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For Publishers, No Easy Path to Content Management

by Lisa Bos    Nov 2002

Publishers today see huge opportunities to leverage their content into new and improved print and electronic products. Like other industries, publishing is also experiencing ever-increasing pressures to manage expense. Based on that, publishing organizations should already be deeply invested in the latest content management technologies, right? Nope. Many publishers have invested, but many have not or have done so sparingly.

IS IT BECAUSE THEY'RE CHEAP? Behind closed doors, content management vendors will tell you that they haven't gotten a foothold in the publishing market because publishers are, well, cheap and conservative. But that's just an easy excuse for the vendor. We describe things differently. We don't argue that publishers as a breed are, in fact, conservative and therefore traditionally slow to make major investments when compared with other types of companies. However, when looking at content management solutions, publishers are reacting to several factors that justify a careful approach.

• For publishers, content management is not an isolated need. To a non-publisher, web content management is often just "Marketing's problem." For a publisher, it's the business's problem, and the success or failure of a content management project can affect the publisher's bottom line long after the initial investment has been absorbed. In other words, content management represents more potential risk (and reward) for publishers than for other types of organizations.
• While technology can sometimes bring tremendous efficiencies and opportunities, publishers' problems are as much about process re engineering and challenging assumptions just as they are about software. For example, one of the more difficult challenges is whether print and electronic products should be supported sequentially (usually this means print first) or simultaneously from a single content source. It is unreasonable to think that a shift away from a product-centric world towards a content-centric world — with all the accompanying changes to process and to staff responsibilities — will be made quickly or easily. And, what is appropriate and what works for one organization will not necessarily be right for another one.
• There are ever-increasing pressures for content to be available electronically as well as in print, but for many publishers it's not yet clear how to support the increased infrastructure costs because there has not been a correspondingly large increase in revenue. It's hard to justify significant one-time investments when the upside just isn't there yet, even when you know you can't be competitive without the investment.

• What's Missing for Publishers Some features publishers often care about that are missing from most content management products: Intelligent XML management (e.g., validation on check in/check out, XML-aware searching) The ability to manipulate, navigate to, associate metadata with, and re-use parts of stored documents (e.g., a subsection within a book chapter) Integration with print composition systems or the ability to edit in a print WYSIWYG view (because many publishers still copy fit to page layouts) Strong collaboration tools

• Finally, once they're ready to invest, publishers often can't find the right tools to do the job. Many existing products focus on features that are relatively unimportant to most publishers (like web content management functions) and do poorly at the ones that really matter (like including print as well as electronic production capabilities). Add to this that publishers as a group are only now adopting rigorous software project management methodologies, and you have a recipe for difficult and expensive projects.

THE GOOD NEWS. Despite the disclaimers above, the path to successful content management initiatives for publishers is becoming less rocky.

• A growing number of success stories show that the investments can pay off. Some publishers have shown that it's possible to implement organizational, process, and technology change over time for incremental benefit and for ongoing fine-tuning in response to evolving business strategies.
• Publishers have learned that they usually need more than a single system: They need multiple, different systems targeted at specific needs (e.g. content management versus asset management versus production tracking).
• As they become more technically savvy, publishers have also begun to take advantage of a component-based approach to content management, building solutions from a combination of tools with the right characteristics and resulting in more flexibility for system evolution.
• And, finally, content management vendors are beginning to focus on publishing as an untapped market, and we are anticipating product enhancements that publishers will care about.

This is an exciting and pivotal time for publishers looking to meet new opportunities through improved content management. We think this newsletter will help you do so successfully, so don't forget to register. And, now or anytime, please feel free to send us feedback and ideas for topics we should be covering.