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JoAnn Hackos, PhD
CIDM Director
www.infomanagementcenter.com
Independence Rules in Ad-Hoc Organizations
Dr. Q, the leader of our content-management consulting team,
has been working for several months with Checko Systems, a
huge manufacturing company with a wide range of products.
Checko is determined to reorganize its documentation staff
into a more coordinated group to take advantage of the cost
savings and benefits of content management.
Checko still has a number of autonomous documentation
departments, but they are rapidly restructuring them back
into a central organization. They have management support
for the change, but they expect it to take two to three
years to complete. Right now, however, two of the largest
departments have joined forces.
Taking Dr. Q's advice, the new Checko central documentation
team is working on its Information Model. They are
- beginning a preliminary user study to discover what
customers think about the documentation and how they use it
- working to define standard information types, such as
procedures, concepts, and reference materials, that all
the writers will be able to use
- deciding which information types are appropriate for each
user duty and set of tasks
Now—just because Checko has a plan to move to Level 3 of
process maturity doesn't mean it's going to be easy. In
fact, the level of complaining has already gone up
significantly. The staff members don't necessarily agree on
which information types are needed or how they should be
defined. They don't have much information about their users
and don't know how to begin their user study.
Level 2 organizations are on a journey from Level 1 to Level
3. As a result, they are in a very uncomfortable position
with a lot of changes to make. The more changes, the more
instability that staff members will have to deal with.
Preparing a Level 2 Organization for Content Management
For Checko to move into content management as a Level 2
organization, they have decided on a centralization
strategy:
- To achieve consistency, individual departments merge to
form a centralized organization with links to other
independent publications groups within the company.
- The new, merged group begins to develop information-design
standards and implement common tools and templates for all
the documents produced throughout the company.
- The merged group will provide training on the new
standards and tools for their own staff and the staff of
the remaining independent departments.
- They will also begin to develop a set of processes to
govern their activities that can be tested and then passed
on to others.
Level 2: Rudimentary describes the state that occurs when an
organization begins to establish uniform practices and
consistent designs. As a Level 2 organization consolidates
and unifies, it becomes increasingly ready to implement a
content-management solution. It is important to point out,
however, that the changes recommended here take time and
concerted effort. If the company as a whole is unstable or
the publications organizations encounter resistance, the
process will be slowed and may be derailed.
Level 2 organizations, we find, are particularly unstable.
There is great pressure to slip back into the ad-hoc world.
But even if you don't achieve full Level 3 maturity at
first, by experiencing what it will take to manage the
change, the next effort should go more smoothly.
Making Content-Management Decisions
Level 2 organizations are actually doing the work needed to
prepare for content management and are beginning to
institute content-management related activities.
As the staff members work through aspects of their
Information Model, they should identify a potential pilot
project to institute the new design ideas.
The pilot project is characteristic of all
content-management planning, but it is particularly
important for Level 2 organizations because they are not
used to working collaboratively.
The pilot project must be a collaborative effort, involving
representatives of the primary stakeholders in the
content-management project. Stakeholders may include
training and technical support, as well as possible customer
representatives. If information is to change for the better
and be brought under control, the potential internal users
of that information should be involved in the redesign.
It is not necessary to take a modular approach to content
development to institute content management, but a modular
approach is necessary to take full advantage of reuse and
repurposing goals. Without modules in place, writers will
continue to develop entire documents on their own, in their
writing flow and context, which will make reuse difficult.
By developing modules and standardizing the design of the
modules with information types, writers can develop content
that is meant for reuse. New documents can be created out of
modules that work effectively together because they are
designed with the same standards in place.
Level 2 organizations are building a path to comprehensive,
development-level content management and reuse, rather than
simple repurposing of text into variations.
Centralizing Production
In a Level 1 organization, production teams generally
concentrate on delivering books or PDFs of books to
customers in print and electronically. As the Level 2
organization moves toward a more modular approach to
information design, the production team will have to rethink
its processes as well.
Modular content is, almost by definition, more difficult to
control than whole books. Smaller chunks of content need to
be correctly assembled into appropriate contexts either for
delivery as books or into the networked relationships of a
Web site. I believe that production teams have a
considerable challenge in organizing how they will deliver
content, both as static content organized into deliverables
during production and as dynamic content that is updated on
a regular basis.
Production teams will often find themselves moving quickly
into technology to support Web content management and
portals if they become serious about dynamic delivery.
Maintaining dynamic delivery in the future is virtually
impossible without technology support.
However, at Level 2, the production team is engaged in
planning, not yet implementation. The content is not ready
for full deployment through virtual assembly methods. The
writers are just beginning their Information Model and
considering a pilot project. The production team needs to be
part of the deliberations and recognize how the changes in
document development will impact their delivery methods.
It's not too early to start planning, even if the planning
will take a year or so before you are ready to implement.
Another consideration to take into account—it may be
advantageous to implement a Web content-management delivery
technology to handle your whole documents in PDF or HTML
form before you move to a more modular approach. Automating
document assembly and delivery may result in significant
time and cost savings and may be implemented earlier.
Beyond Repurposing
Level 2 organizations are not yet ready for content
management. They are proceeding in the right direction by
establishing uniform processes, information designs, and
templates before they can successfully manage content in a
comprehensive manner. You may already have simple
repurposing of identical documents into multiple
deliverables in place. You may also be using conditional
text to send portions of documents on different delivery
paths.
The goal in Level 2 should be focused on restructuring
documents and processes, not on immediate solutions. The
solutions will come in Level 3. Nevertheless, the path is
now being set that will enable successful content
management.
A word of warning... We know of several organizations that
decided to create modular content by splitting apart
existing documents and then hoping to make sense of the
chunks later. Don't try that; you'll regret it later. At
least one organization we've worked with found that
rethinking the chunks took more time than creating new
modules would have.
Modular writing is not about new formats. It is actually a
different way of thinking about content. Splitting existing
documents into pieces accomplishes almost nothing on the
path to modular design and may actually hinder putting good
information into the repository. Just think of all the
unnecessary, interconnected content that you'll have to find
and throw out or rewrite. Do the rethinking first and the
modular construction later.
Timing the Effort
Generally, we have found that for large organizations of 20
or so members, the effort of moving from Level 1 to Level 3
takes at least two years. Some staff make the mental
transition quickly, others wait to see what happens, and the
laggards never change but spend a lot of time criticizing
everyone else. You also have to convince other parts of the
company that you are focused on change.
Making the changes to your information design is often your
own affair in technical publications. However, you may also
have to convince product managers and engineering directors
that the information across products needs to become
standardized. That convincing will take time.
And it will take a vision. Many organizations find that cost
savings are the only motivation for change, while others are
convinced only if the change can be directly linked to
overall customer satisfaction. Develop a comprehensive
vision. Clearly define where costs will be saved, most
commonly in translation or production where time-to-market
can be decreased, and how the information redesign and
delivery method will address current customer issues.
Deliver this message and sell your vision as often as
possible to anyone who could negatively affect the outcome
of your project.
If you've found yourself struggling with a noisy Level 2:
Rudimentary organization, please send your stories to me at
.
I'll assemble them into a feedback to this article.
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