Introduction
Once an organization decides to move its content operations into structured content, the need for a CCMS arises immediately. Since the DITA standard for structure is the gold standard for modern technical documentation, the CCMS must support DITA. In addition, there are several key considerations when choosing a CCMS:
- Content complexity
- Regulatory requirements
- Publishing
- Collaboration and workflow
- Translation
- Budget
- Integrations with other systems
In each of these areas, a CCMS provides value by addressing key use cases to enable seamless flow through the content lifecycle. A CCMS manages complexity, enabling content reuse through various mechanisms.
Why use a CCMS?
A CCMS is an ideal solution for any organization that produces technical documentation, large or small. It provides agility for:
- Companies with a need for collaborative authoring and review. If you have a technical documentation team and subject matter expert contributors or reviewers, you should have a CCMS. The CCMS allows for non-technical writers to be involved in a content lifecycle while reviewing and collaborating on information before it is published.
- Companies in highly regulated industries. Due to its power in reporting, metadata, versioning and multichannel publishing capabilities, a CCMS is key for highly regulated companies and industries such as medical devices manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, or airlines. The ability to generate reports and audit trails are essentials. A CCMS can provide a report on every chunk of information that was ever created including creation date, version control and who interacted with the document or content chunk.
- Any organization that needs to localize their technical documentation. With a CCMS and DITA XML authoring, the efficiencies and cost savings from using structure to localize content, only translating changed content, and automating multilingual publishing are huge. This alone frequently provides enough Return on Investment to justify the introduction of a CCMS. Not only does the CCMS reduce the overall cost of translations as it manages what chunks of content needs to be sent to the localization vendor but it also reduces the time to market when it comes to translated content since the translation process can take place way before the publication is completed.
- Companies that need to produce document variants where they find that there are many different permutations of the content depending on the values ingested. As well as managing multiple versions of those publication variants becomes the key functionality of a CCMS.
- Companies that have multi channel publishing requirements and the need to produce content in multiple formats a CCMS and server based publishing are vital. Either manually or programmatically a CCMS can produce various output formats and deliver them to the predefined destinations like third party websites, delivery portals and so on.
Key Features of a CCMS
When evaluating a CCMS, look at its features in the following areas: schema support, content creation, content management, content translation and content publishing.
The first decision to be made is what XML standard or schema to use. While there are several historical standards, the gold standard for modern technical documentation is the DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) schema, which enables authoring in small, standalone topics that are tied together into a higher level publication by a map. Therefore, full support for the DITA standard is essential.
For content creation, a fully featured XML editor that supports DITA and is tightly integrated with the CCMS is critical. Authoring can take place on the desktop or in the web-based browser. Power authors typically work in desktop applications, while Subject Matter Expert reviewers and contributors often work through a web interface. Both interfaces allow the user to author content directly in the CCMS.
To maximize your ROI, a CCMS must have the ability to manage links, tag, find/locate, put in workflow and run reports on content. In addition, more complex features such as release management (ability to branch and merge versions of content) along with complex metadata management capabilities to support taxonomies and search are common for large organizations with complex documentation needs.
Localization management is an absolute requirement for organizations looking to do business globally. A CCMS allows an organization to take control of the translation process thus reducing the costs and time to market of that documentation.
Publishing requirements have become more demanding. PDF output is no longer preferred – the ability to generate multiple output formats and to deliver small chunks of information based on queries (topic-based delivery) has become the norm. A CCMS is the ideal platform to deliver any such format or content chunk.
Use Cases and Selection Criteria
To select the right CCMS, you need to have a clear understanding of why you need the CCMS and what you will use it for. To do this, you should write up the key use cases that are most important to your business, as well as the key pain points that you hope to address with this technology.
To assess the features of any particular CCMS, an organization must be able to successfully run its use cases on the CCMS. A CCMS should not impede the existing document lifecycle process but be able to support and enhance that process. When looking at any feature, it’s simply not enough to check that box against the vendor’s offering but rather put the system to the test.
It is best to keep the use cases to a manageable number that can be used to properly assess candidate systems. A typical CCMS is a large, feature rich software system. Use cases allow you to assess vendor software based on its ability to solve your real world problems, rather than based on more generic feature lists.
Many companies build exhaustive checklists of features against which to assess software, sometimes including several hundred criteria. This can be an effective approach. However it is critical to properly write and rank features so that you are not skewing the results based on features that are unimportant, when one system might excel in the areas that are critical to you.
In general, the use cases should be detailed and specific, typically dealing with the following areas:
- Authoring
- Content reuse
- Workflow and review
- Metadata management
- Version control and release management
- Publication and content release
- Localization
Naturally it’s not practical to evaluate 10 different systems, hence the end user is encouraged to limit the final selection to 2 to 3 systems. Often if the end user is not familiar with structured content management and creation it will be difficult to properly evaluate any system, so soliciting help from a consultancy is highly recommended.
Estimating the ROI from a CCMS
Calculating the return on investment (ROI) with respect to a CCMS is an age-old problem. Essentially documentation managers are tasked with building business cases for expenditure on a CCMS solution.
Documentation is typically seen as a cost center within an organization.
The introduction of a CCMS aims to lower the costs of documentation production by increasing the productivity of technical writers. These include things such as ability to reuse content, allow for workflows to keep people on task and project oversight, and ability for SMEs to seamlessly review content. The ability to automate publish jobs also adds a significant work benefit as it takes seconds to publish publications v. days and weeks as seen by some traditional models.
Translation of content is perhaps the most quantifiable business case since calculating the costs and projecting the cost savings is straightforward. For example: by using a CCMS to manage our translations we are going to save 60% on our localization costs over a period of a year. If the translation costs are a million dollars per year before the CCMS implementation then the ROI is easy to calculate.
In recent years, with the exponential growth of mobile phones and tables as well as the ability to deliver documentation directly to a machine (ie. car display), delivery beyond PDF has become necessary. Not only can a CCMS deliver a publication to various formats and delivery platforms, but it can also deliver pieces of information to other systems as they need them. Although it’s difficult to quantify the benefit of CCMS and delivery, it’s essential to point out that it enhances the end user experience with the product or service, making documentation a competitive feature. A CCMS coupled with a well defined content delivery/support portal can also dramatically reduce support costs by enabling self service support or by making your support organization more efficient and effective.
Summary
Moving content operations into structured content necessitates a Content Management System (CCMS), particularly when considering factors like document complexity, regulatory requirements, collaboration needs, publishing demands, translation needs, budget constraints, and integration capabilities. For organizations requiring collaborative authoring and review processes, especially in regulated industries like healthcare or aviation, a CCMS is crucial due to its reporting, versioning, and multichannel publishing capabilities, ensuring compliance and efficient content management. Additionally, for organizations needing efficient localization of technical documentation, a CCMS with DITA XML authoring can significantly reduce translation costs and time to market.
Key features in a CCMS revolve around content creation, management, translation, and publishing. These include robust XML editors, content management functionalities such as version control and metadata management, localization management for global business, and diverse publishing capabilities beyond PDF. To assess the best-fit CCMS, organizations should run use cases and evaluate how well the system supports existing workflows while potentially enhancing them. Calculating ROI from a CCMS involves assessing productivity gains, especially in content reuse, workflow efficiency, and automation of publishing tasks. Additionally, cost savings from translation management can be quantified easily. Moreover, with the rising demand for diverse content delivery formats, a CCMS not only enhances user experience but also adds competitive value to products and services, although quantifying these benefits may be challenging.
Bluestream’s XDocs DITA CCMS is a purpose-built CCMS that has found use in many industries and draws its feature set from proven use cases that stem directly from customers and prospects. The robust nature of XDocs DITA CCMS allows for management of complex documentation needs while meeting all regulatory requirements depending on the industry.
