If you are someone who creates lots of documentation deliverables in paper, electronic and web formats and need to get costs under control, this is probably a good book. If you are considering a Content Management System to better manage a number of business processes and all the documents that make them go, this is a poor choice for those efforts.
Her discussion on calculating the return on investment is straight forward and comprehensive. She doesn't pull any punches on the realities of implementing a content management solution. There are no short cuts. She emphasizes the planning that MUST be done and explains every aspect you need to consider.
My entire class agreed that this book is destined to become the industry standard for implementing content management.
Thanks, Ann, for spending the time to write this book.
Regardless of your situation, if you've got an interest in content management -- or if you just want to know why in the world you need to know about this stuff anyway -- check out the book's companion web site... for a solid overview of the strategy, a free chapter from the book, an Return on Investment (ROI) calculator, glossary, white papers and more! The content on this site is extremely useful and is indicative of the quality content found in the book.
Fast becoming a "best practice" in many industries. Fits well into Six Sigma shops. Should be on the bookshelves of both IT and business professionals. Writers, editors, information architects, instructional designers, web masters, XML professionals, records and data managers, publishers, educators, consultants and managers of content of all types can benefit from this practical, common sense approach.
As an architect for content management systems, I have a vested interest with increasing my experiences and knowledge in content management. It would have been nice to see real life examples and situations throughout this book. Chapter 10 did provide some mocked up scenerios for content design. Furthermore, the writing style was too dry. Without the real life examples, it was more like the theory of enterprise content management.
It's an excellent study in content management, but I prefer a first person writing style and some solid real life examples.
Ann Rockley has written the definitive guide for people who want to steer their organizations to take this leap. Whether you're from the business side or from the technical side, Ann's book will help you build your business case, re-engineer your processes, design your data models, select appropriate tools, implement the new system, and avoid the many dangers that lie along the route.
Most people think that content management systems will deliver all of the benefits they seek, but Ann Rockley's book shows why you have to think well beyond a single tool or a single process in order to achieve significant and sustainable success. With more than one-half of IT projects failing to meet expectations, someone equipped with Ann's book is well prepared to beat the odds.
For example, if you're hoping to sprinkle some new software over your existing processes to deliver the full potential of a unified content strategy, then Ann shows how futile and unproductive such an approach will be. If you want to achieve substantial changes in your results, then you'll have to make substantial changes to your processes. Ann's book not only lays out which changes you'll need to make and the impact of those changes, but also describes how to introduce those changes to minimize resistance.
Ann and her co-authors bring enormous real-world experience to bear on the contents of this book. For example, Ann points out where tools and systems are not enough when she writes about how authors must change their approaches and writing styles in order to create information that can be easily and automatically reused and repurposed.
An enterprise-wide strategy requires getting out of what Rockley and her colleagues call the "content silo trap." Anyone who works in a large company will recognize the content silos that Rockley and her colleagues describe and will identify with the problems that content silos can create. Managing Enterprise Content will help you move beyond those silos to collaborative authoring and a phased content management strategy for the company.
You don't have to be part of a large company to benefit from this book. With 22 chapters, an excellent glossary, and several appendices, Managing Enterprise Content provides sound advice for all types of enterprises.
Rockley is an internationally known expert in content management, content reuse, and the tools and technology for working with large volumes of information. This book draws on her extensive experience and knowledge of information modeling, workflows, metadata, dynamic content, and XML. Based on this extensive experience, Rockley helps you think through the options for different ways to do content management and with questions to ask vendors as you evaluate different tools.
This book gives guidelines and concepts to follow for planning, developing, and implementing a successful content management strategy. It also identifies issues to be considered and provides a plan to identify an ROI for the project. There is something for everyone - authors of content, managers of content, and designers of the content architecture. The book is written in a well-organized manner and breaks each main topic of content management into its own part, enabling readers to easily follow the process. Within this one book, an entire strategy is laid out, along with recommendations for resources and tools.
"Managing Enterprise Content" is highly recommended for all organizations that truly want to understand the business benefits of managing the content life cycle.
Rockley succeeds in making a very complex subject appear simple. She clearly commands her material. Despite the encyclopedic level of detail found in the book, it is obvious that Rockley is not reaching for information. Rather than pointing to abstract paradigms from a safe distance, she matter-of-factly breaks them into bite-sized scenarios that can easily be understood by readers new to the subject. Rockley drives each point home with concrete example and case studies from the real world. Many readers will recognize their own companies and departments in her examples. Rockley does not present a "one size fits all" content strategy. Instead, she shows you how to ask and answer the right questions for your organization. And she provides straightforward checklists that make it easy for you to implement each step of the process. In so doing, she presents you with a flexible and scalable framework you can use to solve your own problems.
Before you spend a lot of money on content management systems or consulting fees, buy this book. Rockley provides you with the kind of expert consulting that results from decades of experience, and normally comes at a very high price. In effect, she gives away the store.
I also had the expectation that the book itself would address technical communicators only as its primary audience. This in itself is not bad, but in terms of "evangelical changes" to corporate documentation and training strategies, often "how to" books of this genre do nothing more than "preach to the choir."
By the time I finished reading Managing Enterprise Content, I was excited! For me, the book answered questions about a unified content strategy on two levels: Not only did it address unified content strategy as a strategic business objective; it also unified the strategic directions that the umbrella of technical communication and training professions have been moving towards over the past decade: single-sourcing, corporate branding implementation, critical involvement in software or system development life cycle (SDLC) methodologies, and even implementation of ISO9000 compliance. Please allow me to explain further:
* Unified content strategy is the next evolution of "one source." Unified content strategy itself is a "single-sourcing umbrella solution" to ensure timely, consistent, and cost-effective communication at all levels for your company's goods and services. Consistent means just that: the development and implementation of consistent communications, regardless of the number of creators (authors) or the number and types of output media.
* Unified content strategy is about brand implementation. In today's marketplaces, I believe that effective branding can "make or break" a company. You may have the better proverbial mousetrap, but if your customers do not know it, it won't matter. VHS versus Beta illustrated this.
* A unified content strategy merges the single-source concepts and the driving tenets behind ISO 9000 into a single, cohesive strategy.
* Interestingly, a unified content strategy provides the methodology for developing the typical methodology deliverables required of a SDLC (software development life cycle). Until this, typical development projects let design drive content consistency, which would only be a byproduct if the project was lucky enough to have information designers as part of the team from the "get-go."
The book Managing Enterprise Content does a beautiful job of defining the premises and corresponding values of a unified content strategy. But it does not stop there. With this publication, finally there is a book that defines one source (as a unified content strategy) holistically, answering all of the basic journalistic questions of who, what, when, where, why, and most important, how!
* The "how" itself is through easy-to-follow step by step instructions supported by examples that encapsulate very typical business scenarios.
* The "how" is about getting buy-in within your company of not only management, but of all the players. It provides tables and lists of questions to be answered, objectives to be met, and pitfalls to be avoided.
* The "how" is also about getting the best mix of tools and technologies to meet your company's needs, especially by helping you ferret out the real strengths and weaknesses of third-party tools in terms of meeting your company's business requirements.
In my opinion, here is the real proverbial "bang for your buck" offered by Managing Enterprise Content. The book itself provides a cohesive tool for technical communicators, instructional designers, and related publications and project management to help demonstrate the cost benefits of a unified content management strategy.
In short, this book tells you not only how to do it, but how to get buy-in. Or, in terms of the vernacular of the book itself, it tells you how to qualify your goals (something that we typically have always been good at doing) and how to quantify your goals (something perhaps that most of us have not been so good at doing.)
This has often been the stumbling block for authoring teams in the past? We knew what was needed and understood the values, but never translated the benefits into the languages of middle- and upper management - that of cost savings!
More importantly, by taking all of these items into consideration, the book helps you realize that there is no "one size fits all" unified content strategy solution. Instead, the book focuses on your attaining a derived understanding of the best-unified content strategy solution for your company! In other words, the book "sets you up to succeed!"
In summation, Managing Enterprise Content clearly defines what a unified content strategy is, how to develop one, and what the complete spectrum of benefits of its implementation would be in terms of deliverables quality, development time efficiency, and cost savings.
This book provides a comprehensive business process that integrates technical communication, instructional design, and workflow into an easy-to-follow package that will provide a consistent and cost-savings family of content products. This book "practices what it preaches" in that it addresses the needs of all the players: management at all levels, technical writers and trainers, product designers, developers and testers, marketing and IT staff, and most of all - customers.
Sincerely,
Mark Hanigan,
Principle Consultant - On the Write Track
2000-2001 International President - Society for Technical Communication
The introductory chapters describe the basic content-management challenge--ensuring that content is consistent and accurate across an enterprise. Rockley et al. do an excellent job of describing typical departmental content "silos," where content is hoarded by each department and little or no reuse occurs. They describe how reuse can break down the silos, reduce the amount of content creation that needs to occur, and ensure that content is consistent across the enterprise. The chapter that describes how to calculate ROI on a content-management strategy is particularly strong. Several examples show the factors that go into such an analysis, and most readers will be able to perform their own assessments based on the examples provided.
In Part II, the book describes how to analyze an existing workflow and determine how best to establish a content-management strategy that replaces or modifies the current workflow. This is interesting reading, but suffers from a lack of illustrations. Many of the workflow proposals are outlined in lengthy, difficult-to-follow tables; they would have been much more effective with accompanying illustrations.
Part III focuses on design of an enterprise content-management system. There is good information here about information modeling, metadata, and the like, and this part will provide a useful overview to readers who are not familiar with these concepts.
The Tools and Technologies section (Part IV) of the book is problematic mainly because the information is too general. The authors provide lists of criteria and evaluation methods for tools, but they shy away from making specific recommendations. A series of case studies that describe best practices and implementation decisions given specific project scenarios would make the information presented here much more relevant. Furthermore, the book stumbles in discussing the rationale for XML as an underlying storage format. XML is emerging as the de facto standard for shared, reusable content. Managing Enterprise Content does a good job of describing how XML fits into content management efforts. But the authors overstate the case at the beginning of the chapter, when they attempt to differentiate between XML solutions and other solutions based on the idea that non-XML solutions require complicated scripting and XML does not. A cursory review of an XSL file would tend to debunk that statement. Nonetheless, an XML/XSL-based approach makes a lot of sense for other reasons, and the authors go on to describe its advantages in some detail.
Part V describes how to make the transition to a unified content management strategy. Here, the real-world experience of the authors becomes apparent as they describe implementation plans, likely problem areas, points of resistance, and strategies for avoiding and overcoming the inevitable problems. The chapter on collaboration does an excellent job of describing collaborative authoring and the required changed in mindset.
The publisher, not the authors, are to blame for some editorial and production problems in the book. There are numerous lengthy, complex tables that are poorly executed. The publisher should have made adjustments to the tables to make them more readable. The text itself reads as though it has not been copy edited--there are numerous grammatical errors, typographical errors, and awkward sentences. No writer produces error-free prose on the first (or fifth) draft; it is the publisher's responsibility to edit and polish manuscript text to produce final copy. Especially in books written for professional writers, it's disappointing to see this lack of quality control from the publisher.
Managing Enterprise Content: A United Content Strategy delivers the first comprehensive overview of enterprise content management concepts. It should be required reading for anyone involved in creating, managing, or publishing content.
-Sarah O'Keefe
Managing Enterprise Content addresses content management in six sections. Each section builds upon the previous section as it presents the rationale for content management in what the authors term a "unified content strategy." Rather than presenting the tools and technology commonly used for content management, the authors save those for a later section of the book. Instead, they begin in the first section by explaining "the basis of a unified content strategy," then move to "determining business requirements" through a substantive content audit, followed by a section on design that addresses the fundamentals of information modeling and design of metadata, dynamic content, and workflow. With these concepts established, we are then offered a broad overview of the related tools and technologies, which include XML and the various systems for authoring, content management, workflow, and content delivery. In the final substantive section of the book, the authors recommend process changes necessary for a unified content strategy. A healthy resources section that includes, in addition to a glossary, index, and stout bibliography, other useful tools to aid the implementation of a unified content strategy follows this section.
Part I, "The basis of a unified content strategy," offers a good review of the concepts surrounding this topic and presents a clear statement of the problem. In addition to presenting the standard phases of single sourcing in technical publications groups, the authors explain how other industries reuse content as well. The detailed analysis of the types of content reuse includes examples that I found helpful in gauging the status of my own organization's problem. The chapter covering return on investment (ROI) is a substantial contribution to the field. We now have solid figures we can attach to labor dollars to estimate what our organizations can expect to realize as a result of content management.
When you reach Part II, "Performing a substantive audit: Determining business requirements," you'll agree that Part I was just a warm-up. Chapter 4 is where the authors really touch our points of pain. The dangers, opportunities, and strengths covered here give us a niche to begin dialogue with executive sponsors. These authors arm us with specifics we can use to make a solid case for a unified content strategy. Combine these arguments with the ROI details addressed in Chapter 3 and we've got a foot in our decision-makers' doors. But the authors go even further. Once we understand the problem and know how to convey it up the chain, they lead us in visualizing the unified content strategy that suits our organizations.
From problem to vision to design, Part III leads us mentally to the place where we can begin to see the "how to" of content management. Many advocates of content management confront us with metadata and information models right from the start, but not this book. If the authors had begun this way, they would have lost their readers before they ever got to the checkout. There is plenty of material on metadata available today, but only the XML geeks and programmers really understand it from the outset. This book is about the journey, and the authors have to get us out of the driveway before we can comprehend the horsepower under our hoods. This section on the nuts and bolts of what goes into the design and implementation of dynamic content and related workflow is right where it needs to be - after we've bought into the solution.
Part IV, "Tools and technologies," tells us how to use what we learned in Part III when we go shopping for tools and systems. There is an excellent section on dealing with vendors, which offers sound advice for vendor selection and management. Point by point, the authors offer ways to navigate around the "gotchas" that have proven fatal to many a content management effort. I applaud the recommendations on page 276 to "ask for a content-specific demonstration" and "conduct a proof-of-concept." I wish the authors had included brief cases in point - real-life scenarios of organizations that have learned the value of these actions. We can take the authors' recommendations at face value; it sounds like wise advice. But there's nothing like a true example to drive home the lesson.
Part V, "Moving to a unified content strategy," is where it all comes together and we're challenged to apply what we've learned. Each theme expressed in this section clearly links back to messages conveyed earlier in the book. But this is where the "rubber meets the road" in content management. How are we going to go about this? Who is going to do what? How will our customers perceive this? What is our transition plan? This section helps us think it all through and put solid shape to the decisions we've made thus far. And the resources in Part VI equip us even further. I expected this to be a book that would speak to many of my questions and puzzles about content management, but I didn't expect a step-by-step implementation checklist, or a detailed list of criteria for matching content management tools to my organization's specific needs.
I've been tempted to give up on content management, and possibly single sourcing altogether. Perhaps Managing Enterprise Content was published just in time to persuade me otherwise. It provides a roadmap to content management, acting as a guidebook to the steep cliffs and sharp turns along the way. If there is a route to define or a known course to navigate in the quest for content management, this book speaks about it. Consider it a tutorial in grappling with the entire breadth of the content management problem.
Then in 1998 the World Wide Web Consortium released its specification for the Extensible Markup Language (XML), a technology that opened the doors for pulling enterprise content out of proprietary formats and converting it into manageable data. Nearly five years later, it seems that every mid- to large-sized company is scrambling to put its information assets into a structured content-management environment before its competition does.
If you're wondering what all the hoopla is about, check out Ann Rockley's new book, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy. This book contains more than 500 pages describing a systemic method for defining, evaluating, and preparing for an enterprise-wide content management program that actually benefits a company's bottom line.
Note that I said "content management program"; this book outlines a business development process, not a "one size fits all" IT project or "buy and try" software implementation. And even though Ann owns The Rockley Group and her two contributing authors are company employees, Managing Enterprise Content isn't a thinly disguised sales pitch in book form. This book outlines how to analyze corporate information assets, develop business processes to better leverage these assets, build technology systems for managing the assets, and prepare employees to recognize assets, follow the processes, and use the technology.
The book's sections contain chapters related to the section topic. Section I defines the fundamentals of a unified content strategy. Sections II and III are excellent, detailed descriptions of the content auditing and modeling processes -- the keys to success in any content management solution. Section IV is an overview of tools and technologies that support a large-scale content management implementation, and Section V describes how to manage the implementation. Section VI contains valuable resources such as strategy and tools checklists and an informative segment on how to pick the vendor or vendors that are right for your organization.
Don't let the book's structure fool you, however. Managing Enterprise Content isn't a high-level introduction to content management for a senior vice-president. The book reads as a road map for implementing a content management solution. It's not a book expressly for IT managers, although I think most would benefit from reading it. It's also not just for the business manager. Managing Enterprise Content is for the person who manages both the technologies and the processes for developing and distributing the information assets of an organization, because the book deals with the technical and business challenges in an implementation.
This duality of business and technology is part of the underlying theme of the whole book: A content management solution cannot be successful if it is approached as simply a "technology problem" or a "business problem." The business people have to begin by understanding how the content they create is reused elsewhere within the corporation, and they have to change the way they write to support reusing the content. Likewise, the technologists can't just interview two or three business experts and then go off to create a viable content management solution.
But many books on this subject have this same theme. These other books state that it takes a concerted effort from the business community to identify reusable content, create a usable workflow, and define the lifecycle for various content types, and it takes IT resources to evaluate the tools and delivery systems to support the effective creation, management, and archiving of content assets. What differentiates Rockley's book from the rest is that she describes the intersection of business and IT in creating a viable solution, and the bulk of her book defines this middle ground.
As I said earlier, the keys to success in content management are the content audit and the content model. The audit and model together define the essential components of the knowledge assets managed within a company, and taken together they're the foundation for every other process in developing a solution, including the evaluation of tools and vendors. In Chapters 4 through 12, Rockley takes the reader through the steps and products of the audit and modeling exercises, and then describes how information from these exercises define the metadata, workflow, and systematic requirements of a comprehensive, robust implementation. It requires business acumen and technological expertise to navigate this "no man's land" in creating a content management solution, and Rockley proves she's up to the challenge.
Personally, I found the passages described above and the resources in Section VI to be the most valuable parts of the entire book. If you understand the potential value of a unified content-management solution for your organization but are having trouble selling it to management, Chapter 3, "Assessing return on investment for a unified content strategy," and Chapter 4, "Where does it really hurt?" are worth the cover price. Those chapters describe a methodology for determining the ROI for implementing a content management solution within an organization and the ways to uncover "hidden" opportunities and challenges addressed by a unified solution.
If you're currently involved in bringing content management to your enterprise, or if you're getting ready to implement soon, you'll certainly want to pick up a copy of Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy. And if you're just starting to think about what an unified content solution could mean for your company, this book is an essential resource for understanding the entire process from conceptualization to implementation.
My copy of Managing Enterprise Content arrived the day before a big meeting with other contributors and a potential client. I ripped open the package, scanned the table of contents, and picked out the sections I wanted to review before the meeting.
The content, figures, and case studies were very helpful. I reviewed material I already knew, learned a few new tricks and traps, and generally built my confidence. The arrangement of the book is helpful, too. The sections stand on their own nicely and work well with each other.
Now that we won the contract, I'm reading the book cover-to-cover at a leisurely pace.
This book is divided into several parts. The first part covers the basic concepts of reuse of content. The second part covers how to analyze the business requirements of your content strategy. The third part of the book is more for IT people. It covers information modeling and using metadata to organize your content. Also, a section on using workflow system to interact with your content and what roles, responsibilities and process that needs to be addressed. The book in well organized and explains the concepts in an easy to follow manner.
This book is for IT managers and architects, because in covers the process needed to distribute information and the technologies that support this process. The book covers the obstacles of distribution the information assets of a company. This book is a good resource for understanding the entire process from beginning to end, but other resources would be needed to understand how to implement these ideas.
I have to also give kudos to the physical layout of the book as well. Its modular TOCs at the beginning of each chapter and its pleasing visual layout made it one of the easiest books I've ever used, from an information foraging perspective. Rarely do I see books that are this useful for both linear and non-linear reading.
Discussions of purpose, roles, tools, processes, and benefits - it's all here in this book. For those new to Content Management, this book provides a soup to nuts approach that exposes the pitfalls and areas of resistance you may encounter in the process of getting buy-in for management. It then guides you through every aspect one needs to consider in achieving a successful implementation within an organization.
For organizations already well along the way in implementing a CMS, this book will either validate what you have already discovered or expose issues you may have missed that still need addressing to increase the effectiveness of your implementation.
Rockley examines types of reuse, and demonstrates why you MUST manage your content. She provides practical examples and a comprehensive approach that an organization can take to plan, develop and implement a unified content strategy. And she doesn't sugarcoat the real growing pains that are involved.
If you've never heard of enterprise content management, read the book for a new way of thinking that can save your company time and money. And if you're a frustrated veteran of the trenches, read it for a comprehensive and practical guide to developing a content strategy that works.
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