Finally: Adding Marketing, Sales, and Other Business Systems

Liz Fraley: This is the sixth (and last) of a series of articles based on the talk I gave at the Content Management 2005 conference. These articles focus on extending single-sourcing systems and activities to integrate content-generating organizations enterprise-wide.

Profiling Customer-Specific Purchasing Information

The customer price list is an obvious target for integrating with Marketing. What if you could automate creation and publication of the customer price list? A price list tends to be a complicated, dynamic document. Prices are adjusted based on the customer, the geographic location, the business segment, just to name a few. In addition, different customers may have different discount levels, based on any number of factors.

If you were to dynamically generate the price list, you could produce accurate, up-to-date focused price lists for every customer every time. Simple filters applied to the same information can produce different views. Profiled data turns a single data source into customized price lists for your customers.

In fact, taking this one step farther. Most websites require their customers log in to get pricing data. As long as you know who's looking, you can profile your way to displaying targeted pricing data: you can put their most likely purchases at the top of the list, and, depending on how good a customer they are, you can alter their discount to make purchasing more attractive.

How about the parts list? You can provide customized parts lists to your customers if you integrate their purchasing history with the parts database. Mission critical custom tools can bridge systems through the simple application of XSLT to XML data acquired through XML interfaces. You get documentation stubs for free, that an author or editor can polish and deliver directly to customers.

In addition, you can improving customer experience by integrating purchasing data and portal personalization. XML web service technologies can help coordinate information for customers. Use customer purchasing data to delivers product updates, white papers, and data sheets. The profile connects the docs, linking in field articles relevant to the products customer has ordered in the past or may be interested in today.

Separation of Form And Content

The separation of form from content is particularly important for marketing. Separating form and content makes changing look-and-feel very easy. This applies to more than just the CSS stylesheet applied to a company's web pages: this includes any PDF documentation, any text (README) type files, any presentation slides or self-service, knowledge base articles. Each one of these is content clothed in a particular look and feel that can and will change over time.

The average company changes the look and feel of it's external website every 4 or 5 years. The more tightly integrated the content is with look and feel, the harder it is to upgrade your look. At Juniper, the marketing team outsourced a new look-and-feel to a web services company. It took nearly 9 months to migrate all the pages to the new look. It took another year to convert the pages to more easily maintainable ones.

The web services company had traded maintainability for precise look-and-feel. As a result, they had little pixel gif images all over the place, embedded throughout every single page, so the page would "look perfect" every time in every browser. As it turned out, it didn't look perfect in __every browser__; it didn't look right in half of the FreeBSD-Mozilla browsers _internal_ to the company. And it made updating pages, with changing content lengths extremely difficult.

On the other hand, if they'd automated page generation, updating pages would have been a breeze. Update information in a stub-page, send the stub through a generator, and boom! You've got a well-formatted page that fits the new content. What you don't have is a lot of manual effort to tweak all of the various little spacers that the web services company threw in just to get one page to look just right.

Finally, a few ways to include internal business processes

• Services to support Sarbanes Oxley activities
• Audit trails
• Branding turnover
• Acquisitions
• Connecting to operations, manufacturing, and document control systems
• HAZMAT database integration
• Universal Business Language (UBL)

Look for places that create source data that is repackaged for different audiences and different purposes. All of these places are potential targets for cost savings through XML tool development.

We're all sold on structure -- that's why we're here

Remember:

• Structure is added work
• If you make structure onerous or make adding it hard/expensive time-wise, people will not do it
• You need to be careful about what you choose to do or you will end up with structure that may not really be useful: <temperature>47C/104F</temperature>



Technorati Tag: single-sourcing

Special Benefits For Training

Liz Fraley: This is the fifth of a series of articles based on the talk I gave at the Content Management 2005 conference. These articles focus on extending single-sourcing systems and activities to integrate content-generating organizations enterprise-wide.

Time to Integrate Training

Training materials are perhaps the best example of repackaged data. On the one hand, training materials are perfect targets for reuse: content can come from published manuals to customer support to sales and marketing collateral. Training is the one place that you want to ensure information consistency. Customers pay for training and expect that what they learn in training will always be of value.

At the same time, the training materials themselves are a perfect example of repackaging data based on the idea of varying levels of detail. From one source, you can create scalable training materials:
• Student materials
• Instructor’s materials
• Presentation slides

In addition, with very simple tools, you to go up and down — increase or decrease — the level of detail.

For example, one of the best trainers I know teaches the skills required to do exactly this. G. Ken Holman teaches XSLT and XPath, the language that transforms XML data. He prepares one large XML document with all relevant, tagged information. From this one document, he can produce the student materials, the instructor's materials, and his presentation slides. He can switch from one to the other dynamically to address questions on the slides or in the materials, right before the students' eyes, with a simple click of the mouse.

At the same time, he can produce the individual student name plates, the registration materials, and the student contact information sheets just as quickly. He creates one large document with all required information tidbits. Because he can generate all the output files, he can process registrations and provide accurate data to the students and his class helpers right up to the last minute. One quick transformation and he can print out the latest information for distribution 5 minutes later when the class begins.

It's powerful stuff.

Special benefits for training…

Training in an organization happens at a number of levels — internal, external, and management training classes. Most training classes get cancelled because not enough people sign up.

What would happen if you aggregated the schedules of all available training opportunities? You'd get a master schedule of training classes — one-stop shopping for training, if you will — that everyone could consult. That way, employees can find classes that fit into their existing schedules, reducing the amount of time that training impacts their day-to-day deliverables while at the same time reducing the overhead costs of less than full classes.

When you combine aggregation with profiling, you can generate schedules on-the-fly for different audiences simultaneously:
• This Week, This Month, Next Quarter
• Internal, External, Management
• Certification, Webinars, Tutorials, Online Training

A trainer I know does this on an inter-company basis. He gives training classes himself, and licenses his training to other people to deliver. He posts an XML version of his training schedule; his licensees post XML versions of their schedules. Each one also has a filter that pulls in the other person's information at run time.

This means that whenever someone clicks on Ken's class schedule, that person sees not only Ken's deliveries, but Laurie's too. Ken only needs to modify his own schedule: he never needs to update the master schedule. The master schedule is updated whenever a potential student clicks on Ken's schedule link: XSLT fetches Laurie's latest data, integrates it with Ken's, and displays both to the student. The customer is served: the student can always find the best class that fits his or her schedule.

It's a simple scheme that works because all business units can participate with minimal effort.

Just a note about RSS

RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by (amongst other things) news websites and weblogs. The RSS formats provide web content or summaries of web content, links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data. In addition to facilitating syndication, RSS allows a website's frequent readers to track updates on the site using a news aggregator.

Different news and weblog sites use RSS feeds that are automatically updated whenever a new article is posted. The site determines how much information is posted to the feed — the whole article, a teaser, or just a headline. Readers can use their favorite RSS aggregator to access everything that interests them without having to visit every single site. It's a great way to keep your customers up-to-date and connected to you.



Technorati Tag: single-sourcing