Content Management (CM) is a current trend in information technology with apparently fantastic business benefits. You will hear the promotion of 'Write once, reuse many times!' 'Translate only new and updated content!' 'Update information in one place, and it will be updated in all your output!' 'Focus on content, not format!' and 'You can reduce your development and localization timelines and budgets exponentially!'

These claims are nothing to sneeze at, and they are on the whole fairly accurate - provided, of course that your content management initiative comes off without a hitch. This means ensuring that your project plans are scoped correctly, suppliers deliver as promised, technologies are stable and effective, and, at the end of the day, the writers producing the content understand and are willing to use the new system. Meeting these conditions is, of course, vital.

Implementation is tricky - but possible. If you are considering embarking on a journey toward CM, here are a number of key points worth looking at carefully.

Find experts and buy their knowledge

Content management in one form or another has been around for several decades. It has evolved from techniques going back to before single sourcing, passed through SGML, and has now been given a new lift with present-day XML. Which means that there is an expert community - and a relatively closely-knit one at that - that has seen technologies and companies come and go and has developed extensive experience in evaluating appropriate solutions. CM experts will gladly share their wealth of knowledge with you - for a fee. But the price is worth the time they will save you in trying to get up to speed on your own.

There is no fast track course for a newcomer to the CM world to grasp all the related concepts immediately. Many of these concepts are abstract and most likely quite different from our familiar ways of generating and managing content. It would take much too long to bring any newbie up to speed quickly enough to make independent, intelligent decisions about the right corporate direction to take. And, once a path is chosen in a CM strategy, changing course can be painful and expensive.

Be or have a CM advocate on your internal team

Although hiring experts is recommended, it is essential to identify or appoint an individual or group of individuals working closely on the CM implementation in your company. This CM advocate will need to play two main roles in your organization - first, as a representative to your chosen supplier, and second, as a representative to your development teams.

As a representative to your suppliers, your advocate will need to define requirements and expectations for your systems integrator, as well as serve as project manager. As a representative to your development teams, they will introduce this brand new concept of CM from an 'insider' position - as someone who can explain the concepts in terms of your common environment, using examples that are easy to understand.

Know what you want from a CM system

Do you want your CM System (CMS) to handle multiple languages and be Unicode compliant? Have automated workflow? Use email notification and ways to generate custom reports? Do queries on metadata and text? Allow certain permissions to users and not to others? Output bidirectional languages in a printable format with screen captures in German?

Any CM system offers you a multitude of options, and you will need to do a lot of design and requirements building to understand what will work in your environment. And keep in mind that your system should be designed to assist the content generation and delivery processes inside your whole organization.

Here is a brief overview of how a CMS works and what this means for your project.

Information in a Content Management System is authored and stored in XML, which is terrific, once this new language is understood. Developing content - and not page layout - becomes the main focus of your writing teams. When it comes to localization, those involved can work with XML files very easily, and you can cut down your localization budget by paying only for translation and linguistic processes, since XML reduces, if not eliminates DTP, Engineering, and other formatting-related services. The basic idea is that your writers gradually generate a 'library' of information that is organized in your CMS for future use and reuse. Information is then assembled for a given utilization in a document from appropriate content parts into your final content product - formatted and all.

There are three major parts to a CMS - an authoring engine, a storage repository, and publishing workflow for output. You will need a different combination of tools depending on the content you develop and what will happen to it when completed. Writing, managing, and publishing content for a website or online environment is very different than writing, managing, and publishing content for marketing materials or instructions for a manufacturing organization.

It is important to note that there are many off-the-shelf tools designed expressly to meet the needs of your CM strategy. Keep in mind that it will take a professional integrator to pull all the tools and technologies together in the right way. Do not attempt to do this yourself. Ask for expert assistance, and save yourself a lot of time and energy.

One of your main tasks will be to design the overlying workflow and design features to meet the needs of your team. Your system integrators will need specific instructions from you on the expectations you have for your final system. You should know your development environment better than they do so that you can enable only the features and functions that will work for you.

Furthermore, you will need to design a data model to house your content. Called a DTD – Document Type Definition - this will define how your information is stored and later retrieved from your CMS.

Keep your scope to a reasonable level

Many suppliers of content management technology and solutions will promote what is called 'enterprise' content management. They describe rosy visions of your content being passed seamlessly from marketing to sales to billing to CRM to your website to your printed materials...and so on. But just ask yourself how often - really - does any of your content make such an elaborate trip around your company. Even thinking about the logistics of designing a system like that is mind-boggling.

For example, my company now has an estimated 150,000 employees. The very idea that every word related to every product and every function that this business deals with is housed in one big system and shuffled around the company at the click of a button is unrealistic, to put it gently. Yet that is the selling line for many suppliers. They will try to convince you that it is possible and they are certainly motivated to capture your hyper-complex multimillion-dollar project that for a myriad of reasons will probably never see completion. So scope your work wisely. Benchmark with other companies with successful content management models. Consider what content you want to manage and why. And do not be distracted or seduced into doing more or paying for more than you need.

CM and localization

Managing multiple languages in a CM environment is complex, from both the authoring workflow and publishing perspectives. Think of it this way: in a traditional content development environment, every piece of English content is eventually localized into the languages your business requires. The same will happen when a CMS is in place. But the difference is that your CMS must have the intelligence to effectively manage the need to go through a localization process, and track updates and language equivalents effectively.

This has an impact on a number of features of content management. For example, you will quickly find that internationalization of source content is a very important step. Terminology management becomes vital since your content will have to be capable of fitting together in multiple combinations for specific outputs, and must therefore be consistent across the whole of the company. And processes that happen externally to your CMS will be affected as well and should be factored into the equation.

Although this might seem like even more work, every moment dedicated to managing localization in CM is well worth the effort. When your content is in a CMS, you will be able to strip out a large percentage of the complexity, cost and cumbersome nature of localization tasks. Currently, localization suppliers working outside a CMS environment have to work with whatever you throw at them. They usually focus first on extracting all content from source files before translation. They then have to perform DTP and formatting QA, and execute multiple steps of engineering and reengineering as needed.

With a CMS, however, all that is really required from the localizer is the delivery of clean and simple translation and full focus on content quality. The source file is XML, the translation is done in XML, and the localized product returned to the CMS is in that same XML format. With this as the profile of your localization project, you will find that the time, cost and complexity to localize your content decreases exponentially, just as the system vendors promised!

Training, training, and more training

The paradigm shift from a traditional to a CM environment is dramatic. Do not underestimate the impact that a process change of this capacity will have on your teams. Think of every possible way to supply training and learning opportunities for those involved. And be prepared for a certain resistance to supporting this transition. Remember that the skill profile of those you will need to staff your organization will change once you have a CMS. Where once you had graphic designers and desktop publishing specialists, you might need data modelers and database administrators instead. Try to give every opportunity for your staff to equip themselves appropriately to accompany with you through the change, while their own careers evolve along the way.

Content management is the future - and it's upon us today. It means an opportunity to change the way we have been doing localization and publishing. It is relatively rare in business to be have the chance to initiate such a rapid and effective process of improving the operational infrastructure of a company using new technology. You will be the darling of your senior management staff and your financial officer when they see the returns on productivity, resources and dollars achieved through your new CMS. But, don't forget your aspirin. You'll need it.

Denise Spacinsky is Globalization Strategist at Hewlett-Packard in the San Diego Division. She is also a member of the LISA Executive Committee Advisory and chairs the LISA Client special interest group which can be accessed at http://www.lisa.org/sigs/2001/lca.html.

Denise just completed the implementation of a robust content management solution in the Vancouver Division of HP. She has since relocated to San Diego where she focuses on designing strategic initiatives supporting effective localization and globalization for her company.