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Companies create competitive advantage with technology by building on current practice in ways that others in their industries have yet to discover or implement. Structured content can support a wide range of business activities, from more common and well understood classic examples of structured content to emerging applications that help organizations become leaders in their fields.
The rewards those leaders realize can be significant, in terms of revenues, operational costs, or other business measures, as well as in terms of new skills, knowledge, and expertise that create true, lasting competitive advantage.
Below are real examples of companies taking a leadership role in structured content; pushing the envelope to illustrate its positive impact on revenue growth, cost reductions, and risk mitigation. And their advice reflects lessons learned along the way.
Revenue growth. By adopting structured content, a pharmaceutical company can meet its regulatory requirements more efficiently and grow revenues by entering new markets.
To begin with, all pharmaceutical products must have a document called the product label. Pharmaceutical companies must submit their product label to the relevant regulatory agencies for review and approval (such as the FDA in the United States) before they can bring their products to market.
While the product labeling information has a prescribed structure, it is different in each market. To market internationally and sell products in different countries, the pharmaceutical company needs to publish the same product information in a number of different ways. The publishing challenge is fairly complicated and can include dozens of different renditions of the same document, each containing the exact same language about product information but formatted differently and produced for different purposes.
Traditionally, these documents were managed as word processing files, a non-scalable approach that led to duplicate efforts and prohibitive product marketing costs. Using structured content tools, the pharmaceutical company can quickly and easily create documents, check their completeness, and generate multiple versions of the same content.
Cost reductions. A software firm is experiencing rapid growth in the number of licenses sold, in the number of products they offer in their suite of solutions, and in the number of languages its product documentation must support.
The software firm employs an agile manufacturing process, reusing components and supporting documentation in new products. A structured data model based on DITA enables information to be organized and structured into logical topic areas. The structured content can then be reused for each product to match the product development capabilities.
Translating documentation into multiple languages is an expensive and time consuming activity that involves quality assurance, project management and coordination of the work, and formatting each language version into the proper format for each language. To enable efficient management of structured information components throughout the translation process, the firm chose a content management system (CMS).
Now, instead of having to translate an entire manual each time it was updated, documentation editors could select for translation only the sections that had been modified, thus reducing total work to be done, costs, and the amount of time needed to complete the task. Also, the structured content produced can be formatted automatically instead of using slower, more expensive desktop publishing tools.
Risk mitigation. Several aspects of risk can be mitigated when structured content is used to produce software documentation. Copyright enforcement and boilerplate language that appears in the content, for example, carry legal risks that structured content addresses by allowing copyright, patent, and legal information about products to be managed in a CMS. Also, licensing agreements, contracts, and other important legal documents can be managed in a similar componentized manner.
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\n\nCompanies create competitive advantage with technology by building on current practice in ways that others in their industries have yet to discover or implement. Structured content can support a wide range of business activities, from more common and well understood classic examples of structured content to emerging applications that help organizations become leaders in their fields. \n\nThe rewards those leaders realize can be significant, in terms of revenues, operational costs, or other business measures, as well as in terms of new skills, knowledge, and expertise that create true, lasting competitive advantage.\n\n
