Content Toll Road

Spath was on his way to the Enterprise Touchpoint Collection Summit 03, the company offsite he was sponsoring to get everyone creating content for external consumption. His own presentation was going to be on the benefits of a content distributional strategy. He was sure that his memo on not reading at work would come up. That seemed to be the unavoidable topic these days.

It was a fine day for the drive. It was a fine day to contemplate where the summit would take them. The sign pointing the way to the toll road were up ahead. Attraction marketing sucking the customes on to the road, a road with hopefully only a few exists, so the customers stay on the road and pay the next toll. But, back to attraction marketing, those points of initial contact the customer has with the product that will lead them to more contacts and to the sale and the sales, providing just a small bit of attraction content and a link waiting for conversion. Take me to the next link. Then, the next. Does that sound like CRM, well it's not. The CRM system sits over to the side recording the contacts, but the contacts have to be built into the documents and they drive the response and fullment elements. There has to be something to link to, something to get. But, we're ahead of ourselves here as we drive from sign to sign, from sign to entrance ramp.

So Spath was on the toll road. It seemed like any other highway. Just then he hit the toll booth and went digging for change. These guys only took cash, so like a software startup trying to meet the standards established for software documentation by the market dominators, Spath had to scratch around for change. Cars were piling up behind him as he frantically searched for the money to move on down the road. Toll booths and market barriers, the entry barrier, look pretty much the same: stakeholder expectations and costs.

The toll road didn't really work hard to sell itself like say a can of corn where you buy a branded good, because you always buy it, and you buy it without thinking too far in advance. You take the toll road when you have the money, otherwise you drive the long way around. If this toll road had been software, you would have seen a lot more signs in the form of press mentions generated by press releases, you would have seen a few white papers, you would have requested a discussion with a sales rep, then you would have met the sales rep and gotten a proposal before finally buying. In the B2B arena, it takes five direct mail pieces to make the sale.

Driving down the toll road is hardly like using software. You get your tips of the day from the billboards and the skywatch traffic segment on the radio. You might even call for technical support or directions on your cell phone. And, you might have to pull over to consult a map or in the case where you've run out of gas or had some other system failure.

No, software has more content involved. If it's not the user manual or the online help or the web based content, it might be the marcom for the next upgrade. Spath thought about this as he pulled into the next toll booth luckily he had the money situation resolved. One day he'd get an EZ-tag, but not today.

Before the toll booth, Spath could see the pre-sale enactment chain before him. That was behind him now. Exiting the toll booth he had the post-sale enactment chain ahead of him. Ah, the sign for the service island. Yes, he was sold. He'd pull in and buy some 3rd party, complementing vendor goods. He'd avoid the EZ-tag upgrade. He'd be experiencing more of the value chain, and the extended information touchpoint collection. Heck, he might even engage with the experiential touchpoint collection. The guy taking Spath's breakfast taco order was one of those touchpoints. How would the CRM system capture this contact.

Getting back on the road Spath watched the mile markers click by. Documents, man months, and of course dollars the main concern of CFOs flowing from the company to the customer and back.

Imagining the Italian countryside, Spath runs by a billboard full of Italian words. Translation, globalization, internationalization, localization wait down the road that the enterprise touchpoint collection follows.

Spath then realizes that he'd come to his exit. As a customer, he'd pay one last toll, the exit barrier, the last market barrier. He wondered about the exit costs of his own products. He was sure that those costs don't show up in his total cost of ownership (TCO).

He'd be leaving the toll road behind even as he mastered it. He'd make the trip again, but he was no longer held hostage to the enactment chain. Instead, the experience and his expertise would bring him back to the road. Maybe he'd remember to get a roll of quaters, or an EZ-tag before his next trip. Maybe there wouldn't be any market barriers. Maybe the tolls would be lower. He wouldn't need a map again. The toll road has so many touchpoints and hardly any duplication of content by functional business units. The toll road had an optimized enterprise touchpoint collection, which resulted from an optimized content distributional strategy.

So pulling into the conference, it was apparent to Spath that the information touchpoint collection has followed him off the road. He still had to pay for this offsite, but the ROI suppored the investment. Spath wondered if there were any negative use costs associated with holding an offsite. He'd figure that out later. Well, the explicit costs anyway.

The Emergence of a Need

Spath found himself looking at his content origination budgets. What a mess. The origins of the mess go all the way back to day one of the company's life. No body laid out a content distribution strategy. Why? There were no functional business units to create content, so the indigenous content distribution strategy was used by default, by non-management.

Typically, a startup hires one technical writer in the research phase of product development. The technical writer starts to write the user manual and the help, the ultimate single sourcing situation. Until the technical writer is swamped, nothing else is involving content is considered, and that's if the technical writer is lucky. The content bloom begins with a wild garden of linear text.

Then, the engineers write the "training" content, by training we mean presentation content. No instructional design methodology is used. No feedback is provided to management on the efficacy of the instruction. The assumptions of management are embedded and assumed unassailable. No effort is directed towards checking those assumptions. Training becomes a profit center with the engineers presenting. Training may even become the only source of revenue, particularly if training is so bad that it scares away customers. Spath had seen this up close. That company died a long death doing what the accounting system said. Besides the production costs content exists beyond the grasp of the accounting system.

The technical writer might take a run through the presentation content and convert it into "training" manual content. Still, the presentation content isn't altered beyond formatting. Feedback isn't added. Objectives, goals, and learner testing isn't added. And, the management's assumptions continue to live in the content unabated by reality.

The content bloom spreads.

Then, the marketing phase starts with marcom, so some unified identity is created and promulgated across the organization. If the technical writer was managing print production, that responsibility now shifts to the marketers. If the technical writer didn't include any competitive claims, pressure to do so goes up. White papers end up in the peer editing pile.

The content blooms in lots of potted plant planters. Content shows up everywhere.

Then, professional services emerges. They hire a stand-up trainer. The stand-up trainer slowly takes over the presentational content. The stand-up trainer knows instructional design. If the stand-up trainer has worked in the software industry, they also know that plans are not allowed. No testing of the embedded managerial assertions is going to happen. Hopefully, the stand-up trainer is swamped, so they don't have to worry about efficacy. Friday is Bozeman, Montana. Friday is the focus.

In the meantime, the content empire of technical support blooms. Everything asked is everything answered. Everything is in the knowledge base. Content runneth over long before it starts to carry the corporate identity, legal disclaimers, and contact info that turn content into documents, aka members of the enterprise touchpoint collection.

Then, comes sales training, another content bloom.

Ah, and don't let us forget the website and the orthogonal world of ecommerce and search engine optimization. They even have content management systems, but only for themselves. Do they really manage content? Not, in the sense that Spath thought about it.

Each content originator builds an empire to the best of their ability. Each content originator builds content in isolation. Each content originator uses the latest and greatest content technologies to differentiate their department. This continues even as each content originating organization adds staff and management. Just doing what comes naturally, indigenously, guilelessly. Spath knew otherwise. Some people wrestled with pigs and occasionally you hired one. Then, the CFO wrestles the pig as well, which ends ultimately with the butchering of the pig. Oh, outsourcing the whole mess is such a relief.

Braticator was just such an enterprise, heros all round, drowning in content blooms, power allocations, empires constructed, under tooled, over tooled.

Spath knew these budgets were always too high. It was time to reach out and touch the enterprise touchpoint collection

So it was time for another memo:

I am inviting everyone involved in content production here at Braticator, Inc. to the Enterprise Touchpoint Collection Summit 03 to be held Friday after next. It will be an all day offsite. Please adjust your production schedules accordingly, and figure on losing about a man-month as a minimum on follow up.

This means everyone, not just the department heads. I don't know who all of you are. So if you've created any external documents during your employment here, show up. If you don't, then your documents will not be elgible for external consumption, so someone who does attend will be releaving you of your content production responsibilities. Oh, the easy way out? Not really. An audit will follow, then the razor, then the axe. Oh, and boxes.

It is budget time again, and your budgets are out of whack. So before I whack them, or outsource them, or otherwise dance with them, we need to talk, not to me, but to each other. I promise, no HR team building exercises.

Please RSVP via this email. The usual meal options will be offered. More info to follow.

Thanks.

Counting the Invisible Bean Chefs,

Joe Spath CFO,

Braticactor, LLC

Satisfied with the memo, Spath packed away his bedtime reading, the manual for another accounting system the company was going to buy, and headed home. Educate me now, so I can get real work done later. Spath wasn't going to get caught reading manuals at work.

Bundles of Disfunction

Earlier in the day, Mike, the IT buyer, had tried to print out a potential vendor's manual. Mike wanted to check the features lists against the feasibility report he received from a department head. Mike always did this. He always wanted to see if the purchase criteria had been rigged, so that a particular vendor's product would end up getting selected. There wasn't much Mike could do about it. But, he liked to know all the same. Sometimes he would get the criteria changed, so a cheaper version could be purchased instead.

When he tried to print the pdf, he kept getting some obscure message stating that printing pdfs was against policy.

It took Mike the rest of the day to find out who made this policy determination. It was Spath again. Yeah, that no reading at work memo had gone over really big last week. What a nut! Spath made his policy demand last week after requesting some research from the third-level support staff about implementation.

CFO or not, Mike had had enough. So he went down to Spath's office.

"Hello Mike. How can I help you today?"

"Well, Joe, it's about this pdf policy. I can't get my job done with this policy in place. Why? Why the policy?"

"Alright, Mike. As a buyer, it just might help me if you understood what I call bundles of disfunction. We do buy enough of those. Anyway, pdfs are just one member of the bundle of disfunction that vendors provide to us as features as a means of allocating their operating costs to our businesses, their customer's businesses."

"I'm buying their operating costs?"

"Yes. And, as a result our operating costs go up in ways that are transparent to the accounting system, so they don't count against our ROI. This throws off the decision making in regards to purchasing their system vs. someone elses. The pdf printing argument is the same argument that I make about reading on the job, invisible waste, counterintutive for sure. "

"So you are down on pdfs, because we read them?"

"No. It's not the reading issue. I know that people read them at work. I also know that they don't like reading on the screen, so they print them out. And, that's the problem. The cost of printing on a laser printer is really outrageous when you consider that we used to get printed manuals, essentially for free."

"Yeah, I read that somewhere. The cost of lithographic printing is a few cents a page. The cost of a copy around ten cents. The cost of a laser print out something above twelve cents a page. That's an exponential difference. So that's what we are talking about here?"

"Yes, Mike. I think you can see my point."

"Cost wise, yes. But, I actually use pdfs to save us money."

"But, where does that link between reading pdfs and the money you save get documented? How does it show up on the books?"

Mike didn't have an answer.

"So help me out here Mike. How do we get those linkages to show up in the books? And, as a buyer, you are just the person to help us push back against vendor cost allocation."

"I can see that we need to change our cost allocations and capture some other data. We also need to change the ROI formulas to account for these costs. Still knowledge-driven production gains are going to be hard to measure."

"Well, Mike, it should be worth doing. I've talked to Walter and John about these same issues after I sent the reading memo. They are forming a task force. Contact them about getting involved."

Mike wondered if this was going to contribute to a successful career, this task force. But, he took up some other industry best practices during the bust that managed to save his company a ton of money.

"Oh, and Mike, keep looking for more of those costs that come all inclusive in those bundles of disfunction!"

Mike went back to his office wondering about those bundles of disfunction. He was still unhappy about not being able to print out those pdfs. He'd just work from the screen for now. Just then he realized that reading from the screen was one of those policy costs that likewise could be called a bundle of disfunction. They were everywhere.

Realizing the Value Add

So why does a software vendor deliver manuals and other documentation? I spent years exploring this question. My answer led off in one direction towards expertise development, which leads to customer retention and upgrade sale revenue. This was an enterprise benefit. By linking content across the enterprise into pre- and post-sale enactment chains and increasing the opportunities for interactions with that content, content retained the customer and leads to upgrade revenues. There was profit in this, if anyone did it that way. Nobody did it that way. We were part of development, not marketing.

Others explored the question as well. Their answers led them to the cost management of content. They hinted that there was no value to the vendor except for cost reductions in the vendor's other content delivering business units.

So here we were doing something that just cost money. but nobody really knew why. Some executives had it right, like the checkbox in the magazine review. Of course, there were customer expectations. How many people would buy software if it didn't come with a manual? No one. How many people would buy software if it didn't come with a usable interface? Everyone. Well, that is the real behavior of the system. Manuals were somehow supposed to make up for the poor interfaces. I've papered over enough bad interfaces during my career. Some applications punched right through the wallpaper.

So this whole paradigm is expectation driven. A checkmark in the review checkbox was an expectation. Those expectations didn't just arise out of thin air. Nope. The big vendors like Microsoft, Novell (once upon a time), WordPerfect Corp. (a more recent yesterday), and Lotus built those expectations. These guys were market dominators. They didn't have to serve individual customers. They served markets. The revenue outcomes would have been the same. And, they, the vendors in that league today, still spend lots of money on content.

What wouldn't have been the same is that there would have been more competition. The expectation of content forced startups to try to mimic the content produced by the big vendors. Microsoft provides a user experience person for every five developers. And, this user experience person specs content, but doesn't create it themselves. They manage a much larger contractor force. A startup, however, hires one technical writer per product. Maybe fewer if they can keep their release dates spread out. Startups spend a lot of money trying to overcome the market barrier that is content. So the startups look for every shortcut they can to meet the expectation without necessarily meeting the purpose.

Looking high and low for the value adds and finding them in an unexpected place means that content strategies are meaningful in unexpected ways. Like Spath finding that manuals cost him money, invisible money, implicit costs, or waste even when they were free. So you have a double-sided market, so of speak, where content costs vendors, but its the cost of entry, and content costs the customer, but its the cost of reading. They pay to enter, they pay to consume. These are the true costs of content.

We manage these costs if at all by accident. Startups pay to produce, which isn't necessarily seen as paying to enter. Customers pay for functionality unaware of the bundling of disfunction in the offers they consume.

August Editorial Calendar

Blame it on August. It was that time of the year back before the bust, when every IT news rag was on to the annual IT productivity paradox. Pages and pages appeared on how investments in new technology was not delivering the promised productivity. This was the very thing that had Joe Spath in an uproar.

Yeah, he had the same intuitive feelings for years. His IT investments were not paying off. He figured it was some kind of accounting anomaly, so he spent some time going to intellectual capital conferences and trying to deal with all that hidden value in his corporation that couldn't be uncovered until a valuation. Those valuations were never done until the corporation was sold.

So he took on the mantle of the Counter of Invisible Beans. He wasn't joking. How many accountants did he meet over his career in accountancy that were in denial about accounting being an abstraction. No, accounting was the only thing that was real. Where the real diverged from the books, the books were right, real was wrong.

Brrring! Brrring! Oh, no, the last thing Spath needed as another phone call about his memo threatening to fire anyone caught reading on the job.

"Braticactor, LLC, Spath speaking?"

"Well, no, I wasn't looking for any help catching people reading. But, ah, thanks for your diligence in regards to this matter."

Anyway, yeah, the past day and a half have been a living hell. Readers of all types and stripes were calling about clarification or complaint. They found it unbelievable. Well, so had Spath.

Back in 1998, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) was conceptualized as a benchmark against which IT investment could be compared. It was a consulting methodology that would grow over the years to incorporate a few more concepts like the Time To Return (TTR). There were two parts to the TCO: first there was an activity-based costing allocation of application related costs, second there was the infrastructural multiple. The costs included business administration costs, system administration costs, and use costs. I've forgotten some of the cost categories here. Sorry about that. The big picture was, however, that use costs included negative use costs, as in the non-productive use or the salary contribution for the time spent doing things other than the real work the application was intended for, and positive use costs, as in the productive use or the salary contribution for the time spent doing the real work the application was intended for. Positive use costs came in around 18% for the first year's use of the application. The infrastructural multiple was all the fixed IT costs associated with keeping the application running as a multiple of the cost of the application. In 1989, this number was 2x. So if the application cost $600, you'd be paying $1200 to keep it running, and you'd expect an ROI of less than 9%. The ROI was the positive use cost divided by the infrastructural multiple.

In 2000, the infrastructural multiple was 6x. This before Bluetooth and Wifi, so you can imagine where the costs went by now. The cost allocations turned out to be somewhat intractable, so it was still 18%. Vendors pushed more costs off on customers. And, vendors went with the enterprise pricing model, and from there to the CxO sales model, so prices were through the roof. So the applications cost was above $2000, you were paying $12,000 to keep the application running, and your ROI was under 3%.

These ROI numbers were optimistic and required perfect implementation. How often does perfect implementation happen?

The final construction of the TCO omitted reading, self-support, and desktop training as costs allocated to application costs. Why? Well, because nobody ever tracked these costs. I've worked in one place that made you allocate your negative and positive use costs. But, these were weekly summary type numbers, not a lot of resolution.

Spath knew he could hardly fire anyone for reading. They'd have his job just for suggesting this. Spath's only hope was to hang on long enough that the bottom line would be affected. If he could point to some explicit productivity gain, then he might still be around next year. Of course, other people would claim the gain for their projects. They were explicit. He was implicit. But, somebody had to draw attention to this devious problem. At least, his wife was sympathetic.

Brrring! Brrring!

"Braticactor, LLC, Spath speaking?"

The Twilight Zone

The email from the CFO lay open on the screen. Herbert had had enough. He is in his manager's office right now expressing his exasperation.

   The management of Braticactor, Inc will

no longer allow employees to perform self

support, use online tutorials, or read

manuals for work related software

applications. Further, you are no longer

authorized to use vendor supplied telephone

support. Only in-house technical support is

authorized to speak to outside software

vendor personnel whether for administrative

purposes or to obtain technical support.









   These untracked and unmanaged activities

are consuming productive work hours. Doing

any of the above will result in your

immediate termination.





               Counting the Invisible Beans,





               Joe Spath





               CFO, Braticactor, LLC

Absurd? Well, not here in the twilight zone of negative use costs.