Following is a case study of Standards Australia's own experience of transforming a paper based publishing process into a world-class content management system.
Automated web publishing, empowered authors and future-proof content are increasingly being seen as key drivers that allow organisations to compete in the new economy of the knowledge era. This paper describes how Standards Australia focussed on these principles in developing a content management system that facilitates the online collaboration of over 8000 committee members in the creation and management of over 6000 technical standards. The system is now allowing the delivery of new knowledge-management based services to clients of Standards Australia.
A few years ago Standards began investigating ways of delivering standards online and any innovative new services that might be possible. Like many organisations, Standards found that its core intellectual property, the technical documents, were stored in a wide range of legacy formats including paper, Wang, Word Perfect and Microsoft Word files.
We embarked on a project to implement a content management system that would unify our content and systems in a sustainable manner
Key goals were:
We wanted to avoid:
Faced with an exorbitantly expensive project to integrate all the different file formats, Standards chose to look to the future and develop a custom XML-based solution.
The strength of Document Management (DM) systems is that they can deal with dozens or even hundreds of different formats and our organisation was obviously a playground for that approach. However, we found that DM systems do not generally take the step of looking inside those documents and attaching meanings to what they find there.
Typical document management environments record metadata such as titles, authors and categories. Some text retrieval systems are clever enough to understand the contents of documents and even use pattern recognition to extract concepts that can be used for automatic categorisation. However, they don't provide a framework in which to standardise your content they do not attempt to add value to elements of the document.
Referring back to our aim of a sustainable and flexible content format that users could take ownership of and the need for new knowledge based services to our clients, we realised we would need a system in which we could do more with the content.
Starting in June 1999, The Knowledge Systems group at Standards Australia Publishing began the rapid development of a content management system.
Known internally as ONE, the system developed by Standards Australia consists of:
Using point and click tools, an author can publish a document in just a few minutes without any need to interact with a web master. All the information to publish to the correct section of the site is contained in the metadata captured during the document creation process.
While we are not currently using XML editors – the system is designed all our content to move from word processor to structured editor in a painless way, once mainstream XML editors are available that meet the right price/performance target.
Included in every document is a table at the start of the document that is used to capture all the metadata needed for automatic generation of web sites and meeting the business aims of the site.
Each template generates a set of pre-defined Styles. For example, an organisation could decide that a first level heading should be 16-point Helvetica in dark blue and give that formatting a name, say H1. Now all users need do is apply the H1 Style to their first level headings using a button, a hot-key combination or drop-down menu.
The in-house schema we adopted was designed to have a consistent, predictable syntax. For example, a first level heading is H1. A numbered second level heading is H2#. Likewise, a body paragraph is B1, an indented numbered body paragraph, is B2#. The appearance and the details of each of these styles are easily modified.
The styles are grouped as follows:
The reference styles allow a web server or other hypertext system to provide appropriate behaviour.
For example “This marked-up text is the title of another document in our repository” or “This is the name of one of our clients”. Our programmers can then assign behaviour to the marked up text such as "link this (client) text to the full content details and history notes BUT only if the logged-in viewer is a manager or above".
Our solution represents a potential input into future standardization processes – and the specification for the stylesheet is freely available to other developers.
After an initial meeting, Standards' project managers post an initial draft of the standard on the Committee's website using the ONE system (see details below). The draft standard is marked up using a simple numbering system. Sections are numbered and paragraphs within each section are lettered. Committee members can then comment on each section or paragraph by simply clicking on the number or letter. A dialog box appears guiding the user through the commenting process.
Committee members can view other comments and comment on the comments in a threaded discussion system. When a full round of commenting is completed, a new draft version of the standard can be released. When the committee members are satisfied with the standard, a balloting system allows the members to vote, converting the draft to a full Australian Standard.
The platform on which the system is the Structured Information Manager, (SIM HREF2). SIM is content management system, developed by the RMIT university see http://www.simdb.com. We have constructed a set of tools on the platform to allow rapid devlopment of content stores, with web-based access using word processor documents as the main way of getting structured textual content into the system. This can be integrated with other corporate databases using a variety of techniques.
In addition various portal sites owned by Standards Australia have been constructed including knowledge management HREF3, e-commerce HREF4.
In general, the implementation has been extremely successful, delivering all the required features on schedule. An upgrade of the system was undertaken in March incorporating initial feedback. The system is constantly being upgraded to include new features.
Payback on the business aims is already apparent. The first major test of the system was the judging of the Australian Design Awards, which are conducted by Standards Australia. In the past, judging of 100 to 200 documents by 200 judges has involved huge amounts of paper shuffling and taken months. This year all entries were put on the content management system. Judges were give access and voting took place using our balloting system, reducing effort from three person-months to three person-days.
There are some current limitations with the system.
The main limitation is that while documents carry metadata on them we do not yet have round-trip conversion into and out of XML that will allow server side validation and changing of the metadata. Until mid 2000, all changes must be made using the word processor and re-submitted to the content store.
Less critically, scripts to render HTML documents from the XML content store are written in SIM's proprietary language. This provides high performance, but restricts our application to one platform. Transformations will be re-written using technologies World Wide Web Consortium recommendations in the second half of 2000.
Our key change management message to employees and middle level management has been:
It should be noted that this is a classic benefit of knowledge management (KM). The option of developing the system in-house would normally be viewed as the riskier options, but in doing so we have created a completely new capability. Purchasing a proprietary solution may well have delivered a similar system but we would not have had the new capability and may have been riskier in the long-term by locking ourselves into a particular technology vendor.
The in-house option is already paying off through new business with external clients. We have developed the Australian Quality Council's Business excellence framework database -- a subscription only collection of case-study documents from organisations that have best-practice in various areas of business. We have also completed a publishing system for a large industry association.
Standards Australia delivers the ONE system through its Professional Services division. The commercial exploitation of the ONE system aims to be in harmony with Standards' overall business goals of becoming a knowledge-based service organization.
While we recommend the ONE system for appropriate applications, our content management philosophy and template strategy is entirely compatible with other knowledge management systems. In fact, we list most of the major technology vendors on the links page of our knowledge management website at http://www.knowledge.standards.com.au.
Generally speaking Standards Professional Services aims to help clients manage not just the technical standards we now deliver online, but their own internal procedures and knowledge assets as well.
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