As a content management company, we sing the praises of our clients who have created tremendous efficiencies in publishing operations by implementing appropriate tools and technologies to reduce time to market and satisfy a multichannel publishing strategy.  The information industry is under tremendous pressure to deliver digital content in many forms to many channels.  However, some publishers are moving away from automated workflows and content transformations.  Why would an organization forgo automation in today’s complex publishing world?  Perhaps it is due to the following:

1. Managing offshore vendors – Holding a vendor responsible for meeting quality standards and publishing timelines requires a different set of skills than incorporating publishing tools into an organization. With automation, some of the vendor responsibilities are moved back to editorial and production departments. While an offshore vendor can apply brute force on a case-by-case basis; adhering to structured formats and implementing templates enable content transformations and delivery in a sustainable and automated manner.
2. Cutting jobs – Publishers who think that automating workflow is wonderful but equates to cutting jobs may benefit from another vantage point. Just as effective manager works with an individual to align skills with solutions, the same can be said for automated workflows. For example, technology is excellent at machine processing---XML validation, business rules validation, schematron validation.  Individuals outperfom on cognitive skills that automated technology is not equipped to tackle---content development, content curation, metadata management, new product sandboxing. Saving time with efficient workflow routines equates to realigning staff to work on value-add tasks.
3. Conserving culture – Some organizations don’t like technology that automates workflow.  Never have, never will.  It takes communication, dedication, and training to change an organization's culture in terms of new technology adoption. Working with older toolsets (eg, Word 2000, InDesign CS3, etc.) provides a comfort level to both in-house staff and external authors. But guarding a culture against change can result in antiquated processes and missed opportunities.  
4. Hiring vs investing – Increasing headcount is an easier sell than investing in technology. Investing in the right technology means changing the way individuals do their daily jobs but also means changing the way an organization approaches a publishing program that has worked consistently for decades.  It is no small task and investing in a new CMS is indeed a financial and organizational committment. Adding up the factors that instigate the pursuit of CMS need to be part of the investment equation---lack of automated content transformation, laborious manual workflow steps, inability to deliver to multichannels, ineffective content organization, dispersed assets, inconsistent metadata, etc.
   
   Rather than calculating ROI on a CMS investment try looking at the payback period when the pain points are resolved.  If you can justify an investment in automating workflow and have a payback period of a year or less this could be an easier sell to internal staff and management. 

There is little doubt that publishers have a multichannel publishing goal.  There is pressure from the consumer and the competition to produce more content, more efficiently, and to more channels than ever before. A balanced approach to making changes to people (ie, structuing teams according to skill sets), processes (ie, automating as much as possible), and technology (ie, implementing appropriate tools and technologies) results in success.  It is not just the technology that requires investment. Changing people, patterns, and culture usually requires a greater investment in time and education.

What approaches to workflow automation resulted in success at your organization? What pain points do you continue to face?

RSuite 4. New Look. Proven Engine.

Today, the newest version of RSuite CMS has been announced and we can't wait for publishers to experience all the new features and tools. RSuite 4 offers a redesigned, more intuitive user experience with action-oriented contextual menus, search-based content navigation, accordion-style search results, and a user interface (UI) with intentional color design. In fact we've found that the new UI provides greater productivity among editorial and production groups while drastically reducing the learning curve. This means your team will reap the benefits of contet management faster than ever.

“With RSuite 4, we’ve coupled a great user experience with very powerful content management. The unified search and browse experience helps users contend with large volumes of content and assets. This version of RSuite will make content management approachable to a wider range of users---marketing, new product development, and sales. This will further expand the opportunity for our customers to get even more value out of their investment in content management. We continue to focus our efforts to enable publishers to implement a strategy for multi-channel products readily adaptable to future market-driven needs.”  ---Christopher Hill, vice president of product management at RSI Content Solutions.

Read more about the latest features or schedule a personal demo today.

RSI Content Solutions and Data Conversion Laboratory have surveyed and collected input on the state of technology adoption and digital revenue metrics from publishing and media organizations. Join us for a webinar on December 6 as the survey results are revealed and analyzed by Barry Bealer, CEO and co-founder of RSI Content Solutions, and Mark Gross, CEO of Data Conversion Laboratory. 

Don't miss Barry and Mark's insight and perspective on 

• How publishers are approaching the digital landscape to benefit customers
• How organizations recognize increased revenue from multi-channel publishing
• What you can do to achieve greater revenue from digital products in 2013

Webinar Details | 2012 Publishers' Survey Results

Title: Reality Check: The Truth from the Publishers' Perspective

Date: Thursday, December 6, 2012

Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EST

Space is limited.
Reserve your webinar seat now at:
https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/198740406

Audible Inc., an Amazon.com, Inc. subsidiary (NASDAQ:AMZN),  was founded in 1995 by Donald Katz. The company invented and commercialized the first digital audio player in 1997, 4 years before the introduction of the iPod. One of the few startups to survive the dot-com bust, Audible was designed to be a destination and a daily literary service for serious readers who wish they could read more—and for the huge population of would-be serious readers who don’t have the time to read what they want or need to read.

The company introduced one of the first digital audio players in 1997. The following year it published a Web site from which audio files in its proprietary .aa format could be downloaded. Today, Audible is the Internet's leading provider of spoken audio, entertainment, information, and educational programming. Audible is the exclusive provider of audiobooks to all Apple's iTunes Music Stores worldwide.

How to Increase Revenue?

In 2007, Audible saw an opportunity to improve sales if it could easily identify and share its products in the Internet space and provide open APIs to allow partners to easily integrate with Audible. A solid metadata foundation was the critical component to achieve these goals.

Content Management to Improve Workflow, Metadata, Content Distribution

RSuite CMS was selected to manage metadata used to create Audible's online product catalog. RSuite's metadata management and customizable user interfaces and APIs offered Audible the tools needed to effectively manage content and support workflow functionality. Audible completed a successful proof-of-concept project with RSuite CMS in which several use cases were identified. During this stage many business rules were also documented that were applicable to improving Audible's business opportunities. Audible worked with RSuite's developers to configure and deploy RSuite CMS after installation.

RSuite CMS became the framework upon which Audible crafted solutions to meet all its requirements: workflow, business rules validation, content aggregation and delivery, publisher feeds, audit trail, and product prototyping. In 6 months, Audible configured and implemented RSuite CMS to become both the database of record for its metadata content and its workflow tool that enables seamless transfer of content from publisher feeds to web site-ready files.

 "RSuite has become a very critical system very fast!" 

--Art Zegarek, Director of Data Architecture, Audible, Inc.

How Can Content Management Help Your Organization?

RSuite CMS is used to by the world's leading publishers to create, store, manage, and deliver content. Contact us to learn how publishers are using RSuite CMS to deliver content to licensing channels, automate ebook production, streamline common editorial and production tasks, and much more.

Most publishing companies have one of those folks on staff who is intimate with the content. Someone who knows all the images that were used in a previous edition or which drug monographs couldn't fit into the printed product in time for publication. I used to be one of those people..ask me the ghost words embedded in Tabers' Cyclopedic Dictionary, 18th edition*. Even with a photographic memory, today's proliferation of content makes this skill nearly impossible. I also like to bring up the lottery scenario risk: "what happens if Jim in Production wins the lottery and all that knowledge leaves your organization?"

To effectively manage content, organizations need a handle on what they have. Publishers using a Word document system simply can't be agile in today's environment. Think about a document sitting on some file server, with all its attendant assets—images, charts, chapters and paragraphs—buried within it, and the only way to know what content is in there is for someone in your organization to remember that it’s there.

Without enriching your assets with metadata and storing them in a repository that allows you to search and find content relating to a specific topic—say, tennis elbow or the Higgs boson—you could be duplicating work recreating assets you already own, wasting time searching for those assets, and missing huge revenue opportunities to sell content granularly as a custom bundle or a focused derivative e-product.

At this year’s MarkLogic World conference, Nature Publishing Group (an RSuite CMS customer) presented an explanation of how they support what I would call ‘virtual journals’. There are very specific segments of the scientific world that would not possibly justify the creation of a full-blown journal, but when you start to realize, ‘Hey, we have this very large repository of existing journals with some articles across all of them that appeal to this market, and if we gather these articles up from all these other journals, we’ve got enough content to be of interest to this marketplace.’ Suddenly you have the option to create an online-only product (for example) with very low internal costs that is of specific interest to this niche market that previously was too small to be worth going after. It’s a long-tail concept but without applying metadata consistently and systematically this simply couldn't happen.

Metadata isn't magic and it really isn't all that complicated---you need the proper tools, workflow, and people in your organization. And once you have that set up, the fun begins---new product development, automated distribution to new licensing channels, multi-channel output.

Download our latest white paper and learn how publishers are increasing revenue with strategic content management, including metatadata enrichment. The free white paper includes two case studies from Human Kinetics Publishers and Elsevier Health Science.

Download Now

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*While I no longer work at that publishing company, I won't ever tell!

Educational publisher Triumph Learning knew that digital products would be the ticket to offering great products to its customers as well as being in a position to compete against some of the larger educational publishers in the industry. But to bring digital products to market, it was understood that step one was centralizing content.

Chief business development officer, Robert Methven, shares how in just 1 year Triumph Learning has been able to centralize, inventory, and reuse more than 25 years' of assets to create "Readiness for the Common Core." 

We now have a whole new business line that may generate tens of millions of dollars for us based off of being able to leverage our assets that we put into CMS that we now converted and delivered into a new product offering. A year ago we didn’t even have that idea on our product roadmap.

Get started on content management

1. Centralize your content

2. Inventory and understand your assets

3. Develop new digital products quickly

4. Refine digital products based on customer feedback

During Hurricane Sandy this week I doubt I was the only east coast reader concerned about how I would read when the electricity went out. My Kindle and iPad were charged but I knew the iPad wouldn't last long if faced with days of lost power. My trusty Kindle would serve me well but my aggregated news on Flipboard would be missed. Power outage gave me a glimmer of hope that I could catch up on some long-form journalism in its print form (New Yorker) and plan my holiday menu (Bon Appetit). I chuckled thinking how my friend who is adamant about reading print only was not wasting mental energy on this internal discussion. Powered with candles and print, he was prepared for a lovely time. 

At a time when major publishers are selecting "digital only" as a solution to plummenting subscriptions and ad sales, the devil is in the details. Electric outages are an obvious problem and real concern if your business delivers exclusively to digital products. There's also the issue of ad revenue in the digital sphere compared with print. Data from PricewaterhouseCoopers illustrate that ad revenue from digital products will double from 2011 to 2016 and print will experience small growth. But the dollar value from print ads eclipses digital:

Now combine competition into this story. Looking at Newsweek's decision to go digital only in 2013 is somewhat shortsighted when you consider all the online competition competing for smaller digital advertising dollars. 

Digital only is not the golden ticket....yet. Publishers (media, trade, educational, STM, legal) still need a strong print presence both for the obvious reasons (national electric power grid, customer demographics) and the other obvious reasons (ad revenue, customer demographics!).

We've been conducting a year-long survey with publishers and media organizations to assess digital revenue metrics along with technology adoption decisions. So far, the majority of our respondents indicate that digital revenue is exceeding print revenue. 

Does this mean these publishers are creating more digital products than print products? That answer is still to be determined. We also ask publishers to indicate all the outputs expected to be a focus in the future. At the moment both print and ebooks are tied with 88.9% of respondents indicating that print and digital books are important. Web products have a slight increase at 91.1%.

Our big takeaway from the preliminary results to the 2012 publishers' survey do indicate something we've maintained for years. No matter your revenue streams from published products, a single-source multi-channel publishing process is key to satisfying customers along with the bottom line.

As you're cleaning up from the hurricane and recharging your electronic devices think about how your organization is setting itself up and share your input. We'll reveal all the results to this survey in an upcoming webinar in December. 

Let us know the devilish details that your organization faces.

A couple years ago there was an article from wsj.com under the Cubical Culture section that struck a chord with me: “Management to IT: We don’t like you either.” As evidenced by the title, the inherent conflict between IT and management is never ending. And even though the article was published 5 years ago, we still see the conflict arise in many publishing and media organizations.

Management today at many companies expect more out of IT organizations than in previous years. It's no longer acceptable to request an 18- to 24-month project life cycle and not show a return on investment quickly. If IT continues to do these types of things, they will render themselves useless and out of a job. The old days of “we can build it better than any product on the market” is long gone.

For publishers I have seen a shift over the past 5 years related to this build-vs-buy mindset. If your IT organization is still touting that they can do it better, cheaper, faster by building a critical system (e.g., CMS) from scratch… run, run away as fast as you can. Given the wealth of tool sets available and the openness of many products on the market, why would an organization ever take the build-it-from-scratch approach? I'm genuinely interested in this and welcome your dialogue in the comments section.

I’m not biased when I make these statements. I’ve seen a renewed interest by publishers to license a product and show a return on investment quickly. This has been our mantra since day one with RSuite CMS. Our goal was to make a highly configurable CMS that can manage any content and be operational in a short period of time (under 12 weeks) to meet core requirements. Yes, there will be some organizations that require 12-month projects to migrate from one system to the next, but overall the trend has been implementing a new system, even for larger projects, in a much shorter time frame. The only way IT will be able to handle this shortened timeline is to license a software product that meets 70% of their core requirements pretty much out of the box such as RSuite CMS.

I can certainly understand why IT organizations at publishers want to build their own CMS. First, it’s fun to build software. Second, it gives more of a feeling of accomplishment than integrating third-party software. Finally, a programmer can have a job for life just making endless changes to the software (ok, that was a cheap shot).

Management today needs to understand that IT does have value and IT needs to understand that management has the right to ask questions. Reducing the stress between these organizations is critical to publishers making the right technology choices and implementing new systems on time and within budget.

Let us show you how RSuite CMS satifies management's desire to demonstrate ROI on CMS investment and IT's desire to play with cool technology.

Going to Frankfurt Book Fair? Wunderbar!

RSuite CMS is a content management system for publishers to create, manage, transform, and deliver a digital future. Visit our publishing technologists in Frankfurt and see how RSuite 4.0, powered by MarkLogic, provides a publishing solution to manage the entire life cycle of your content.

We invite you and your colleagues to join us along with our partner MarkLogic in Hall 4.2 | Stand K429. Learn how some of the world's leading publishers are harnessing the power of RSuite CMS to achieve a multi-channel digital publishing solution.

Join us for a Drinks Reception on Wednesday 10 Oct at 16:30 at our stand.

If you are unable to attend but would like to discuss how RSuite CMS will help your organisation, please contact Sarah Silveri at tel: +1 610 276 1375. Click here to visit RSuite CMS at Hall 4.2 | Stand K429

“RSuite CMS combined with the DITA for Publishers framework is helping us achieve the holy grail of single-source publishing: XML content automatically delivered to InDesign and to multiple ebook delivery formats. The transformations from structured content to designed content have been seamless, allowing our staff to focus on content and product development.”

“We see RSuite as a key technology that will allow us to implement industrial strength content management, including version control and automated content distribution, to best support our digital publishing program.”

“Our editorial process was labor intensive, and the problem couldn't be fixed by adding more people. With RSuite CMS, we get our product in the hands of customers faster, which makes us competitive with the bigger publishers with deeper pockets.”

The RSuite User Conference kicks off tomorrow morning, September 20th, in Philadelphia at the Hub Cira Centre. The agenda is packed with a fantastic lineup of speakers and presentations.

John Blossom, President of Shore Communications will keynote the event and outline the cutting edge of content technologies that he has defined as "The Second Web" and how they are yet again redefining successful models for high-margin publishing businesses.

Can't be in Philadelphia? Join us via Livestream! Catch us on Twitter!

Breakfast...lunch...happy hour...all served with a healthy dose of content management for publishers.

See you tomorrow!