How can a CCMS simplify enterprise content operations?

A while back I spoke with the documentation lead at a very large organization. At the time she had 23 open browser tabs as she worked to update a product warning on a single product across all of the user guides (for different functions), safety data sheets and onboarding material for that product. All of her content plus that written by others across the organization.

What nobody realizes is that the problem isn’t the writing. It’s the architecture underneath it. It’s like old load-bearing walls in a house that were never designed to hold that much weight. And once the structure becomes too heavy, it starts to collapse.

Is your content operation ready for a CCMS?

A CCMS is not for every team, but there are certain patterns and characteristics that signal that a move to a CCMS is indicated. Smaller teams, and those publishing only a few documents, will likely find that the additional overhead of a CCMS is not warranted. But for larger teams, and those creating and managing large documentation sets, a CCMS can be a game-changer.

• You’re maintaining the same content in multiple places and regularly find them out of sync
• Localization costs are climbing while your source content barely changes between releases
• Writers spend more time hunting for the “right” version of something than actually writing
• Your publishing process involves manual steps that someone has to remember to do every time

If you find that you relate to most of the above then your content operations may benefit from moving to a CCMS.

What a CCMS actually does (and what it doesn’t)

A Component Content Management System (CCMS) is a type of content management system. It is different from other content management systems in that it manages content at the component or ‘building block’ level as opposed to the document level. Instead of storing finished PDFs or Word documents in a content management system that is based on components, a CCMS stores individual components. Each of these components is a self-contained piece of content. Examples of components are warnings, procedures and product descriptions. Components are stored in one place in a CCMS. From that single location, each component is then referenced by all of the documents that require that same component. When changes are made to a component, all of the documents that use that same component are then updated automatically.

A CCMS is far more than a system for updating individual documents. It can support the management of different versions of different components, the different structures that can be used to present the same content, the work of different authors creating different content in different languages, the different people involved in the publishing process for individual pieces of content, and grant the correct people the ability to carry out the correct tasks on individual content in one go and in one place.

This system does not write your content for you. We see a lot of interest in the CCMS space lately, and a lot of people seem to have the idea that the system will do the work for them. It will not. It is a management system for your content. It can help make your authors more efficient, but it will not replace them.

The real cost of document-centric thinking

A company’s content operations typically start out in a document-centric fashion. Creating documents is a very easy thing for people to understand, very visible and very familiar to most people. However, as a company’s products and services grow, so does the complexity of the content that is required to support them. As more countries are added to the list of places where a company’s products and services are shipped to, and as the frequency of updates to a company’s content increases on a quarterly basis, the need to publish that content in a variety of different formats to different audiences around the world creates a garden that needs to be constantly watered with a teaspoon. Eventually, someone will water the garden, but for how long?

While saving one update is convenient for the author, the compounding cost of such updates is a major factor in the woes of documents, and is often cited as a reason to avoid them. This cost manifests as the requirement that anyone updating shared content within a document update the content in all other places where the shared content appears as well. This means that the person updating the content must first find all of the other places in which the shared content appears. Then, each place found must be updated with the new content. Should the updated content not be updated in one of the found locations, then the updated content will not be consistent with the content found in the other locations, and the user-facing consequences of this can be quite severe for companies in regulated industries.

Where a CCMS genuinely earns its place

The actual efficiency gains from the CCMS can materialize in completely unexpected places.

A technical writer works for a software product with 7 different modules, each having its own documentation. In a document-centric environment, sections or topics may be included in several documents. In the example above, the installation prerequisites section would be included in the installation guide as well as in the user guide. This section is copied and pasted from one document to another, often with some minor changes. Over time, in a document-centric environment, such a section will drift apart from the original content as the documents go through their different revisions and are updated by different people. This can cause severe problems with user-facing content that are difficult to track down and fix. In a regulated environment, such inconsistencies can even have serious compliance-related problems. A CCMS avoids all these problems by storing a single component for the installation prerequisites section. This single component is then referenced in all guides where this topic is covered. When the prerequisites section is updated, the change is made once and all guides update automatically. There is no need to check all other documents where this topic may also be included.

Another advantage of well-implemented IXIA CCMS is that very long documents that require very expensive translation can have that cost drastically reduced. And the largest component of that cost is the amount of redundant material in the document. Material that is identical in many different versions of the same document. Material that is identical in many different translations of the same document. well-implemented IXIA CCMS handle this sort of redundant material only once – when it is first written. After that, it is included in all later translations automatically. I have worked with several large documentation sets, and the cost savings here have been shocking. (And yes, that is a formal term of art, and it is every bit as useful as you would hope.)

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While using a CCMS to create content does lead to many great benefits, the greatest benefit is confidence in the updated-ness of the content. In the end, that is what matters most. If a piece of content was updated somewhere, authors should be able to trust that it has been updated everywhere. And, in terms of review, it will no longer be the job of the reviewer to check for and remove any instances of duplicate content found within finished documents (a very time-consuming and tedious task).

Workflow Comparo

Task	Document-centric approach	CCMS approach
Updating a shared warning	Find and edit every document manually	Edit one component, changes push everywhere
Translating content	Send full documents, pay for repeated text	Send only new or changed components
Publishing to multiple formats	Manual reformatting per output	Single-source publishing to multiple outputs
Version control	File naming conventions, folders, hope	Built-in versioning at the component level

The table is not intended to criticize earlier work processes but rather to highlight that the processes described earlier were adequate for smaller numbers of documents but did not scale to the same extent as a CCMS for larger numbers of documents.

(And I am really enjoying labeling the old way of “file naming conventions, folders, hope” and juxtaposing it with the modern approach of a CCMS)

Getting the structure right before the software

A) Setup of the content structure before the implementation of the CCMS software.

Before you start setting up a system to manage your content, make sure that your content is in good shape. A CCMS is not a fix for badly organized, inconsistent, and unformatted content. Such content will simply be moved to a more expensive place where it can then be worked on at greater length. Therefore, it is necessary to set up a good content model before you start with a CCMS. A content model describes the types of content that you work with, their organization, their interrelations, the number of outputs you need to generate, and which of the components look similar but are not reusable and which are.

First do the thinking about your content and how you can organize it. The software part is relatively easy to set up once you have established a good content model. This documentation lead has since moved her team to structured authoring and says she’s forgotten what it feels like to trust her documentation. She doesn’t have to check it all the time for accuracy. That’s a feature I haven’t seen listed in a specs sheet before but it’s real and it’s powerful.

It’s very difficult to manage large volumes of content well. The tools that are available to manage content at scale are complex to implement and manage. In the end, there is no substitute for careful planning and the time and money required to successfully implement a CCMS. Your documentation will be better if you take the time to build a good content architecture instead of trying to make a suboptimal content architecture work with a CCMS.