Realizing Measurable ROI with Multi-Language Content Management
What is content management worth?
That can be a philosophical question. If you ask a content author, you'll hear about the way content creation and review is made easier and more efficient. If you ask a project manager, you'll learn that content management makes it possible to identify bottlenecks and monitor the progress of component pieces in an information set. If you ask a production person, you'll discover that delivering to different data formats is now a more automated and reliable process. Ask an IT person and they'll talk about integration with existing enterprise infrastructure. While all of these answers are true, none of them really assigns a dollar value to content management. Finding a concrete way to measure ROI for content management can be a challenge.
One place to look for a metric to measure the value of content management is in the rising costs associated with delivering product-related content in many different languages. The global economy is here. Products that were once marketed and sold in areas that required only one or two languages are now being offered worldwide. Suddenly the Pacific Rim, Eastern Europe, India, China, and Brazil are growing markets for many kinds of products and services. To reach them and sell to them successfully, content such as marketing and sales information, product documentation, services manuals, warranty policies and many other kinds of content must be available in each of the many languages spoken there. Translation is the key. And time-to-market is critical. The required content is already in one language. It just needs to be put into the languages needed for your new markets.
The Rising Cost of Translation
But translation is expensive. Whether you translate in-house or use a translation service, whether the process is aided by a translation memory system or not, no matter how it gets done, translation has an assigned cost that can be readily determined for your business. And, typically, translation costs are rising—not because the per-page rates are increasing, but because more and more content needs to be translated. Product lifecycles grow shorter. Many more variations of products are introduced. New products are added to those already there. The increasing amount of content required to support these products means that more must be translated and, inevitably, translation expenses rise.
So, in calculating the ROI on introducing content management, you CAN get an objective metric to start with—the amount you currently spend on translation. This starting point is good for either projecting what you will save over a given period or analyzing the results of a pilot project designed to show what you can achieve. But still, that's only half the story. How do you measure what your savings are, or what they could be?
Translate Once, Translate Right
The answer lies in the ability of multi- language content management to control what gets translated. If you have content that evolves from one product release to the next, chances are not everything in the content related to that product changes. Some things do. Maybe many things do. But not everything.
The key to controlling translation costs is to translate only those things that have changed. Your savings come from not translating those things that haven't. Factor in the savings in time and resources and that number grows exponentially.
But in order for this approach to work, your content must be managed in granular units, sometimes called "minimum revisable units." An XML-based approach like the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) calls them "topics." Once your content is authored in such units, a content management system can determine when one of those units changes. When that content goes through the review and approval cycle and becomes ready for the next edition, a tool in the content management system can identify all the related units in other languages that must now be retranslated to capture the new or changed content. If the base unit is brand new, the system can also determine the need for creating new objects in the target languages. Such a content management system can then create a project and send the new content along with the older translated version off to the translation process.
When the translated units return, they are put in the repository and managed with all the others so that when an information set in the target language is published, it is easy to verify that all units are at the current version and in synch with the source language.
This approach to controlling translation costs is demonstrable and in use today. How does this approach provide a metric for measuring ROI? By using it, you can readily determine the percentage of content that is reused and not translated. The translation costs that would have been expended provide one good measure of your ROI. If that alone justifies your investment cost, then the other less readily measurable benefits of multi-language content management come along for free.
XyEnterprise is a leader in content management and multi-channel delivery, providing solutions to industry leaders in technology, financial services, publishing, manufacturing, government and aerospace/defense. The company continues to innovate to deliver products that support an evolving marketplace—including distributed workflows, multi-language content management, interactive electronic delivery and standards such as DITA and S1000D. Their solutions help workgroups of all sizes simplify and expedite the automated creation, management, delivery and reuse of content across the enterprise.
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