It has been an interesting start to 2009. It is clear that the financial crisis continues and the world awaits the outcome of President Obama’s stimulus package to see how this will affect the US and global markets. As many commentators have hypothesized; while access to credit is a real issue, it is the consumer coal face where change will start. Changes in consumer spending flow through the entire business ecosystem from B2C through to the B2B sector.

So in a market such as this, how do you drive forward?

I think the answer to this question lies in how businesses are affected and are subsequently seeking to deal with the crisis. The effects are first felt in a reduction in sales revenues. This is a natural market reaction to a crisis – ‘hunker down’ mentality. This leads to additional emphasis on sales execution and a review of costs.

At Author-it we have been heavily focused on these issues in our client and prospect discussions. That is; how can Author-it help our clients with sales execution and how can we cut their costs? Obviously there is an investment to be made in purchasing and implementing Author-it, so we have been ruthless in presenting our case for real dollar cost savings above other gains. Here’s some scenarios to illustrate this point:

Issue: Authoring teams (of all persuasions) are under significant pressure. Teams are being asked to do more with less people and still expected to complete projects on time.
Solution: Author-it allows 40% + gains in authoring efficiency through advanced reuse, single sourcing and multi-output publishing. More output from less.

Issue: Authoring teams are becoming a distributed mix of permanent employees and contractors. This makes collaboration, authoring, edit review and approval very difficult.
Solution: Author-it Live allows web based, ‘anywhere, anytime access’ to content for authoring, review and publishing. Huge time and efficiency gains.

Issue: Localization budgets are under pressure but there is still a requirement to sell in global markets and therefore deliver localized content.
Solution: Author-it Localization Manager can cut localization costs by more than 50%. This is a real cash saving.

Issue: Sales teams need to produce more revenue. This means more sales proposals and therefore more administrative load.
Solution: A number of clients (and us of course) use Author-it to generate custom sales proposals at a small fraction of the time and effort required using traditional methods. This means better quality, compliant proposals and an increased chance of sales success.

Issue: Authoring applications are siloed meaning it is difficult or impossible to leverage content assets across an enterprise.
Solution: Author-it is an enterprise authoring and content management application. Its ease of use and intuitive UI means it can be used by all business units allowing content to be shared and reused throughout an enterprise. Huge efficiency gains across the enterprise.

The above scenarios focus on addressing the core issues many companies are experiencing right now that is how to; cut costs and increase revenue. I believe it is by focussing on ROI and these key areas that both software purchasers and vendors can come together and mutually work through the worst effects of the current market.

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

The term ‘double-edged sword’ may have been created with content management systems (CMS) in mind. On one edge, they hold great promise for organisations in terms of their ability to create and manage content that is more accurate, less costly to produce, and more consistent in appearance. On the other, they can present a myriad of challenges in their implementation and acceptance by the people using them – and purchasing them. Let’s examine the challenges that a CMS presents, along with ways those challenges can be overcome…

Challenge #3: Gaining Approval
The approval process for a CMS is an all-too-familiar barrier. While budget concerns might be raised the real obstacle is convincing people that there’s a good business case for a CMS.

Often it’s a generational issue: many older executives simply don’t see the value of managing information and the only types of arguments that are considered involve hard ROI.

Sometimes this is readily evident (where there is a high volume of customer-facing content), but if the issue is just making life easier, gaining internal approval can be difficult.

The answer?  Obviously, where there is a good deal of customer facing content or translation, the case can be made easily. But where neither item is a factor, the case should be made through the value of producing content that is consistent, graphically uniform, and ultimately quicker to create.

Posted by Paul Trotter, CEO, Author-it Software Corporation

I attended the CIDM Best Practices conference in Santa Fe, NM in September. As a new member of the CMS community, working for Author-it, I could not help but notice the apparent need for an evolutionary advancement in the industry.

During the conference, in practically every discussion I had with potential customers, they described their current CM solution as either:
1) A mixture of various vendors’ solutions that required some effort to integrate; or
2) An incomplete solution that still needs components to automate their processes.In most cases, these people did not seem to know about (or understand/accept) the concept of a true “end-to-end solution”. Most of the conference was focused on developing best practice techniques for persuading the rest of the industry (including their own respective organizations) to embrace content management. This was, after all, the intent of the conference. However, there was very little mention of the taxing requirements of CMS integration.

Many people seem very attached to their current multi-vendor solution as they’ve invested a lot of time, money, and sweat into it. In several cases, CIDM presenters described how they began their CMS deployment with at least one restart before they found a solution that actually addressed their respective requirements.

It seems there is an inherent high level of uncertainty in the final result when launching a new CMS solution. This should not be surprising as there is a corresponding high level of integration effort required to deploy a multi-vendor solution. Yet implementation timing is a significant cost variable in any major project. A timely ROI and clear path of achieving it is key to selling the CMS concept at the executive level.

In my opinion, this market must evolve to a more complete solution-based environment before it can substantially proliferate. Much like the networking device industry today, in general, customers prefer a complete end-to-end solution for procurement, product integration, and after-market service reasons. The industry needs to vigorously emphasize technology AND integration as a means to ramp general acceptance.

Posted by Chris Simoneaux, Senior Sales Executive, Author-it Software Corporation