When considering the ROI of component-based content development, it can be easy to assume that the more content an organisation is able to reuse, the greater the benefit they realise as a result. A larger store of available content means greater potential to repurpose existing material, with a bigger impact on authoring efficiency. While there are certainly cases where this is true, this does not mean that just by increasing the amount of content you reuse will, in of itself, results in substantial performance improvements.
Research from Aberdeen Group’s March 2010 Benchmarking Content Reuse in Technical Communication study found that the amount of content leveraged plays less of a role in how much an organisation benefits from component-based content development than how easily that content can be reused.
Aberdeen Research Methodology: Identifying the Best-in-Class
In order to identify the practices that enable organisations to benefit most from content reuse initiatives, Aberdeen Group’s direct survey research benchmarked the performance of 208 organisations. Using key performance criteria measuring costs savings and efficiency in content development, Aberdeen categorises study participants into one of three tiers of performance: Best-in-Class (top 20% of performers), Industry Average (mid 50%), or Laggard (bottom 30%). These categorisations were intended to isolate the organisations achieving the greatest impact from content reuse.
Aberdeen found that organisations achieving Best-in-Class performance levels achieved a high standard of performance (completing projects on or before authoring deadlines 93% of the time and within budget targets 90% of the time). While the Industry Average achieves similar performance (they complete projects on or before authoring deadlines 82% of the time and are within budget 76% of the time), the impact that these organisations on their performance is significantly less than that achieved by the Best-in-Class (Figure 1). Meanwhile, Laggard performers struggle both to consistently meet objectives (meeting deadlines 39% of the time and budgets 26% of the time) and to improve their performance.
Ultimately, these benefits translate into superior productivity among content producers. To this end, Aberdeen found that the Best-in-Class publish 31% more content per content producer than the Industry Average and 100% more than Laggard organisations. Subsequent analysis revealed the practices and strategies used by the Best-in-Class to achieve these benefits.
Make Content Easy to Reuse
While the Best-in-Class achieved significantly greater performance than their peers, it’s not by leveraging more content. On average, organisations are able to construct about 45% of a new document from previously created content. This number does not change significantly, regardless of an organisation’s performance (Figure 2).
To a large extent this is because there is a limit to the amount of existing content that can be used in a new publication. At the same time, while reuse initiatives offer significant improvements in efficiency, they can paradoxically increase the complexity and difficulty of content development processes. This means that as organisations build stores of reuse-able content, they risk eroding the effectiveness of content developers. Instead, Best-in-Class take the extra step to focus on making content easier to reuse, which is what compounds the productivity of their content developers.
How the Best-in-Class execute on this change in emphasis takes shape in a number of changes that these performers make how they develop, manage, and publish content. Some of these changes – such as central management of content – the Best-in-Class share with their peers. Others – such as the use of publishing engines that automate the creation of page layout or the assembly of content into new documents – are areas where these companies stand out from their peers. Aberdeen’s Benchmarking Content Reuse in Technical Communication provides more detail on the capabilities that support the Best-in-Class.