Why does publishing my catalog have to be such a pain?

     With advances in desktop publishing, e-Commerce, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and the Internet it is easy to be overwhelmed by the technology options, formats and standards. Where does all this information (content) come from and how do you get it out to the market? With 20% of products driving 80% of your revenues, can you identify the 20% of your customers who deliver 80% of your company's profitability? The faster and easier you can deliver your messages to the right audiences the bigger the advantage you will have over your competition.

How do I get there?

1. Understand where the information you want to publish will come from.
2. Determine the best audience to target with that message
3. Discover how your key customers want to receive your message

What are the challenges?
     Your customers continually look to your organization to improve its value proposition, increasing the pressure to connect with them in new and unique ways. Technology has changed the way you connect with your customers. Not only do you need a strong print catalog presence but you also need to consider the impact the Internet and e-Commerce has on your business growth. In our September Issue of The Bottom Line we looked at the foundation of any good catalog project – The Publishing Plan.
     Lets begin to look at the challenge of collecting and sharing content inside and outside your organization. From speaking with many people who are responsible for publishing a catalog, we have identified some common challenges to overcome. Sharing information both inside and outside your organization requires dealing with the issues around creating, capturing, managing and delivering content. These include:

• Too much work – the most common complaint is that it simply takes too much manual effort (=time) to create, review, update and publish information. Most people responsible for publishing are under enormous pressure to deliver more quickly, with greater accuracy, in more formats, and with greater customization.
• Difficult reuse – everyone recognizes the value in creating a “single source” of information: greater accuracy, higher productivity, improved consistency, easier and faster updates, and no worrying about which version is correct. But today's tools and processes make reuse very difficult, especially when you want to be able to incorporate the same information in different documents with a different appearance.
• Multiple authoring tools – with few industry standard tools existing in the publishing world people are free to choose word processors or other desktop publishing software to transfer information from one person to another. The time lost converting documents from one format to another and reconstructing the lost formatting continually drains productivity and enthusiasm.
• Handcrafted publishing – time lost to make documents look pleasing and squeezing paragraphs undoubtedly represents a significant drain on resources. In many cases, the waste is compounded when the same information is formatted multiple times on multiple tools. For example, authors contributing content to technical manuals or catalogs use a word processor to create their content and then spend time decorating it – even though the tech writing group discards all of their careful formatting when they aggregate the content into the rest of the book.
• Publishing to multiple types of media – for organizations that must produce their information in multiple forms – print, Web, wireless, CD, etc. – the cost of publishing mounts quickly. In many organizations, entire teams exist solely for the care and feeding of each type of media that the organization supports. Because the usual process involves converting information published for one medium (for example, print) to another (for example, Web), keeping the information consistent and up-to-date is extremely difficult and inefficient.
• Keeping information fresh – those responsible for producing content find themselves under continuous pressure to improve the quality of the information they create. Whether the information is for use inside or outside the organization, it's not sufficiently accurate, consistent, fresh or complete and it costs an enormous amount of time and money to create and maintain.
• Customized information – your customers want information that's more relevant to their needs, and they have learned from the Web's best sites that the technology exists to tailor information precisely. But in most cases, you publish “one size fits all” documents that contain considerable amounts of irrelevant information for any one user.