Managing Enterprise Content
Willis/Bach
Chapter 3 – Assessing Return on Investment for a Unified Content Strategy.
This chapter primarily consisted of the setting and meeting of goals when deciding whether or not to implement a unified content strategy. It was divided primarily into three parts, "Identifying goals," "Qualifying goals," and "Quantifying goals." The first two are easily summarized, with statements such as the following:
A fictitious company was used in demonstrating the process of deciding whether or not to implement a unified content strategy. The process was as follows:
Identifying Goals:
- Shorten time-to-market (how long it takes to get an item from conception to sales).
- Reduce cost of content development.
- Improve accuracy and quality of content.
- Reduce manufacturing defects.
These are all noble goals, but they aren't very specific. Without further guidelines, slight improvement can be viewed as successfully completing a goal. Hence, the next category:
Qualifying Goals:
- Reduce time-to-market by two months
- Reduce cost of content development by 25%
- Ensure content accuracy at all times (100% accuracy)
- Reduce defects to less than .01%
The last task of Quantifying the content is a bit more difficult. This essentially breaks down to how much benefit (read: money) the company gains by following these guidelines. For instance, maintaining constant 100% content accuracy can be fairly costly; however, if the company is sued due to a flaw in a manual, the loss could be catastrophic. Even if the company wins the case, the costs for simply defending themselves alone will be far greater than the cost spent on making sure they aren't sued in the first place.
The above process is not possible without gathering metrics (real costs). To do this the following steps need to be taken.
-Identify tasks.
-Measure the duration of a task.
-Calculate the cost of a task.
Ongoing metrics need to be performed as well.
Compare savings and/or value to the cost of achieving a goal.
After calculating the return on investment, the determination to implement a unified content strategy should reveal itself.