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Digital Transformation with Intelligent Content

Today’s emerging businesses are born digital. Existing enterprises compete with these digital native businesses and seek ways to innovate without disrupting their established processes. In this path to competitive excellence, there are several hurdles they need to overcome. Namely personalization, localization, contextualization and digitization of information and work processes…to name a few. In the following blog, we address some common questions which are being asked by organizations on their transformation journey.

Which parts of my business need to be digitally transformed?

Digitizing business processes is imperative, but which processes holds precedence over others? Can a certain process be ignored while another given a priority? The digital transformation of an organization can be initiated from several functional areas and Business Units, such as – Business Model, Product Development, Data, Processes, Knowledge, Self-service and Organizational Culture.

It’s usually not a question of one or the other, rather a question of which aligns better with the immediate business objectives of the organization. Serving customers better impacts the top line directly, whereas addressing internal employee experience (EX) has a direct impact on the bottom line. Hence, to realize maximum impact both CX and EX need to be addressed.

The key to achieving competitive excellence in the era of continuous digital transformation is to focus on both top and bottom-line improvements. Customer experience usually has been the sweet spot for organizations to digitize the customer touchpoints since the results directly translate to topline gains, but focusing on it alone isn’t enough anymore. As much as an organization needs to focus on the external customer touchpoints, addressing internal customers aka its employees is equally important for overall productivity and bottom-line gains.

The cost of getting it wrong

Consumers today are drowning in a sea of information but barely find the information that they are looking for. In organizations, 70% of the employees struggle with missing information and it costs up to $5.4 million annually in lost productivity. This is an estimation for an organization with 1000 professional workers and it is the cost of poor information discipline.

Organizations have collaboration systems and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) in place but these tools are simply not keeping up with the demands due to an enormous information explosion. How can we address this challenge? The answer lies with content – we need to make content intelligent and responsive.

The foundation for future businesses: Intelligent Content

Intelligent content has the capability to meet consumer needs better, both internal and external since it is readable and usable by both humans and machines. Before we dive into intelligent content further, let’s define the key characteristics of intelligent content:

Structured

Stored in topic-specific components

Reusable

Format-free

Enriched with metadata

Intelligent content forms the basis of the information fabric of an organization that wants to digitally transform itself. A unified approach towards intelligent content across the organization has several benefits, ranging from:

Cost savings with content reuse

Information governance with access rights and change tracking

Adaptive delivery of consistent information to any digital channel and

Discovering insights

Intelligent content really shines when it is centralized across the organization without the barriers of departments.

How to create intelligent content?

Intelligent content inherently describes its meaning, purpose, and relation to other content. It can be created using structured authoring tools. Structured authoring is a concept and way of working; XML is a specification that lets you implement structured authoring.

Structured authoring lets organizations define and enforce the consistent organization of information in smaller, reusable chunks (components) that can then be dynamically assembled into any deliverable.

Traditionally a lot of companies assemble documents, whether printed or online, but the same content can be reused in, for instance, mobile apps, chatbots and other IoT applications. Due to its componentized nature, it’s also easier to translate and to reuse existing translations from translation memory, saving massive costs for global enterprises. In all these benefits lies the power of structured content.

Organizations are adopting structured authoring because it enables them to overhaul and streamline their content processes; it is the foundation of content automation. Intelligent content is created using structured authoring tools, and by enriching the information with the right metadata and classification information such as taxonomy terms.

How can an organization be truly digital to the core?

A truly digital organization is one that has digitization embedded across all the organizational processes required to transform both customer and employee-facing touchpoints. One common element to both CX and EX is the content or the knowledge of the organization, which is used to store, communicate, curate and serve the organizational goals. Treating content as a strategic asset is vital to successful digital transformation initiatives.

Agile processes and automation are necessary to augment the skill set of our present workforce to enable them to work together with the machines of tomorrow. In other words, human first and machine augmented is what organizations should strive for. For machines to be able to work with human knowledge, the information has to be in a machine-friendly format, or in other words, it has to be intelligent content. Intelligent content creation is the first step towards turning any business into a truly digital business.

Organizations need intelligent content, in order to become truly digital. Centralized intelligent content has several benefits for organizations, namely consistency, reduced information redundancy, adaptive delivery to any channel, reduced desktop publishing costs and improved localization workflows. By itself, knowledge centralization is not enough, we need unified collaboration to make it possible to create consistent and accurate information by breaking departmental silos.

Structured authoring offers the prospect of intelligent content creation and better management of information. A fundamental shift in the mindset is required from an entire organizational perspective on how valuable information is treated, and how to manage and manipulate it for desired transformations (print, digital, embedded in smart devices etc.). A starting step to adopt such a change is to evaluate existing skillsets and identify new skills that are required, both to implement a structured workflow and to work within it. In our next blog, we will look at unified structured authoring and collaboration for enterprises to take the first step on this journey.

Unstructured content

Unstructured content includes emails, documents, videos, photos, presentations, webpages and many other kinds of business documents. These documents have no associated data model and include many different formats.

These types of content often do not have any associated metadata, and if they do, it is often inconsistently applied. This means you cannot access the benefits that structured content provides.

To structure content or not?

So, does every organization need to structure their content?

A structured content approach makes sense when content is business-critical and plays a vital role in digital transformation initiatives.

These digital transformation initiatives can be anything from dynamic content assembly for self-service portals, to intelligent knowledge hubs and product and services documentation. Because structured content enables content reuse, you can eliminate unnecessary duplication of effort and ensure consistency anywhere common content is reused.

Simply stated, structured content improves business agility, provides governance and control and enables findability to both external customers and internal employees.

When deciding where to start, consider how you want to manage this content and how you are defining your broader content strategy.

Early adopters of this approach include manufacturing, financial services, business services and life sciences industries. These organizations are quickly recognizing the benefits of a structured approach to content in comparison to document-based management.

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Part 2: Tying Strategic Business Objectives to Information Management Strategies

In our previous blog, we explored how well-executed information management strategies have a direct impact on reaching business objectives. In this blog, we deep dive further into the core aspects of content – quality, type and management methods. These elements impact the overall productivity of an enterprise in an increasingly connected digital world.

Role of content in a data-driven economy

When it comes to measurement and analytics, organizations automatically think of data as just numbers. But how can they use this data to make better decisions, and how it can drive business goals? In reality, data can help deliver content, but it is the actual content that completes the picture painted by the numbers.

Together, data and content work to provide the information vital to growing and driving businesses towards success. Content maturity, and an efficient content supply chain are key to a digital-first organization and should be part of the strategic business objectives of any ambitious brand.

Just like data values, there are various kinds of content. Depending on the type of content, an organization may manage the content differently to get the most value out of it. But first, we need to consider, what is good content?

What is good content?

There are several ways to define what makes good content, but the following are the minimum requirements:

Accuracy and Clarity: Information corresponds with reality and is verifiable

Integrity: Information meets user expectations and does not have gaps

Timeliness: Information is updated frequently to meet business requirements

Findability: Time spent on search and retrieval of information is minimized

Applicability: Business process (es) and/or individuals can understand and use the data

Governed: Information can be traced and monitored to meet business objectives

Uniqueness: There is only one correct version, in other words, a single source of truth

Types of content – structured, semi-structured and unstructured

It’s important to map the right type content to the correct use cases in your organization to ensure it addresses your business needs in the long run.

Structured content

Here are some typical examples of structured content:

Organized predictably

Classified by metadata

Often componentized

Stored in a centralized repository

Maximizes the opportunity for reuse, dynamic assembly and can be published in many different formats (web, print, etc.)

Metadata allows description provides information about other data, hence useful for machines or AI services to utilize the information. Structured content also can ensure consistent tagging, accurate search results, compliance and data governance, security and tracking.

Semi-structured content

The characteristics of semi-structured information include:

Unstructured information with semantic tags

May be defined by different attributes

May use tagging applied by workflows

Make it more searchable than generic unstructured information

A good example of semi-structured data is HTML code, which doesn't restrict the amount of information you want to collect in a document, but still enforces hierarchy via semantic elements.

Unstructured content

Unstructured content includes emails, documents, videos, photos, presentations, webpages and many other kinds of business documents. These documents have no associated data model and include many different formats.

These types of content often do not have any associated metadata, and if they do, it is often inconsistently applied. This means you cannot access the benefits that structured content provides.

To structure content or not?

So, does every organization need to structure their content?

A structured content approach makes sense when content is business critical and plays a vital role in digital transformation initiatives.

These digital transformation initiatives can be anything from dynamic content assembly for self-service portals, to intelligent knowledge hubs and product and services documentation. Because structured content enables content reuse, you can eliminate unnecessary duplication of effort and ensure consistency anywhere common content is reused.

Simply stated, structured content improves business agility, provides governance and control and enables findability to both external customers and internal employees.

When deciding where to start, consider how you want to manage this content and how you are defining your broader content strategy.

Early adopters of this approach include manufacturing, financial services, business services and life sciences industries. These organizations are quickly recognizing the benefits of a structured approach to content in comparison to document-based management.

In our next post, we’ll take a look at how structured content is making it much easier for companies to realize the benefits of AI technology fully. In the meanwhile, why not read our IDC report looking at how you can adopt a new content approach to build your AI ready enterprise.

Disclaimer: This blog was originally posted on company blog here.

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Part 1: Tying Strategic Business Objectives to Information Management Strategies

Information is one of the organization’s most valuable assets. This shouldn’t come as a big surprise, given the amounts that organizations invest in creating, managing and protecting it. But measuring the value of information, on the other hand, is not a clearly established practice, except for the accounting function who look into Intellectual property value.

So the question arises, how do we extend the fundamental information valuation model to prioritize information management within an organization?

Like physical assets, not all information is the same or made in the same way. Some information is clearly more important than others. For example, R&D information in an engineering organization and rules and procedures in a business services organization may be deemed higher value versus tweets and generic email exchanges between co-workers. This leads us to classify information based on the various values they provide.

Information as an asset

Furthermore, these values can be directly tied to the various business objectives that an organization may have and tied to the bigger overarching goal – rather than a standalone goal. The direct link between information management and business objectives has many times been overlooked.

Over the next two blogs, we’ll provide an introduction to how both can be merged, and practical considerations for any business looking to gain greater value from their information.

Various ways to measure the many values of information

Depending on the nature of the organization and how information is used we can broadly classify the many ways to measure the value of information. An organization can choose based on its strategic objectives which value they would like to harness first and in which order:

Intrinsic value – How correct, complete and exclusive is this information?

This property can be associated with information very easily; information is valuable only when it is complete, accurate, timely and exclusive. In regulated industries, there is a great emphasis on using information which possesses this value for conducting day to day business. Using the information which doesn’t have integrity could result in corporate and regulatory violations and fines. Systems are put in place to monitor the flow of information, its access, and trace changes happening to it over a period of time. Hence, technology and analytics can dramatically reduce risk and costs for such organizations in their quest for data integrity. Clearly, the bigger business objective here is to maintain and secure high corporate and regulatory compliance and enable competitive differentiation.

Business value – How good and relevant is this information for efficient business operations?

This property relates to the use of information for conducting day-to-day business in an organization. Internal business information needs to offer availability and collaboration aspects to ensure seamless operations. To empower teams to work across silos and efficiently there is a need for systems to capture information, manage and deliver it in an easy manner. Knowledge is lost when systems are not integrated and knowledge creators work in silos away from knowledge users. In short, to enable one organization’s strategic objectives, intelligent information authoring and reviewing systems to author, review and deliver information becomes the stepping stone.

Performance value –How does this information affect key business drivers?

The reason we need to measure the performance value of information is that we are looking to support higher efficiency, better customer focus, better employee experience and higher visibility into systems and tools to empower everyone better in a distributed work environment. Higher efficiency at work can be enabled by reducing redundant information, ensuring clean information as well as effective and fast information search. Organizations are consolidating systems to have an end to end view, but this might not be a one size fits all solution. What works best for marketing functions might not fit the requirements for finance. Organizations should look into technology which provides holistic solutions to their business problem and look at how their content strategy and technology can support and solve it.

Cost value – What would it cost if we leak, lose or misapply this information?

Security around information is a critical aspect which can be used to assign value to information with respect to catastrophes around it such as, what cost incurs if this information leaks to competitors? What happens if the wrong information gets printed on pharmaceutical labels or what if incorrect rules were used to audit a client? Besides several wasted hours of subject matter experts and the rework, litigations and bad reputation can bring down an organization to its knees. In organizations where information is their core product, security aspects of systems used to manage information is of critical importance. In other words, the cost value of information is a value which is directly linked to the highly regulated nature of businesses. Hence, organizations who operate in a regulated space should be looking into the cost value of information as a key criterion when making business decisions around systems and technologies that deal with information.

Market value – what top-line gains could we get from selling or trading this information?

Several organizations have successfully built their entire revenue model around monetizing data – Google and Facebook are the famous ones that come to mind, but there are other ways to connect the information to an organization’s top line. More often than not organizations are sitting on a wealth of information which they could use to further augment their revenues. Being able to find a relation between client data and various other services used by them, organizations can generate patterns which can be used as templates to offer similar services to the identical customer group. This clearly could mean accelerated sales, or a completely new service offering in the case of a consulting company.

Economic value – How does this information contribute to the bottom line?

When customer-facing agents can provide accurate and precise information to a client they can close deals faster, better and ultimately provide a better customer experience. With a growing information overload across organizations in the world, finding accurate, timely information (and particularly highly contextual) is growing in importance and systems which enable that should be on the radar of C-level executives. Information management technologies and its impact on the bottom line are directly linked, and analytics can be used to monitor and harness this value further.

Role of content and data in an organization

Content has the power to complement and complete the picture painted by numerical data in an organization to drive various initiatives across the business. Numerical data and content together constitute the core – which needs to be addressed to derive the highest value from information in an organization. Based on the goal of the organization, they can choose to monetize content and data, as well as drive business objectives from knowing where to focus.

In our following blog, we will discuss the various ways to manage different forms of content and data and what makes the content fit for the objectives in an organization.

At SDL, we offer SDL Tridion DX to manage both structured and unstructured information. SDL Tridion DX comprises SDL Tridion Docs, our component content management solution for managing structured content and SDL Tridion Sites for managing unstructured content. Omni-channel delivery is facilitated by our dynamic delivery technology. As a result, we can deliver one of the most powerful information experiences, agnostic of format or platform, to enterprise organizations.

Read part 2 if you'd like to learn more about the core aspects of content, and how they can impact the overall productivity of an enterprise.

Disclaimer: This article was first published on the company blog.

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Personalized Content and Consumers

Have you ever wondered how would it be like to read content online and each content is exactly how you like to consume, perhaps short, crisp with a lot of data, analysis and graphs or elaborate, detailed source citings with links to each and a lot of predictive ‘what if’ scenarios included or even a bit emotional and talking about how it would affect the human side of things? The best part of it, these all varieties of flavour of content type is actually from the same publisher on the same topic. Wait a minute, did I just describe personalized dynamic content creation? Is it even possible? I believe so yes! We are talking about harnessing the power of machine learning, artificial intelligence and content management to provide us with the most unique experience of our times. 

Let's look into the first interactive movie of our time, Late shift here while watching a movie, with an interactive poll among the viewers the outcome of the movie can be changed. Many passionate arguments have happened in the past where mass does not agree with the ending of a movie or a story. Many times the storyteller has more than one ending in mind but can only implement the one he thinks would be most popular and everyone gets to see his vision. Now finally mass will have a voice as they watch, and perhaps they will get to see a different storyline each time they view it with a different audience. I find this extraordinary and thrilling. 

With the application of the same logic and extending it to personal profiles of individuals and combining it with the power of AI+Machine learning, it would be possible to create greater engagements by media companies. The end customers could be media professionals themselves like journalists and authors who would now need lesser time to find an appropriate image or a quote to go with their thought/opinion piece. It could be a news agency providing personalized content to each of its readers and now have a highly engaging content. We can imagine this extended to even corporates who are trying to send the right message to each of their website visitors. Now they can truly show content relevant to the visitor based on their profile and achieve a higher conversion rate when comes to marketing to sales leads. 

Have you seen such a solution in the market already? I could not locate one, but I look forward to finding one soon and I will be updating this post. 

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Customer Journey Mapping - A starting point for every business.

Every business exists because it serves the unmet needs of a certain group of people who are highly likely to pay to have their concerns addressed and solved. These prospects become paying customers to a business once the business is able to convince them, no one is better suited to address their needs than them. Hence, it only makes sense that every business should treat their customers as a core to their business and map every touch point where customers interact with the company. Customer journey mapping does exactly that, it maps the needs, the desires of customers, touch points in their journey to making a decision to purchase, purchase and finally become the happy advocate and help create new business for the company. 

Source: https://www.mycustomer.com/experience/engagement/nine-sample-customer-journey-maps-and-what-we-can-learn-from-them

In the above image, we look at an example scenario of travel, how does a person trying to book a travel go about it. As simple as it might look on the surface, there are multiple factors behind the decision to travel. 

1. Pre-awareness stage: For instance, what made the person think of travelling, what influenced him perhaps he/she read a nice article, perhaps saw his friends travel or perhaps an image of a faraway beach those factors trigger the pre-awareness stage of the scenario. 

2. Awareness stage: Following the trigger, the individual starts searching for options, now that they are aware they look for solutions by search or by recommendation. Word of mouth by friends or credible sources online are used generally to educate oneself to make a wise decision.

3. Consideration: Here the consumer weighs various options, and prepares to make a concrete buy move. Usually, this is the phase when consumers like to leave their personal details in order to be contacted or further evaluate their almost decision.

4. Decision: Based on feedback and information gathered from the consideration phase, the final buy decision is made here. 

5. Delivery & Use: The desired object is acquired by the consumer and they finally get to use it in due time depending upon the product/service.

6. Loyalty & Advocacy: This is the real test of the product/service, where one sees if the customer is really happy with the value perceived by them and can result in referrals, or bad press for the company. 

In the above-listed stages, there are several emotions that the consumer goes through from curiosity, anxiousness, happiness, contentment, pride even. They consume a lot of information across various channels and more often than not it's from various sources. Depending on the size of the purchase, the number of people involved in decision-making increases, it can be a single person trying to book a trip to a weekend destination to a family of four for their summer vacation or a corporate analyst with his seniors across 15 odd fields. 

How can one business cater to all the demands of information and validation that a potential customer looks for. What is this information that they look for and how can they be delivered to the right channel where the consumers are actively looking for them. More often than not at least in the beginning, it isn't the product site they finally carry out the purchase. This question can be answered by content marketing which needs to be placed on the right channels which will, in turn, draw in your customers. The type of content and your channel will depend on your product and customer profile. Which brings us to the next important topic of discussion: buyer persona, one we shall tackle another day. 

The customer journey holds a wealth of information which a company can make use to build their strategies for demand generation, marketing, pre-sales, sales and after-sales support programs. Applying metrics to quantify KPI’s can be a starting step to implement a complete customers journey in phases. Hence, irrespective of the size and value of a product customers journey mapping should be the first step any business should take and build their business around the customer.

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Technology adoption and managing change

Change is eternal, isn’t it? We keep hearing about change in so many contexts around us all the time - be it weather, behaviour, climate, environment and even business environment. It is all-encompassing and has been a constant companion to all of us from time immemorial, and yet, we don't deal with changes that well. Changes mean a shift in perspective, it means adapting to new ways of living or conducting our tasks, in other words, it means effort. Hence, to enable people to adapt to new ways of doing things we need to make it easier for them. Today lets discuss the changes in the business environment, not really a new topic but it remains fresh to discuss nonetheless, with digital transformation as the hot topic all over the world lets try to see how are we going about it as professionals and people.

Information technology has been changing the way businesses are being conducted and how people run their lives. But recently, the impact is increasingly sharper, more intense and more impactful perhaps because technology itself is evolving really fast. Keeping up with these changes mean being as agile as the technology itself is being created and developed. Hence, agile becomes pretty much a fundamental building block to our new technology world. One can then raise a question, what happens to our old world as technology isn't everything and there is still much which hasn't been touched by technology yet? Correct, technology hasn’t just yet touched everything and transformed everything but it is my strong belief that it will, soon enough in near future waiting patiently around the corner. We do not discard old ways but we augment it with technology, we see technology as our friend and ally and harness the power it offers to make our lives easier and effort minimal. When we can augment the old way of working with the new way of working we will be able to harness the true power technology bestows upon us. What Gartner recently named as digital twin , imagine your office and work as a physical entity and a cloud version which you can access wherever you go without even the dedicated machine you were assigned at work, imagine your physical home and a digital app to get the food and room heated up before you reach home to enjoy the cosiness of it, imagine your health advisor and an app to keep a tab on your well being beyond measuring your heart rate but checking your vital stats to advice you personalized vitamins to add to your diet and perhaps even 3D print it for you. The possibilities are immense and not even far-fetched as of this moment. 

Although, most of it remains hard to adopt by the market to the dismay of businesses.  Even though the scenarios mentioned above are beneficial to customers it remains a challenge for businesses to bring it to the market, technology augmentation is easier said than done. There are a few hurdles to quick and successful technology adoption and they begin with the threats of data breaches, security risks and violation of personal data privacy in case of individuals. As technology adoption matures, the risks associated mature with it too! Hence, in order to accelerate technology adoption, the hurdles need to be addressed, and it can be done by considering 3 important phases. 

First of all, security: Security of personal data, company information need to be protected at all cost and with almost all the products being online in nature and interacting with internet in some way, Cybersecurity now emerges as one of the most important aspects for any technology product whether it addresses business or individuals. Secondly, the method: Other than the security aspect there is also a very key aspect of technology adoption, namely the process behind it. The process of introducing a new technology has to be taken into account for a smooth and successful adoption of a new technology. Process management can be a key to introducing and managing new changes by understanding underlying key areas, people, behaviour and guiding new improvements with new process aided by the new technology. 

Finally, what can bring about successful change and digital adoption at a faster rate is something very human, namely attitude. A curious, careful and open attitude to technology might be just what we all need to a see the change we all want. Embracing technology to help us live an easier life is the common goal for us after all, both for businesses and consumers. Having a curious, open and positive attitude towards new technology can be educational as well as beneficial. Something known as the growth mindset. In summary, when we have successfully addressed the three aspects to technology adoption namely, security, method and mindset most of the technology adoption can run smoother and be much more successful than that one execution where they are not addressed well.