Content will Always be King. A discussion on the ... Ultimately, in today's
business environment, one of the most critical assets for any organizations
across any ...
Content will Always be King A discussion on the importance of content transformation and dynamic publishing in today’s enterprise
Mukul Krishna
Content will Always be King
TABLE OF CONTENTS Content will always be king .................................................................................................. 3 The Expanding Interactive Content Universe ................................................................... 3 Revisiting Enterprise Content Publishing ......................................................................... 5
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CONTENT WILL ALWAYS BE KING
The best corporate strategy, business plan, marketing campaign, product plan, financial strategy – you name it – is useless if it cannot be communicated and used effectively and in a timely manner.
Over the past few years, as organizations have started embracing digitization of their workflows, there has been a massive amount of emphasis on process at the cost of content. Ultimately, in today’s business environment, one of the most critical assets for any organizations across any vertical is its branded intellectual property which resides as digital content. The best corporate strategy, business plan, marketing campaign, product plan, financial strategy – you name it – is useless if it cannot be communicated and used effectively and in a timely manner.
The Expanding Interactive Content Universe Each year, enterprises invest billions of dollars in hopes that their corporate communications — which may include video, audio, graphics, text, and images — are accessible, up-‐to-‐date, and relevant, to drive their marketing outreach programs. These assets are the fuel that drives all corporate activities, including marketing initiatives used to directly engage with stakeholders. The look and feel of this information is equally important and in some case more so, than the message conveyed. Well crafted, up-‐to-‐ date, value-‐laden, and brand-‐consistent content communicates a company’s qualifications, establishes their thought leadership, and legitimizes the message behind the medium. For decades, print advertisements, TV, radio and mail-‐outs served as critical touch-‐points between a company and its customer base. Then the Internet introduced Websites as another standard communications channel. And now digital devices such as smartphones and tablets have revolutionized the way companies communicate with potential customers. As the new digital touch point with customers, smartphones, and tablets shift one-‐dimensional communication to multiple dimensions-‐ an interactive dialog in the making. Whether receiving customized offers via mobile devices, launching a video from within an e-‐magazine on an iPad, or interacting with digital signage at a local retailer, customers engage with vendor communications more actively than ever before. The explosion in digital content has changed the consumer and enterprise landscape over the past 10 years. End-‐users have been inundated with all types of content that needs to be accessed anytime and anywhere. This has spawned many new business models in an effort to tap into the ever expanding availability of different types of content on myriad devices.
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Content will Always be King
Though the larger consumer market has adopted technological advances around managing and consuming digital content rapidly, the traction within the enterprise has been slower. This is despite the rapid adoption of digital content within organizations as most enterprise content is still woefully unsearchable and languishes in departmental silos across the enterprise. Another key reason for slow enterprise wide deployments has been the lack of awareness and proper direction within an organization to deploy digital content. Enterprise wikis and blogs did not face initial enthusiasm in the enterprise market as companies did not understand the value, nor did they feel that they could trust employees to use these tools responsibly. However, early users have shown the tremendous value proposition that on-‐ demand and interactive content bring to the enterprise space.
This is despite the rapid adoption of digital content within organizations as most enterprise content is still woefully unsearchable and languishes in departmental silos across the enterprise.
At the heart of any workflow is a storage system (central or federated) married to a repository service as part of a content management platform. Enterprise Content Management married to the storage system has become arguably the most crucial piece within the content/information workflow. Content Management, as the term describes, is a solution that enables the ingest, archiving, indexing, search, retrieval, browsing, annotation, conditional access, version control, repurposing, collaboration, display, transport and cross-‐platform publishing of content in a seamless, collaborative and secure environment which is easily integrable with other third party systems within the content workflow spanning the asset lifecycle from creation to delivery.
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Such systems are largely client/server applications that enable the It provides a platform for traditionally siloed systems to integrate with and provide a collaborative workflow environment for different knowledge workers to seamlessly work on content creation, management, repurposing and delivery
Revisiting Enterprise Content Publishing Since the advent of desktop publishing software, traditional publishing has not radically changed. In fact, expanding requirements to publish faster, more personalized information across print, Web, and digital devices cannot be met using traditional publishing tools. This is because they require repetitive, time-‐consuming processes for content repurposing, updates, and distribution. As a result, inaccurate, out-‐of-‐date, and ineffective content has been propagated to audiences even, for example, after situational changes, fallacies, or redundancies were realized.
Modern enterprises are increasingly aware of the evolving role and significance of digital content within their organizations, and many have been looking toward the media ecosystem to resolve greater organizational content creation and management requirements.
With an ever-‐increasing variation of available media resources, incorporating vast and disparate information has remained an on-‐going pursuit for traditional book, magazine, and newspaper publishers as well as corporations that communicate through documentation, Websites, marketing materials, and other publishers’ publications. Time-‐ consuming and resource-‐intensive, traditional publishing requires laborious page-‐by-‐page recreation, repurposing, translation, and reconfiguration of content. For complex publications, content creators have been tasked with maintaining multiple versions for different audiences, in different languages, and for different media channels, further complicating and adding inefficiency to the publishing process. Modern enterprises are increasingly aware of the evolving role and significance of digital content within their organizations, and many have been looking toward the media ecosystem to resolve greater organizational content creation and management requirements. Dynamic publishing combines previously diverse, un-‐combined yet related technologies into a single, unified platform that saves time, costs, and burdens placed on knowledge workers across all functional areas within an organization — regardless of whether they are creative talent working with marketing, or business-‐line managers in various departments. Rather than just a diverse set of functional technologies, dynamic publishing technology is a concept where the whole is greater than the sum or its parts. Frost & Sullivan defines dynamic publishing as a value chain of software products and processes that enable the creation, repurposing, publication, and delivery of rich content, which can include text, graphics, and video, audio, and real-‐time data amongst other media types, across a variety of publishing channels. These solutions, though traditionally deployed on-‐premise, can now just as easily be vended through the cloud as a service and are the critical first step for any enterprise content strategy.
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Content will Always be King
Knowledge workers are constantly challenged with being able to communicate with internal and external stakeholders. Selecting the most relevant channels can aid a company in cutting through the clutter and delivering clearer, more concise and personalized information to customers, employees, partners etc. However, for many companies the barrier to publishing to multiple channels is the resource requirements associated with manually repurposing and formatting content for different formats and devices. This barrier is dramatically reduced when publishing processes are automated. Since dynamic publishing enables a company to manage content at the source and independent of final format, they can “Create Once and Publish to Many” channels faster, quicker, and with greater information quality. This helps marketers leverage more channels because they can easily create layouts for new channels and deliver information to them as their needs evolve. The value proposition of dynamic publishing, when harnessed properly, can thus empower marketing executives to launch marketing campaigns across diverse channels, even those that might have not been anticipated earlier, by simply repurposing existing content in a channel-‐specific layout created through the dynamic publishing solution. Dynamic publishing provides substantial resource reductions associated with content reconfiguration, repurposing, and reformatting. Knowledge workers that access and work on the same pool of content housed in a centralized repository can now leverage this content interdepartmentally. This not only boosts collaboration but also enables knowledge workers to refresh content more frequently, while at the same time reducing content and departmental silos. For example, content created for a product can be leveraged on the company’s website, published to a PDF document, and to an iPad. When this content is updated at the source, it can be regenerated to all channels, supporting up-‐to-‐date, consist content. In today’s world of 24/7, anytime, anywhere access, dynamic publishing solutions are the mantra to achieve success in real-‐time, multi-‐channel content transformation and distribution, boosting enterprise collaboration, and streamlining workflows.
In today’s world of 24/7, anytime, anywhere access, dynamic publishing solutions are the mantra to achieve success in real-time, multi-channel content transformation and distribution, boosting enterprise collaboration, and streamlining workflows.
Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today’s market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the Global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Is your organization prepared for the next profound wave of industry convergence, disruptive technologies, increasing competitive intensity, Mega Trends, breakthrough best practices, changing customer dynamics and emerging economies.
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