Once content is specialized, you can leverage your investment in semantics with automation of key processes, and begin tying content together—even across different specializations or authoring disciplines. For example, you can share common content across marketing and training, or share common processes and infrastructure throughout your content life cycle.

Scenario

The software division of a large technology company stores their content in a CMS, which allows all the teams in the division to reuse the content. At this level, they have moved beyond single-sourcing of content and achieved multiway reuse. Product descriptions created by the marketing team can be reused by the technical publications group to create product overviews, and by the training group to create product tours. At the same time, product architectural specifications created by technical publications can be reused by training, technical support groups, and the marketing team.

The following figure illustrates how content created by different teams can be reused in multiple deliverables by multiple teams across the division.

Figure 6: Content reuse across teams

Reusing its content across the teams in the division, the company can save a signifi cant amount of money by translating the content source rather than each deliverable that instantiates the content.

Investment

Organizations need a CMS to effectively control and automate the content development life cycle. In addition to storing content and providing versioning control, the CMS provides workfl ow automation support that assists authors in creating, reusing, and publishing. However, the investment in implementing a CMS is non-trivial in terms of preparation and cost.

In preparation for a CMS implementation, you must understand the structure of the content and where it is appropriate for reuse. This requires a significant amount of research, planning, and coordination to identify the reuse possibilities, requirements, and standards across disciplines. In addition, you need to defi ne a robust metadata model to support the content model and apply it to all topics. Lastly, you must have agreed-upon content development processes in order to automate them with workfl ow control. This requires consensus and support from all stakeholders in the content life
cycle. The cost for implementing the CMS includes the following items:

• Price of the CMS software
• Hardware to run it and store the content
• Resource time to prepare and plan for implementation
• Resources to customize and maintain the CMS
• Resource time for training stakeholders to use it

Although such an undertaking may seem daunting, the initial implementation is a one-time cost but the improvements in speed and efficiency will allow you to recoup the investment in a minimal amount of time.

A translation management system is another key automation and integration investment to manage and automate content localization. If you are translating content into more than one language, you must have processes in place to handle this additional work. A translation management system provides automated process management for translating content and integrates into the CMS workflow support.

To implement a translation management system, you must have a defined translation process that can scale to meet your localization needs as they increase, and you must understand the requirements for a scalable system. In addition, you must build your translation memory, which is the library of localized content.

Return

The return on investment in a CMS is the ability to reuse content across disciplines and automate the content development workflow. If content is not stored in a repository that provides easy retrieval through metadata, it will be impossible to reuse content across teams. In addition to obvious characteristics such as automated status change notification and reporting, workflow support enables you to see quickly what information is reused in which topics. This crucial feature of this fourth level of adoption enables true reuse and mitigates the risk of inadvertently propagating change throughout the content set.