35 hours), or preparing materials for publishing to print publication (4.32 hours). For organizations that devote significant man-hours to publishing, these hours add up to major expenditures. That might be why most respondents in the larger survey had such high hopes for XML authoring and publishing software.
Table 2 shows the percentage of respondents from the larger survey who expected significant improvement or substantial improvement as a result of XML authoring and publishing software. The respondents cited reduction in errors, reduced time to market, and reduced costs as their top 3 expected benefits. Over 68% of all companies, 75% of manufacturing companies, and more than 64% of companies of all sizes have high expectations (significant to substantial improvements) for reduction of errors in their editing processes. At least 66% of companies (across all sizes) have high expectations for reduced time to market. Of the $1 billion-plus revenue companies, 70.5% expect significant to substantial improvements in reducing time to market. Sixty-nine percent of manufacturing and 65.9% of services companies expect significant to substantial improvements in reducing time to market. In addition, over 61% of all companies and 71.8% of the $1 billion-plus revenue companies expect significant to substantial cost reduction.
MAJOR INEFFICIENCIES AND THEIR COST
Respondents were asked to choose the top 3 causes of inefficiency in their content processes from the following list:
Redundant updates of information that has been copied and pasted
Searching for content to reuse
Recreating content that already exists
Translating the same or very similar content multiple times
Translating unchanged content
Manually formatting documents for publication
Converting document to other publishing formats
Creating customized varieties of information
Updating information already published
Other
Of these, the most significant causes of inefficiency in creating, translating, and publishing content were:
Recreating content that already exists
Searching for content to reuse
Creating customized varieties of information
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