Last month we discussed the essential components of a catalog publishing system and how a Digital Content Management system can help catalogers overcome the time and budget constraints facing every catalog project. We accomplish this by allowing them to create, organize, manage and deliver their catalog content to multiple media through a single, streamlined publishing workflow.

There are 3 reasons publishers need to consider a Digital Content Management (DCM) publishing system:

1. Increased productivity. By reusing content across multiple publications authors are able to both reduce production costs through reuse as well as speed up the time to market for their publication.
2. New revenue streams. By using Webcom's Digital Content Management tools catalog publishers have been able to use catalog content to create economic value from new online markets, full line product catalogs, segmented / personalized catalogs, sales promotions and flyers.
3. New publishing options. Because Webcom's DCM publishing systems are cross-media enabled now you are able to streamline your workflow by managing both print and electronic (CD, Web) versions from a single publishing system.

Why is managing content so important?
In today's fast changing business environment we all need information to remain competitive.

"Enterprises that fail to unlock the value of their content assets, from documents to Web pages to digital assets, are losing billions of dollars in lost opportunity. Alan Pelz-Sharpe VP Research & Consulting, Ovum Ltd.

Whether you get paid to distribute information or you leverage information to influence the buying decisions of your customers – the faster you can get information to your audiences (decision makers) the more you'll improve your competitive advantage.

Consider these facts:

• Over 80% of all content is unstructured (Fulcrum Research). What that means is that it cannot be easily accessed, reused, or repurposed. The volume of content is growing 200% per year.
• Documents, Web content and rich media assets represent the vast majority of unstructured content.

The business systems of tomorrow will be driven by information delivered "on demand" across multiple channels to your trading partners. We are not just talking about the Internet. Today's publishing environments demand cross-media access to all content so that publishing choices can be made without concern for accessibility, compatibility or scalability. Webcom's DCM solutions deliver secure, format neutral repositories where content is readily available to publish on demand in print, CD or the Internet documents.

The Bottom Line is that structured content allows you to make these publishing choices based on the demands of your audiences; not based on the limitations of technical skills, access to appropriate file formats or the ability to distribute content in print or web ready application files.

What is a Content Management System?

Lets look at the definition of each component.

Content is information that you want to publish. It maybe product information (product names, descriptions, ordering specifications, sku numbers, images, etc) or it may be chapters of a book, articles, real-time data, etc. Somewhere that information is created by an author or through a transaction and must be converted and stored in a usable / recognizable (structured) format. Did you know that the average knowledge worker spends 40% of their time looking for content.

The second piece of the puzzle is Management. In order to create value in your content it must be treated with care throughout its useful life. The concept of managing suggests that there is a defined structure that is created around content so that it is easily found. The purpose of Content Management then is to provide a structure where creating and managing content occurs throughout content's lifecycle.

Lets look at an example, too often creative designers end up recreating a logo that already exists in many instances throughout the organization. This happens because they cannot find the logo they need or it was in an unreadable format. This is not a small problem – Forrester Research estimates that 70% of the time content is recreated rather than reused. These publishing practices introduce inefficiency and inconsistency into your workflow.

In order for effective management to occur there must be a System. At the heart of the DCM is a central repository or database – at Webcom we call it the Digital Library. This is where your content (the information you want to publish) is stored. The Digital Library gives you confidence that those important publishing assets are secure and readily available in a suitable format for the types of documents you want to create both now and in the future. This system provides a structure or rules that govern each of the decisions made throughout the publishing workflow.

The Bottom Line

The speed at which you distribute information to your customers and trading partners is often the determining factor in a critical buying decision. Information is a powerful differentiator on which to build your competitive advantage because it is something that is within your control. Price, quality and service are a given in these competitive times. Now your ability to compete must come from new and creative strategies that are built around communicating more effectively with your customers and trading partners.

At Webcom we are working hard to help our customers capture, organize, manage and publish their content in relevant forms to the audiences they want to impact. This requires a suite of tools to manage content and the audiences that need to receive your messages. We call this integrated approach to publishing Digital Content Management. Please speak to your account manager or contact me to investigate how these tools can be used to impact your bottom line.