Top Five Traps in a Content Supply Chain

Today, Oct 2004

In the Information Age, All Companies Are Publishers

Before the information age, car manufacturers only made cars, libraries only stored books, and newspapers only printed the news. Now, however, companies from all industries are realizing that in addition to what they do, they are also publishers, and there is a learning curve.

Carmakers have to create, manage and produce manuals, catalogues, and brochures. Libraries have to preserve collections and make their stacks available to a digital readership. Newspapers have to splice and dice their daily report millions of different ways to fit the distinct consumer tastes. In addition, these organizations have to publish in multiple languages and multiple formats: CD-ROM, PDF, Web page, hard copy, etc.

"In the information age, all companies are publishers," said Dan Dube, director of business analysis at lnnodata lsogen, a provider of content supply chain solutions. "And that's not even counting internal demands for content that every company has: memos, annual reports, newsletters, Intranet sites. However, in this rush to transform content products, many companies are actually losing ground, credibility, and money due to the innovation choices that they have made."

The speed and sweep of these new choices - from plates and ink to digital rendering, from product development to knowledge development, from product selling to task support - have caused technology whiplash for corporate America. Sparkling new techniques are being implemented to less-than-sparkling outcomes, causing those promised returns-on-investment to look puny in the eye of publishers' shareholders.

"Many well-intended new initiatives are burdened by inappropriate or outdated software designs, implementations, and support systems," said Dube. "The first step is to understand that even if you are not in the manufacturing business, you depend on a supply chain, a content supply chain, and its proper function is vital to your bottom line. Otherwise, you're putting a drain on ROI from both directions, escalating costs and lagging innovation."

Having evaluated many content supply chains for publishers, manufacturers, institutions, and government agencies, Dube offers the following advice.

Top Five Traps in Content Supply Chain Management:

1) Inefficient Processes. Don't get bogged down in manually intensive tasks (like troubleshooting format problems in a word processing program) or redundancies (like composing the same content twice for a hard copy and a Web site). In addition, hundreds of hours-per-year can be lost recreating information that already exists (like copying and pasting content from one document to another) or converting Word files to PDFs or HTML.

2) Organizational Boundaries. Don't let separate departments duplicate content production activities (like posting the same information on a different page of the company Web site). In-house experts from each department of an organization will often achieve the departmental goal but never see the big picture. When the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, you aren't coordinated.

3) System Limitations. Over the years, different departments end up with different systems that don't talk to each other, or don't translate information from one place to another. Proprietary systems architectures also make it difficult to move data from legacy systems to newer technologies. Don't let your organization be beholden to a software maker that may be out of business in twenty years. You've got to be able to control your content in perpetuity.

4) Technology Limitations. Don't use a wrench to hammer a nail. Don't extend an application beyond its capability (like using MS-Word for final composition when it usually leads to extra labor hours troubleshooting formatting errors). Many companies pay internal IT staff to write internal "patches" to transfer data from one system to another, which ends up costing more because they perform worse than integrated systems, and you have to keep applying new bandages.

5) Inadequate Use of Resources. Assign your high-skill/high-cost labor only to the most important tasks, not to support activities that could easily be outsourced. For example, a production editor, whose primary skill is page layout and Web site design, may not need to be in house because the skill requires no expertise in that field. Expensive resources should not spend time doing repetitive tasks.