Next week I’ll be speaking at the Content Management Strategies conference happening in Santa Clara, CA. This is the JoAnn Hackos conference that started out as a conference looking at content management. Several years ago, it added a DITA track, and now it’s almost entirely DITA focused. The tracks have settled down the last year or so: Authoring, Technical, Management, and Demo. Technical almost always means DITA.

It’s been small the last couple of years, but all conferences have been down in overall attendance. It’s a sign of the times. (One exception was PTC/User in 2009 where we saw the same number of Arbortext attendees as in 2008. All other tracks were down 20%.)

I’ve presented at this conference every year that Single-Sourcing Solutions has been in business and attended longer.  For me, this has always been a conference not to miss. It’s always a great conference. Luckily, the CM-Strategies conference is in Santa Clara this year. With no travel required for me this year, the decision to attend was a slam-dunk.

This year, I decided to do something a little bit different with my presentation. It’s not the usual technical presentation or in-depth case study. With the launch of the new Arbortext business unit at PTC, we reached out to long-time Arbortext customers to see where they were.  We wanted to know whether our customers were realizing the full potential of their solutions. We wanted to know what data they’d collected, what lessons they’d learned, and what they’d implemented over time.

The results were absolutely stunning.

We all know there’s a software side to making dynamic information delivery work. Customers who have seen IBM talk, and who have seen the DITA OTK, have come to us and said “Sure, they can get there, but can I?” What if you’re not a software company? What if your paper product is your deliverable? What about the Medtronics of the world? Or the Harcourt School Publishers? Or Mapquest? What’s in your reach? What have customers really achieved over the years? Did they see the ROI they expected?

My talk highlights stories from companies who have been doing dynamic information delivery with Arbortext for a very long time. It’s not a single-case study, but many aggregated together. I’ve included qualified, hard data on benefits, breadth of projects, and feature impact on long-term implementations.

Sure to be as eye-opening for you as it was for me.  See you there!

Or, It’s not just about the technology

A techpubs department is a techpubs department and one is not so unlike another. At a certain level that’s true, but the devil’s in the details as we all know.

I’ve found, over the years, after watching countless techpubs departments implement single-sourcing solutions of all kinds and using products from nearly every vendor: Those who go through a true, enterprise-wide discovery process have a far higher probability of, not simply succeeding, but realizing their return on investment. Not only do they realize ROI on the technology, buy they see that return in their staff costs, their implementation costs, and everything related to getting a project like this done. In addition, we’ve found that those who don’t go through this process, end up spending a far greater amount of time and money in the end than those who do.

Choosing an end-to-end system like Arbortext, discovery is critical for us and for you. To assure your successful implementation over the long haul, you want to understand three things:

1. The technology
2. Your existing processes and business goals
3. Your people, skill sets, and their interests

We all know that when you implement Arbortext, it’s not just about the technology. In fact, the technology is only one of the three major legs supporting an implementation like this which has lasting, process-level change effects on the entire enterprise. You’ve got to look at the processes you have in place today, your organizational culture, and your people—the skill levels, what you have, what you need. It’s not just the technology you’re looking at: You’ve got to look at all these different things, together.

Asking for a demonstration before you understand exactly what it will take, from an organizational perspective, to implement single sourcing in your enterprise is no different than watching a video or reading a white paper (both of which take less time and cost less in terms of your resources).

Rushing into a demo reduces the conversation to the technology, internally and externally. Management will give you less resources, reducing the chance of successful implementation because your business case is weak. It’s technology-focused rather than business focused. (And, let’s face it: business-focus is what drives budget allocation.)

In addition, a generic demo doesn’t serve you very well. Vendors show generic features and maybe they hit on the one thing you’re looking for and maybe they don’t. You and your team sit through an hour (or two or three) of features and functions of a very complex system and set of applications. (If you’ve got 8 people sitting in a 1-hour demo, you’ve just wasted 8 hours.) Looking at generic features, you can’t possibly know what ripple effects the technology that you didn’t see will have? You also don’t know what will help bolster your case because a feature you didn’t see helps someone else in the organization.

In all the work we’ve done with customers, we’ve often found that while other parts of the organization currently don’t use the documentation in it’s present form there is a desire to do so if the documentation could be easily customized or configured for their purposes.

Don’t get me started on the ripple effects of seemingly simple process changes.

The goal of any vendor evaluation is not to see whether the product works. Software always has bugs; there’s always a learning curve; and, unless you’re dealing with an out-of-the-gate startup and haven’t spoken to the vendor’s references, then you know it’ll “work.”

What you’re really looking to understand, in the most efficient way possible is this: What will let you advance the sales process or end it. What will get you what you need or get the sales person to stop calling.

What tells you that?

A clear and precise understanding of exactly why Arbortext applies to your unique situation, processes, people, and business needs. Without that, a demo doesn’t add value to your conversation.

The latest PubWright Podcast has been posted to here and on iTunes here.

This week’s podcast features Kevin Dietz from Timpani Software. Timpani Software develops BuildBeat, a comprehensive automated software build management system, and MergeMagician, an automated merging server designed to work with your existing software configuration management (SCM) system.

The annual PTC/User conference always has a Management track. Typically, they send out a questionnaire to the attendees in advance of the show, to gather enough information to assure that the sessions are relevant and valuable.

This year, the questions were interesting enough that I wanted to share them — and our answers to them.  As it turns out, we had a good bit to say on the matter.

1.  Your name, your title, and a brief description of who you are

Liz Fraley, CEO and Founder, Single-Sourcing Solutions. We are a VAR for PTC.  Our area of expertise and specialization is in the Arbortext suite of products.

While we are still busy and our firm is growing, we have noticed that our customers have slowed down their spending. Approvals tend to take a little longer and more caution is practiced when committing budget dollars to projects. However, the work demand has not changed and, in fact, increased reductions in headcount have created a need to rely more on technology to meet the demands of their customers and their ability to expand their global market share. For us, this has proven to be a good thing as our approach has always been to rapidly deploy solutions and provide training and support for the tools in real time. Our approach has allowed our customers to be more productive in a much shorter time and realize the ROI faster.

3.  How has it impacted your budget and spending on R&D?

4.  How do you (and your company) encourage a culture of innovation and risk-taking?

Everyone at Single-Sourcing Solutions is strongly encouraged to support the community we share with our customers:

• by actively participating in user groups and forums,
• by contributing code to Open Source projects related to our industry,
• by presenting at conferences and industry association meetings

We continue to look for new ways to share information and support the user community.

5. What are the key issues that I should address in a presentation titled, “Energizing Product Development in a Challenging Business Climate”?

Although we learn a lot through do-it-yourself projects, the full cost of implementing the system by stringing together a lot of little tools can be much higher than the cost of purchase for a fully-functional system may be.

6.  What is the key challenge (or obstacle) you currently face as it relates to innovation in your area of the company? Specifics please.

7. How much Open Innovation are you and your company actually engaged in at this point?

We feel it’s our responsibility to actively contribute to open innovation. This practice not only supports our customers and all the members in our community, we have found that it enriches our knowledge as well. Single-Sourcing Solutions is very proud of the reputation we have established and continues to grow: Open and candid communication with the desire to build a stronger community and more robust solutions to meet the changing market needs for information design and delivery.

Updated 6/23/09:

I can’t say that the management portion of the conference was valuable to me. It had potential, but the rest of the conference, as far as Arbortext topics go, has come up so high in quality, it was hard to choose the Management presentations over the Arbortext ones.  I skipped most of this track and likely won’t choose to do it next year.