tekom-Jahrestagung 2012 - ActiveDoc

Content Strategies
CS 11
Workshop
Building a Business Case for Content Strategy
Sarah S. O’Keefe, Scriptorium Publishing, Raleigh-Durham, USA
Content people, as a group, are terrible at business cases. In discussions
about content challenges, the content creators usually have a long list
of valid complaints about bad tools, inefficient processes, and generally
wasted resources. But at the first mention of a potential solution that
costs more than $100, content creators respond, “Oh, they will never approve
that. We never get any money.”
It is true that “they”—which is to say upper management—do not respond
well to requests for large sums of money. What they do understand
is business cases, such as, “To prevent us from wasting Y amount
of resources every year, we need X amount of money this year,” and X is
smaller than Y.
Building a business case requires you to quantify how an investment
(in tools, technology, training, or anything else) will improve business
results. It is not sufficient to claim that your content strategy will contribute
to business goals; you must estimate the improvement and show
that the results are worth the investment. It helps when your estimates
are obviously erring on the conservative side and the savings shown are
still compelling.
Estimating the business value
Increased content reuse and efficient localization are the most common
ways to show value in a business case for technical content.
For reuse, you contrast the cost of writing or maintaining a topic with
the cost of reusing a topic automatically. If the proposed system can
increase the amount of reuse, you have a clear cost savings. Typical tech
comm estimates in this area are as follows:
−−
Current reuse: 5 percent
−−
Estimated reuse with new strategy: 20 percent
If the cost of maintaining a topic is estimated at €100 and the organization
has approximately 4000 topics, then a 15 percent increase in reuse
results in savings of €60,000. If all of the topics are updated in a typical
year, this is a yearly cost savings.
For localization, you need to look at the cost of reformatting translated
text. In less-efficient environments, that cost is approximately 50 percent
of the overall content localization cost. But in this example, we will
use a more conservative 25 percent:
−−
Cost of localization, per word: €0.10
−−
Percentage of localization cost associated with formatting: 25 percent
Again, we assume 4000 pages of content being translated and 250 words
per page. The cost is therefore €100,000 per target language. If formatting
is automated, the organization saves €25,000 per target language in
each localization pass.
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tekom-Jahrestagung 2012