We haven't been posting as much as we'd like recently because we've been focusing on the preparations for our upcoming Intelligent Content 2009 conference. There have been foods to choose, rooms to manage, technical details of all sorts to sort out and much, much more. It's been fun (if somewhat ...

The sophistication of today's layout tools are seductive from the start and ubiquitous to the end. They have given us a certain feeling of control that is intoxicating. However, if you have found the justification to manage enterprise content systematically, than you can bet that there is a likely return ...

So what's metadata and why is it crucial to intelligent content? And what's intelligent content? We define intelligent content as content that's structurally rich and semantically aware and is therefore automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable. So what’s metadata, and why is it important? Metadata is often described as 'data about data'. ...

We have posted our Program Schedulerent a car bulgaria for the Intelligent Content 2009 conference. You can see the program as a schedule, or view it by presentation title, presenter, or by company. var sc_project=2956907; var sc_invisible=0; var sc_partition=26; var sc_security="e21b5692";

Keynote Speakers Our Keynote speakers are Salim Ismail of Confabb (formerly of Yahoo), and Bob Boiko of Metatorial Services (and author of The Content Management Bible). In his keynote address, Intelligent Content Salim will be talking about emerging trends with internet content and how context and increasing structure inherent in the ...

The deadline for submitting proposals for Intelligent Content 2009 was October 10th. And now for us, the hard work begins. We're in the process of examining the many excellent proposals we have received. Our thanks to all who have provided a proposal. We won't be able to present all of them — ...

Steve Manning will be speaking at the DocTrain East 2008 Conference on Oct 29-Nov 1, 2008 in Burlington, MA. Steve will be presenting two sessions: "Navigating the Vendor Maze: Understanding XML Authoring Tools and Content Management Systems" It can be tough to work through the volumes of software vendor marketing and know exactly ...

Today's businesses have begun to move away from static unstructured content to semantically structured and tagged content to help them find content more easily, dynamically deliver content, and reduce costs. In other words they are moving to more intelligent content. This blog entry describes scenarios we have seen for ...

In my previous post - Serving Multiple Touch-points – Old School Tricks, I wrote at length about the method of importing content into layout-intensive page makeup tools using their procedural markup languages. The intent was to demonstrate how content can be efficiently formatted for high-gloss publications in an automated fashion. ...

Yesterday two major things were on my mind. First I was very excited to announce our inaugural conference on Intelligent Content. We've been talking about having a conference for years, and now it seemed to be the right time, there were so many things happening with content. Content can ...

Publishers often ask us “What’s the difference between RSuite CMS and MarkLogic Server." Great question!  The most straightforward answer is that RSuite is a content management application and MarkLogic Server is a database. It’s that simple.

MarkLogic Server is an incredibly powerful XML repository on top of which many publishers have built fantastic applications, O’Reilly’s Safari U, Elsevier, and Congressional Quarterly, to name a few. These custom built delivery applications are just one way MarkLogic Sever has been used.

RSuite CMS is also an application built on MarkLogic Server. RSuite CMS sits on top of MarkLogic Server to leverage the native XML repository (i.e., database) and search capabilities. Without a database, RSuite would not be able to run – just like a car needs an engine. However, without a chassis, steering wheel, electronics, etc., the engine would be of little use. Therefore, think of RSuite as the ignition system and think of MarkLogic Server as the engine. Both are very important to content management.

From lost relationships to steep financial penalties, the price of poor communication is high, research shows.

By Rich Maggiani, Solari Communication, special to The Content Wrangler

Poor communication costs business millions of dollars every single day. Most executives and managers understand this, yet they don’t realize how big a part they play in this miscommunication.

Financial statements do not carry a line item for poor communication, although they should since, with a little effort, it can quickly be quantified.

Communication is vital to the success of your organization. To be most effective, communication must circulate and reach all levels, not just the core.

Different forms of poor communication

Here are but a few:

• Long, unproductive, numbing meetings without a clear purpose or agenda, often reaching no conclusions, result in lost productivity as well as the collective time of everyone attending
• Poor documentation neglects to mention the purpose of the software or hardware and only explains how it works. Users, however, don’t care how it works; they want to know how to use it!
• Uninspired selling skills and anemic sales presentations showing no interest or understanding of a prospect’s needs, result in missed opportunities and lost sales
• Rambling, cryptic, and incoherent emails that are misunderstood or ignored, result in wasted time. Often (up to 50% of the time) an email’s tenor is incorrectly perceived, simply because body language cannot be analyzed and tone of voice not perceived; this results in hurt feelings, ill will, and inaction
• Distracted managers who simply do not or cannot truly listen alienate staff and lower morale. Staff members who realize they are not being listened to and simply patronized, themselves stop communicating
• Staff members from different generations or gender lack a basic understanding of each other, their communication styles, and preferences. Incomprehensible and inappropriate statements are commonplace. Baby boomers (thinking it’s still the ’70s) and today’s generation (who were not even alive then) simply do not share the same communication foundation

Poor communication squanders time, wastes effort, erodes loyalty, and loses business.

Squandering time—Poor communication simply takes longer to process and understand, if understanding can be attained. Unnecessary questions are asked, discussions are needlessly lengthy, the communication is recreated, only to be foisted again on a wary audience.

Here’s an example of an email received by a colleague: “The company may need the more accurate methodology since it’s the standard approach employed of the more approximate method that may result in an estimate that under-estimates and not on-target estimates.” After a lengthy conversation with the sender, my colleague’s client rewrote the email. Final squandered time for one email: six hours.

Wasting effort—My bank’s CEO recently sent every customer a letter explaining the bank’s checking account overdraft policy: five dense paragraphs. The policy was more onerous than the current overdraft protection plan. Many customers didn’t appreciate the change and called to protest, inundating the bank. The customer service representatives explained why the letter was misleading and inaccurate. As a result, the CEO planned to rewrite and resend the letter. The CEO’s effort fell prey to the 30% of business letters that initially fail.

Eroding loyalty—According to an Accenture study, American consumers returned $13.8 billion in electronics in 2007; Europeans returned $11.5. That’s over $25 billion. Between 60%–85% had nothing wrong; that’s between $15.2 and $21.5 billion in perfectly functional equipment returned. Why? Confusing interfaces, features difficult to access, no customer education, weak documentation were overriding factors—all issues that superb communication could solve. $25 billion! That’s a lot of lost loyalty.

Losing business The presentation was wonderful, beautiful slides, expertly delivered—all about the expertise of the company who was leading the proposal. Unfortunately, the state agency wanted to know how the company would solve the agency’s problem and support their budget. Instead, the agency got egotistical fluff. The agency, rightly, awarded the contract to another firm; the company came in “second”.

How big a cost?—Poor communication cost Merck $253 million after losing their first Vioxx trial. Why? The jury was befuddled by Merck’s scientific explanations.

[Editor’s Note: Since Merck lost the Texas Vioxx trial referenced above, it has announced it will also pay plaintiffs a whopping $4.85 billion (US) to settle an additional 27,000 related lawsuits, rather than go to trial.]

Positive results—Thoughtful, effective communication delivers unparalleled benefits to both you and your audience. Effective communication reaps positive results: increased market valuation and stockholder value; greater employee commitment, involvement, retention, and morale; and stronger customer loyalty. All of which saves you—and makes you—money.

How much is poor communication costing you? Share your stories, examples and comments below.

About Rich Maggiani
Rich Maggiani helps companies enhance market share and profits by helping them communicate simply and clearly with stakeholders, prospects, and clients. Learn more about Rich and his firm, Solari Communication by visiting the company website. Subscribe to the Solari mailing list to receive fresh position papers via email.

A nice early version, without the turtles. Bob DuCharme http://www.snee.com/bobdc.blog

The term microboredom caught my eye on this Trend Blend 2009 graphic under Media, furthest out on the Information Overload tentacle. Beth Kanter blogged about the graphic and trends she’ll be looking into in Trend Blend 2009: A Map of Time and Tide. Click on the image to go to a flickr-stored full sized version so [...]

This is number 3 on the Technnolgy Predictions for 2009 on CMS Watch."With social computing coming to the fore, it's never been more obvious that everyone does not, and will never, categorize things in the same way. It doesn't even... annvmichael Metadata Taxonomies Publishing

This is number 3 on the Technnolgy Predictions for 2009 on CMS Watch.

"With social computing coming to the fore, it's never been more obvious that everyone does not, and will never, categorize things in the same way. It doesn't even matter what's correct anymore (well, it does to me, but I'm not about to spend my days stopping people from tagging a map of Botswana with the word "Ohio.") While I'll never agree with David Weinberger's assertion that "everything is miscellaneous" (a taxonomist's least-favorite word), I will assert that the days of the traditional, definitive, and single-hierarchy taxonomy are long behind us.

Enter the varied and multi-faceted application of metadata, experienced as people would like to experience it. In the search world, Endeca popularized it, now it's a commodity. You should be able to get to information the way you want, which may be different from your colleague's approach. We still need controlled vocabularies. We still need to tag content. Text mining and auto-tagging software is gradually improving, and extracted terms can be applied as metadata. But that metadata needs to be a lot more fluid, cloud-like, and by no means fixed in a single hierarchy. And even if it doesn't make sense to you that that map of Botswana is tagged with the word "Ohio" -- it probably makes perfect sense to someone. One person's chaos is another person's perfect path to findability."

Opinions?

Or consider it a lazy semweb wish. Bob DuCharme http://www.snee.com/bobdc.blog

Happy holidays to one and all I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and are looking forward to an enjoyable 2009. It looks to be a great year even though money will be tight for many of us, and time may be tight for all of us. I’ll be studying the Trend Blend and Beth Kanter’s [...]

I wanted to share a fun photo mosaic tip. Let’s say you wanted to decorate your office door using just your computer, the office printer, white 8.5×11 office printer paper, and the digital photos (especially screenshots!) you have stored on your computer. Use a photo mosaic program called Andrea Mosaic and then print a giant mosaic [...]

We asked technology guru Dave Kellogg, CEO, Mark Logic Corporation to share with you his predictions for the coming year. Check out Dave’s list to see which tools, techniques, and technologies will make news in 2009. Then, add your predictions to the list (using the “Comment” feature at the end of the article).

Dave Kellogg’s Top Ten Content Technology Predictions for 2009

1. Component-based authoring move beyond technical publications—While the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and other component-based authoring approaches have seen increasing use within the technical publications community, in 2009 we will start to see more broad use of a component-based authoring in areas like operations and marketing.
2. Microsoft SharePoint will continue its strong march—Sharepoint will continue undercutting the high-end enterprise content management (ECM) products and making basic content management functionality more accessible, and more affordable, for the masses. Customers will increasingly spurn bloated ECM suites in favor of SharePoint.
3. Enterprise XML content repositories emerge—Organizations will increasingly want to aggregate their content in an enterprise content repository in order to maintain a single copy of record, maximize re-use, and enable sophisticated content analytics. For the same reasons that organizations create data warehouses, they will increasingly create content warehouses. In 2009, that trend will start.
4. Content goes offense—In 2009, organizations will play both offense and defense with their content. For the past several years, enterprises have viewed content as defensive:  How do we produce the documents we must in e-discovery?  How do we comply with Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (PDF)?  In 2009, organizations – having implemented the baseline stay-out-of-jail requirements – will then ask: How can we use this content offensively?  How can we better leverage our content to drive our business?
5. Cloud confusion will end— Right now many people are confused at the distinction between cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS). In 2009, they will realize SaaS is simply one type of cloud computing, and SaaS vendors will increasingly offer APIs that make their application components available as cloud-based platforms. Publishers will continue to turn into IaaS (information as a service) vendors. And Amazon and Google will continue to compete in offering “the other IaaS” (infrastructure as a service) with offerings like Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine.
6. Power, space, and cooling will become, pardon the phrase, “hot” items— Organizations will increasingly worry about the power, space, and cooling requirements of their content infrastructure, whether it’s hosted in the cloud or run in-house. Server consolidation and virtualization will continue to play a major role.  Customers will increasingly want their content infrastructure to run on relatively more efficient racks of commodity hardware over specialized high-end servers.
7. XML will be dubbed an “overnight success”— In 2009, with Adobe, Microsoft, and other leaders embracing XML as their standard format (see Adobe XML Framework and the Microsoft XML Developer Center), organizations will wake up to discover that the majority of their content is in, or will shortly be in, an XML format.  After more than 10 years since its invention, XML will then be dubbed an overnight success based on its new ubiquity.  Like most innovations in IT, XML will be another overnight success that was more than a decade in the making.
8. Metadata will continue to rise in importance—With the never-ending explosion in information, metadata will continue its ascent in helping to enable findability and navigation. Entity identification, fact extraction, and other semantic enrichment tools will continue to expand in popularity.  Baseline extraction identification will commoditize, being seen in 2009 the way spelling correction was in 2006. 
9. Markup goes inline—Content enrichment through in-line markup will start to be seen as clearly superior to extracted metadata. Using conventional infrastructure (e.g., a search engine and a relational database) “extracting” metadata is clearly the best approach (e.g., pulling out a list of cities from a document collection and storing in a database which cities are referenced in which documents). In 2009, organizations will start to realize that the value of content as an asset can be increased by not extracting metadata, but instead by directly enriching the content with in-line markup.  Such an approach increases the value of content over time and enables more powerful and more precise queries than extraction.
10. Enterprise search engines will get caught between a rock and a hard place—The rock is the Google Appliance which will continue to wipe out the basic “crawl and index” enterprise search market. The hard place is a new generation of platforms / databases built to enable content and data/content applications.  The XML Query language (XQuery) will be at the heart of these next-generation platforms.

What do you think?
Did Dave miss a prediction? Do you see something in your crystal ball that will come to fruition in 2009? If so, leave a comment (using the “comment” function at the end of this article) to share you prediction with the masses.

About Dave Kellogg
Dave Kellogg is CEO of Mark Logic Corporation, a company which develops and markets an XML server. Prior to Mark Logic, Kellogg was SVP of marketing at Business Objects (BI), VP of marketing at Versant Corp (ODBMS), and worked in both technical and marketing positions at Ingres Corp (RDBMS). You can contact Dave via email. To keep up with Dave’s work, subscribe to his blog.