While I’ve spent my career in the software/consumer electronic world, I’ve done a little in the regulated industries. My favorite was working for a company that reported to the Federal Railroad Administration.

How is a regulated environment different?

It’s different in a number of ways, depending on who is regulating you.

For example, you may be lightly regulated, as the rail equipment company I worked for was. By this, I mean that you have to track things like the big edit reviews and resulting comments and all previously released product documentation. Design specs after a certain point had to be auditable, as did factory floor policies and procedures. As did training materials used to teach people how to use the products.

Fundamentally, anything that was required to show auditors how the product and the product instructions got be the the thing out in the field has to be tracked. And, because this equipment was very robust, they had to track it essentially forever, as the products worked in the field for at least 50 years.

If a railroad crossing failed and people or property were damaged, the company had to be able to show the documents that shipped with the products, how that information came to be in the manuals, how the equipment was made, and how the end users were trained to use the equipment. For as long as that equipment was functioning in the field.

They had a lot of paper in a lot of file cabinets.

What they all have in common

Regardless of the industry – FDA, Financial, SOX, Solvency II, other government – it comes down to audit trails. You have to be able to show the trail of content that got you to the place you are right now. And that means history of content development in some manner.

If you’re using Word or InDesign, you have to depend on an external document management system and somehow track when and how the changes came to be.You must track versions of what shipped and when to who and why. You have to track review comments.

You wind up with a lot of paper in a lot of filing cabinets.

There are better ways

There is another way – you can track and manage the components in your content. Using the right component content management tool, you can use the history features to show you this information. You can also manage your review comments electronically. It’s a lot easier than trying to manage all these parts on your own.

To see how Author-it manages history and audit trails, watch the movie below.

Have you worked in a regulated environment? What were the restrictions you faced?

For most companies, the content they create is critical to the running of the business. Consider for a moment:

• Policies and procedures – state how the business is to be run, who does what and how. In industries with oversight, such as finance or medical, the business also must show auditors how the company has been running since the last audit. Failure to show this content can result in heavy fines or other bad things.
• Internal product documents – describe how products should work, the thought processes, the solutions, and so on for developing the products sold. Without these documents, a business has no idea how it builds what it builds. It also don’t know why decisions were made to do X rather than Y.
• External product documents – explain how to use the products to the people who purchase the products. If the external documents are not helpful, the business (at best) incurs an unreasonable support cost or (at worst) has a high return rate. Both impact available capital in the business. If the business functions in a regulated industry, it must keep the history of the external documents to show potential auditors how the product was described to work or potentially face large fines.
• Customer support documents – help internal support teams and external customers find a solution to their problems. For expensive internal support teams, quickly finding and understanding how to help a customer gets the customer off the phone and able to move forward. External customers who find a solution on the support site and never call is the ideal, as it costs the company less than pennies per customer.
• Training materials – few staff arrive knowing how the company works, what safety information they need to know, or how the products work. Training is how a company shares it’s tribal knowledge with the new tribe members. Many companies save a great deal of money on their insurance by making sure all new employees are trained in the required safety protocols. If the business needs to train customers on how the products work, the training center is a profit center.
• Marketing collateral – positions the products to the appropriate sales market. Few companies have a product so needed that no advertising is needed to sell the product. Failure to attract customers to the products negatively impacts the business.

Content as a business asset

The groupings above just touch on the broad types of content a business needs to manage. Even a small mom-and-pop store has some of the types of content listed above. For large international companies, the sheer amount of content assets, just as with hardware assets, for example, can be overwhelming.

Best of Breed companies know their business content is an asset that needs to be managed, just like the other assets in the company. Most companies track the computers and cell phones they use, for example. Annually, all the equipment is inventoried to make sure they have what they think they have.

Many companies never think about the business content as a business asset. The content that’s critical to the business is in Word or Powerpoint files or who knows, saved everywhere: on people’s local computers, somewhere on the network, maybe on a Sharepoint site. No one has any idea how much content they have, much less where it all is or what the most recent version might be.

If you ever wondered what Author-it products do, this is what we do. Our products help you manage your business content as the business asset it is.

In other news

We have a new line-up of free webinars coming your way in April and May. We’re really pleased with the offerings and hope you are too.

High on the list of must attends are 2 in particular:

Content Development: Future Trends, Future Solutions
Paul Trotter, CEO of Author-it Software Corporation shares his vision of the future in this hour long event. You’ll leave knowing what trends are and what you need to prepare for now.
April 25 at 4pm Eastern time.  To sign up for this tools-neutral webinar, click here.

What’s New in Author-it 5.5
Additionally, we have several webinars scheduled to show you what’s coming in Author-it 5.5. To see the times and dates, click here.

Recently I’ve noticed that not only within the pages of this blog, but in CMS blog-space in general there are a handful of commonly used acronyms that are bandied about with the assumption that all readers automatically understand what they mean, not only literally but also what technologies and processes they actually represent.

Another twist to this is is that even within the content management community, there isn’t always agreement. Here is my humble attempt at bringing some clarity to the subject.  My thanks go to Wikipedia and Peter Halgopan of Information Week for help with definitions.

CM or CMS – Content Management  or Content Management System.  This a computer application used to create, edit, manage, and publish content in a consistently organized fashion.  CMSs are frequently used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators’ manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures. The content managed may include computer files, image media, audio files, video files, electronic documents, and Web content.

CCMS – Component Content Management System.  Content Management applications which break down authored content into granular components (‘topics’).  Core components of such content, can then be reused in many content products.  Research shows that as much as half of product support content is redundant and could be reused. For a large organization, reuse can yield significant savings, efficiencies, and quality improvements over time.  A core component can be something as small as a legal copyright statement, the first steps in a process that are shared by many processes, or an key branding message like a product name or tagline. Reuse allows the core component to be edited and maintained from a single source, and then be easily assembled into thousands of documents where it is needed.

WCM or WCMS – Web Content Management or Web Content Management System.  Content management system software, usually implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and many essential Web maintenance functions. Usually the software provides authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little or no knowledge of programming languages to create and manage content with relative ease.. Blogging tools such as WordPress, Blogger and Movable Type are examples of WCM tools.

DM or DMS – Document Management or Document Management System. A computer system (or set of computer programs) used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents. Some DM systems also have tools to help support workflow. The term has some overlap with the concepts of Content Management Systems and is often viewed as a component of Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECM) and related to Digital Asset Management, Document imaging, Workflow systems and Records Management systems. Contract Management and Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) can be viewed as either components or implementations of ECM. DM systems are particularly good for organizations with a high volume of documentation that needs to be easily searchable, as well as organizations that have to comply with regulatory restrictions.

DAM – Digital Asset Management covers content and files of every type, including images, video and audio files, MS Office files, in fact just about anything that can be digitized. DAM usually refers to a hardware/software system that helps to store and manage these digitized files. The term “Digital Asset Management” also refers to the protocol for downloading, renaming, backing up, rating, grouping, archiving, optimizing, maintaining, thinning, and exporting files.  Occasionally the term “Visual Asset Management” (VAM) is used, especially in the FMCG space.

MAM – The term “Media Asset Management” is sometimes used as a sub-category of “Digital Asset Management”, mainly for audio or video content.

ECM – Enterprise Content Management tends to be a bit of a all-encompassing concept but generally refers to systems that include content management and digital asset management components. ECM systems are usually fairly expensive and hardware intensive, and often require a significant level of IT experience to set up and run. The “official” definitions as set by AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) is “Enterprise Content Management is the technologies used to Capture, Manage, Store, Preserve, and Deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists.”

The major differences between CMS and ECM? The CMS definition specifically mentions software; it’s a software system (or systems) for a the specific use of managing and publishing content, whereas the ECM definition refers to both tools and strategies.

I’m sure we are just scratching the surface here, so I’d be grateful if anyone can give deeper meaning to any of the above, or indeed add to the list.

Posted by Dunken Francis,  Web Consultant, Author-it Software Corporation

By the time you read this blog post the US Presidential election should have been decided.  Whichever side of the political fence you sit on, Obama or McCain, one thing is clear; the first order of business for the new President will focus on restoring confidence in financial markets.

The President’s ability to really influence the crisis will be an interesting sidebar as it plays out.  Rupert Murdoch claims there is little they can do to help but much they can do to make the situation worse.  He fears the effects of protectionist policies on globalization but I think we also need to consider the costs of an ‘avalanche of regulation’ aimed at righting the wrongs of the current crisis.

It is clear the market has failed and where markets fail, governments have a responsibility to step in and regulate. The upside is, we don’t repeat the mistakes of yesterday. On the down, with regulation comes compliance and cost. Cost, when corporations are already struggling with a heavy compliance burden and the effects of a down economy.

Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC) is a growing market segment sized by GRC Analysts, Corporate Integrity at $52.1 Billion in 2008. There is a thriving technology sector delivering solutions for GRC.

I have been having a series of discussions with analysts and players exploring the connection between Component Content Management (CCM) and GRC. There is a huge opportunity to include CCM solutions such as Author-it, in the GRC mix to fill the gap in current GRC solutions where the rubber meets the road… Policy and Procedure documentation and training materials.  It is via this documentation that a corporation educates its employees on how to be compliant and holds them accountable.

Compliance in this parlance is about people, processes and systems, all of which must be documented. And if they are to be documented, you better have a process for managing the content that goes into this documentation.  CCM concepts such as reuse, single sourcing, multi-output publishing and localization all play a role in providing an efficient, auditable and ultimately compliant result.

We are into phase two of a three phase project with a major US financial institution as we speak.  This project is all about compliance, efficiency and cost savings.  Author-it is enabling them to create policy and procedure content from business units all around the US, store this content in a central repository, update it in a controlled fashion/workflow and then deliver it via a dynamic web output to tens of thousands of employees. The solution allows for multiple variants of policies and procedures based on criteria such as geography and business unit.  These variants are resolved at publishing allowing for a dynamic, employee specific document.

It is a fabulous example of how CCM can successfully breach the GAP between GRC and the compliance coalface, your employees.
Cheers
Steve

Posted by Steve Davis, President, Author-it Software Corporation