Content management success hinges on globalization, reuse, executive buy-in
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/22/2007 3:11:00 PM MDT
High costs, cumbersome regulatory requirements, lawsuits, and lost business opportunities are challenges facing multinational manufacturers today as they seek solutions that generate multilingual product information that's deliverable to multiple end users.
The bigger news is that many global manufacturers are not only meeting these challenges, but are achieving cost benefits and competitive advantages from deploying enterprise content management (ECM) systems.
A recent poll surrounding success factors for ECM adoption in a multilingual corporate environment included more than 300 C-level executives, information architects, product management directors, developers, and documentation specialists that were asked these questions:
1) What is the most critical business challenge driving your organization to consider a global ECM solution?
More than one-third (35.3 percent) of respondents say globalization and translation requirements comprise the toughest challenge, matching the percentage of respondents who cite content reuse across multiple business groups. Other top responses included time-to-market (17.6 percent); and customer satisfaction improvements (11.8 percent).
2) Indicate the factor that you think is most critical to meeting project objectives.
More than one-third (38.6 percent) of respondents say gaining executive buy-in is the most critical factor in achieving project goals. Others include successful preplanning and change management (31.6 percent); validating the return-on-investment (19.3 percent); and implementing a standard like the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (10.5 percent).
To yield the greatest ECM benefits, an enterprise needs to follow best practices in implementation, including:
• Methods for producing globally focused documentation solutions;
• Tactics for simplified, straightforward customer communications; and
• Strategies for leveraging content management systems to improve a company's bottom line.
For more information, contact the survey sponsors:
• Astoria Software, a provider of software for managing structured content; and
• Idiom Technologies, a provider of localization and translation services.
