Document Projects. Marketing & Customer Communications Management

Document Composition – Participative Document Creation October 13, 2008

There used to be only one method of inputting to document creation / composition tools. It was a case of throw some defined data at the composition engine and then execute a script. Out of the other end of the process comes a printable print stream to by physically printed and finished.

Now, some vendors have moved and other vendors are moving in the direction of participative document composition. New technology means that users within the business can write documents of their own and have them processed as part of the overall organisation document production activities.

But why do this? Well, clasically, if you wanted to create customer documents you would need to establish a project. That project will involve people from a number of groups. The project team would likely carry a Project Manager, technical resource from IT, a representative or two from the business, a compliance office and perhaps many more people – I’ve sat in meetings with 25 people discussing the evolution of a single document!

To put it mildly, it has always been a slightly baffling process particularly if you are a non-technical business user. Why so much to create a single document?

The reason is that customer facing documents are important and you can’t afford to get them wrong. The second reason were the limitations of what technology can do. This has changed now with the advent of object oriented systems and service oriented architecture. Now, reusable blocks of enterprise code can be made widely available to any number of mission critical business processes.

So for example there may be a standard way of performing a calculation or rendering and displaying images on a document. Whereas before, these bits of code and rules would sit on an isolated server in some IT backroom, this code is now available really to anybody that needs it!

Much of a documents construction is now pre-defined. Where the address will go, where marketing message can appear, what legal lines can be used and so on. This means the overall format of say a letter can be established early on. If a change is needed to company letter formats, this can be done globally across all letters. Before, every application would have to be changed and tested individually!

So the business user now becomes concerned only with the content. They can enter their content on a Word Processor style interface, perhaps even following content standard rules, enter the document into an authorisation procedure and track the document until it leaves the organisations door. It’s really that easy now.

The advent of the application service oriented architecture in document creation and distribution is bringing about a sea change in the way that companies now communicate with their customers. It’s saving money, accelerating time to market and directly improving those classic customer churn prevention, retention, satisfaction and acquisition goals.

A major breakthrough in customer communications management technique, I would urge all my readers to investigte the business case for this approach as soon as possible.