Argument: Structured Content is More Profitable

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Dec 12, 2008

Opportunities for Structured Content

Bruce Sharpe of JustSystems gave us some great examples on how some businesses are leading the way by using structured content to improve revenues, reduce costs and mitigate risks. Now, he continues that discussion with some approaches to structured content, ones he argues that can drive business efficiencies and profitability.

Using Structured Content to Improve Business Processes

Structured content — documents that have been chunked into meaningful component parts and tagged in a systematic fashion — can be used to foster innovation of business operations and processes, and thus drive promising and profitable business opportunities.

Structured content for innovation focuses on business results, enabling an organization to do what has not been possible without structure and without the processes that structured content enables.

Innovation brings fundamentally new capabilities to an organization. Innovation derives not just from how structured content is used, but also from where it is used.

Below are examples of the positive impact structured content for innovation can have on revenues, costs, and risks.

Growing Revenues

Structured content dramatically improves the discovery of information that can lead to new product innovations through new applications of existing intellectual property.

For example, a travel publisher produces content for hundreds of travel guides, initially rendered as printed books and web pages. While the publisher has opportunities to publish more guides and syndicate other web sites, the linear publishing process — from manuscript editing, to production editing, to desktop publishing and finally to web production — stifles those opportunities.

To grow, then, the publisher could reengineer its publishing process by introducing structured content. In a new QA step for manuscript editing, an editor uses an XML editing tool to chunk and tag the authors’ manuscripts into component parts. Transformed into content components, travel information can be processed for multiple publishing activities in parallel. One group can continue with the production editing and desktop publishing while another can pursue web publications.

The publisher’s investment in structured content lets it syndicate its content across the web as well as produce and maintain additional specialty books.

Structured content also automates many production steps for both web and traditional publishing, leading to faster time to market.

Reducing Costs

Structured content reduces the cost of contract creation and review and heads off the downstream costs of legally binding mistakes introduced into contracts when content is produced "on-the-fly" or through ad hoc reuse of information. This is especially valuable in regulated industries where different domains require specialized content.

In this example, a traditional manufacturing firm has already invested in structured content for its technical publication efforts, but it still creates contracts in a one-off process. The results?

High contract development costs due to legal and administrative fees
Loss of favorable terms due to lack of information about previously negotiated terms
Risk of unrecoverable costs due to lack of warranty and liability protection in the contract terms
Cost exposure due to incorrect pricing

To reduce costs in its contracting efforts, the manufacturer can develop a single-source library of structured content, containing approved contract clauses and templates. Lawyers can then automatically create new contracts out of existing, approved content components.