best practices

Best Practices

Information Management Best Practices - Volume 1 “Regardless of the kind of information you need to manage, this book will make your projects better.” Bob Boiko, Washington University

“The TIMAF organization proves its dedication to raising the bar for information management practitioners everywhere. It has assembled the best thought leaders in the field to share insights from case studies which are both actionable and universally relevant. Even the most experienced IM professionals will learn something new with each turn of the page.” Scott Liewehr, President CM Professionals

“It is, quite frankly, the best collection of case studies and solutions I’ve run across and will be an invaluable resource for our readers. The reports are solid, practical and real-world examples of how to do things right.” Hugh McKellar, Editor in Chief KM World Magazine

06 Drazen Djukic, Volker Grünauer

5

06 R Drazen Djukic Volker Grünauer

Creating a Product Information Strategy for your Corporate Website Managing Product Information in an International and Decentralized Web Environment Drazen Djukic ([email protected]) is responsible for the content management strategy and development of Wienerberger’s websites. He managed the roll-out of the company’s websites and online product catalogs to more than 25 countries and participated in building up a corporate intranet. Drazen holds a Master’s degree in Information and Communication Systems and Services from the Austria’s Technical University for Applied Sciences. Volker Grünauer ([email protected]) is responsible for the e-marketing strategy at Wienerberger, which includes 37 websites in 25 countries. Together with the IT department he managed the rollout of the CMS into new Wienerberger markets. Previously, Volker worked as an art director at elements.at, a web-design firm located in Salzburg, where he created interactive experiences for customers in different business sectors. Volker holds a Master’s degree in E-Business from the University of Applied Sciences of Upper Austria.

6

TIMAF Information Management Best Practices Vol. 1

Abstract Especially for production industries with decentralized product information, it is essential for your company to consider Product Information Management (PIM). Due to numerous acquisitions and different regional needs, Wienerberger’s product range varies from country to country. This results in a decentralized organization and product structure. Nevertheless, Wienerberger implemented a centralized content management strategy to support regional market needs. This best practice example focuses on a handful of ingredients necessary for a successful PIM project. These include system integration, media asset management, and organizational workflows. There is a saying in German that goes, “There’s no all-in-one animal which provides you with milk, wool, eggs and meat”. One of our key conclusions is to follow the strategy “start small and improve continuously”.


7

Background Founded in 1819 in Vienna and traded since 1869 on the Vienna Stock Exchange, Wienerberger is a company that looks back on a great tradition. Over the years, Wienerberger grew from a local Austrian brick-maker to the world’s largest producer of brick. During this time, the number of production facilities rose from 11 to 240 plants in 26 countries. Due to many acquisitions and different regional needs, the product range varies from country to country. This results in a decentralized organization and product structure. Nevertheless, Wienerberger implemented a centralized Content Management Strategy to support regional market needs.

The Skills Needed to Perform this Best Practice To understand this best practice article, you should be familiar with the general concepts of Web Content Management (WCM). Note that there are different parties involved in the process of implementing a Product Information Management (PIM) strategy. This article addresses the project management level of the process, but is worth reading for any job role dealing with PIM or WCM.

Step 1: Define Your Goals Can you afford outdated or even wrong data on your website? Nowadays customers and other stakeholders expect accurate and timely online information. We know from research that inaccurate information on websites damages the brands behind them. Let us think about a customer looking for a certain product—in our case a very special roof tile. In an ideal case, the customer finds exactly what he is looking for in your online

product catalog. He has checked the reference images and the technical details, and they all seem to be the perfect match for him. He is so impressed that he instantly orders the product. Now imagine what happens if his search returns a completely different product because the image on the catalog page was wrongly associated. He may feel that your website—and your products—are not worth his time. Or imagine a user who is searching for the address of a nearby building. After driving for two hours, he recognizes that the address leads to a completely different building than the one he is looking for. He will probably be very disappointed. We are sure there are a lot of similar cases in your business; therefore one could say that giving no information at all is better than giving wrong information. This makes assuring up-to-date, complete, and correct information an important part of your Web Content Management (WCM) strategy. Developing a vision and stating a strategy are the only ways to make sure that everyone works together in order to reach your company’s goals; otherwise you risk having problems like those previously discussed. To get started, we suggest reading your WCM strategy and taking it as a basis for developing a Product Information Management (PIM) roadmap. In our case, we defined the following overall goals: • Cost savings. • Improved customer service. • Reduction in complexity. To reach these goals we: • Simplified the editor interface to reduce content management efforts. • Made use of existing data through integration and merging of data sources.

8


• Established data quality assurance using reporting. • Defined workflows for better collaboration. • Offered product configurators. • Avoided redundant data. • Defined meaningful product categories. • Set up a search strategy (in combination with product categorization).

Step 2: Determine How Data is Linked to Products Before you start implementing PIM related tools, it is essential to dive into the organization’s tool inventory. Most organizations have more than one database/system where they store product-related data. In most cases, this architecture makes sense, as each database/ system has different requirements and a different focus. For example, ERP systems e.g. SAP concentrate on production and logistics and are therefore quite technical, whereas WCM systems focus on transporting marketing information with multimedia content. If you are setting up a new database/system for the same kind of information that is already in an existing system, you run the risk of having to do data updates twice. This usually leads to degraded data quality. To avoid this, you need to assess these systems, figure out what kind of information is managed there, and determine what can be used for the online PIM system. This kind of data inventory allows you to avoid redundancies and insures that your product information is adequate. The following steps will get you started: • Check the existing data sources. Check which databases/systems already exist in your organization and what kind of product- related information is stored there. Remem ber to ask who is maintaining the systems and how often they are checked to insure that their data is up to date. Often, it is also

necessary to check the format of the data to ensure that it is correct and complete. For example, there could be an image somewhere in the system, but without any metadata like title and description. • Draw a rough product model. The next step is to draw product models—ideally one product from every product group—with all necessary data—technical attributes, descriptions, images, references and instruction manuals, for example. Then you determine which system inside your organization you can get this information from. The end result of this process is a product model that has data links to specific systems. • Define the data links in detail. Take a closer look at the data and the system where it is stored. The following things should be taken into consideration: - What language is the data in? Is the data language independent (a technical value, for example)? How many languages is it available in? Is it possible to manage translations of certain data in the specific system? - Is the data structured or unstructured? For example, is the data text containing more than one value? - Is the data regularly updated? • Synchronize your product model. Check with the product management, marketing, and sales departments to ensure that you do not violate any product strategy. Some systems like an ERP contain a lot of confi- dential, internal data that does not fit with your marketing or product strategy.

Step 3: Set Up Organizational and Content Management Workflows It is crucial for every project is to set up a project organization that matches your company’s organization chart. Your PIM project involves at least your Marketing and IT departments, but can also involve any other part of your organization that is linked to product


information. Marketing and IT have the following responsibilities: • Marketing - Responsible for topics like data linked to products, information structure and strategy. • IT - Responsible for topics like information architecture, database management and technical implementation. For the ongoing maintenance, you need to delegate responsibilities to different people within your organization. As mentioned earlier, data accuracy is an important success factor. Therefore, you must set up content management workflows that regularly update data. Keep these workflows practical; start by brainstorming of all tasks which need to be done weekly, monthly and yearly. Then go through this list and link the tasks to departments and job roles. Do not use the names of employees in this chart; write down their job roles instead. This helps you to deal with employee turnover. Reporting—discussed in Step 6—helps you to see problems in your project’s organization. For example, if the colleague who is responsible for updating the product information for a specific product group leaves the company, he might have not forwarded this task to his successor. If you track the number of logins and the amount of data changed over several months, you could see a significant change in that report. Triggering such events helps you to see changes in your organization which you may not be aware of through the official channels. In large organizations, you simply may not be informed about organizational changes, even if they affect your project. Therefore we highly recommend creating such reports and checking them regularly. Of course, you should also ask everyone involved and their supervisors to inform you about upcoming changes. You should also assess which parts of the information flow can be automated. If you, for example, know that you must enter every new

9

product in your CM system and your ERP system, you can set up an event to trigger a reminder when anyone adds a new product to the system. There will be a lot of possible automations and in general, people have great ideas for such process optimizations. To decide whether something can be automated, determine how often this trigger really happens, and how likely it is that your users can miss a key step in the process if they do not see a trigger. If the trigger occurs frequently and automation reduces the process time and saves costs, or if the trigger can easily be missed, you should automate the trigger. When you have finished developing your workflows, create use-case based training for your employees. People learn more easily if they can apply what they are learning directly to their daily work, and they do not like admitting that they are not able to do something. Your training should consist of use-cases that show your users how to complete specific common tasks, instead of showing them all the functions of the database. We did all of the trainings inhouse, without the help of consultants, because we know our products and the needs of our customers better than a third party vendor, and we think this know-how is essential for training.

Step 4: Integrate Data Sources You designed your product data structure in Step 3; you know where to get the information from and which formats will be delivered. In this step, we will concentrate on the technical implementation of that data structure. In most cases, you will already have one or more web content management (CM) systems that you use for managing the company’s websites, portals, and intranets. CM Systems usually manage product content like descriptions, images, technical attributes, and so on. Integrating an ERP system to make use of certain data, or using a Digital Asset Management

10


- Therefore, you must design an easy-to-use interface to make your system usable for CMS editors. When importing data from other systems you must also verify data Consider the following items before implement- quality and integrity before publishing it to your customers. Therefore, you need to plan ing your data structure: data quality reports and checks. • Make use of rollout and training. Instead • Start smart and improve continuously. Projects often fail because project teams start of having one big bang rollout, roll out your off with too large a scope. It is tempting to sites one by one and use your stakeholders’ automate as much as possible, and to comments to make improvements. If you do everything in one project. This results have multiple websites/applications, choose in an undesirably long implementation time. one for a test run. As you test the site, try to Instead of implementing all of your data links illustrate its benefits to your stakeholders— at once, implement one, roll it out, test it, and consistently up-to-date data, less effort in improve it continuously. content management, quicker time to market, • Choose your integration technology wisely. etc. Train your users to use the tools that you developed, and check with them to see if Modern CM systems offer a lot of different possibilities for data exchange and integrating the tools are missing functionality. Improve the tools in a second run, and then present with other systems. The most common inte- your changes to the people who are respon- gration methods are Web Services. Web sible for other websites. Services allow data exchange in a hetero- geneous system landscape and reuse of services within an infrastructure. Web Services open standards also save you a lot Step 5: Set Up Reporting and of money. You can also choose other techno- Controlling logies for integrating systems as long as they Proper reporting and controlling procedures fit your IT strategy; the important point is help you organize and promote your project. that almost all systems in your enterprise (CMS, ERP, etc.) must support the technology Consider an online product configuration that you choose. feature. The feature can also be used to track • Develop an update strategy. After you have which settings are the most important for your chosen an integration technology, determine customers. The product management team thinks that this is interesting information, which how often data has to be updated. For example, you may import technical attributes leads to the use of your reports for further product development. As you see, reporting of products from your ERP system to your CMS. You need to figure out how often those can and should be an important feature in your project, as it gives you direct feedback from technical attributes change in your ERP your customers. For example, by analyzing system, and how fast those changes have to be reflected online. It is also important to set product statistics you can recognize valuable trends in markets. up an organizational workflow for updates. - In some cases, it may be sufficient that an administrator can update the data on request. Because our PIM is directly linked to our websites, we used standard web analytics soft In other cases, users need direct control of ware for tracking the access rate of the online updates to ensure a fast update of their web product catalog. sites. (DAM) system for storing product images and instruction manuals, eases the content management process by reducing your editors’ efforts.


For quality assurance, you should also implement some further KPIs which may be tracked directly in the database. We check the following figures: • Duplicated content - Check whether some products occur twice or more in your databases. • Accuracy - Check whether the technical details of your product are realistic. • Update frequency - Check how often the data is updated. • Login activity - Check how often your organization’s users are online. If that figure changes dramatically, it could indicate that one of your users switched to a new job role and did not inform you. Take such signs as indications for new training. You also need to set up different reporting levels. Your management is interested in different figures than a content editor; give every user group the figures they need plus some extra figures—that motivates your users.

Step 6: Continue the Improvement Process In the preceding step, we used web analytics to improve our business by utilizing the PIM database in a proper way. You should also consider improving the PIM project continuously—in fact, it is a process, not a finite project. This step describes how your PIM team can also profit by using web statistics. As described in the first step, you need goals for the project. Write down these overall goals again and try to figure out which KPIs you can use to track your project’s success. For example: • Evaluating Cost Savings. - Track how much time is needed to enter new products. - Implement one cost center for the whole project to see how the total costs for the

11

project evolve. • Improving Customer Service. - In Step 2 you talked with your internal and external customers. This gives you good feedback for the project. Keep up these interviews, doing them at least once a year. - Add quantitative questions to your interviews to make your improvements traceable. For example, ask users how happy they are with the PIM solution, based on a 10 point scale. • Reducing Complexity - Visualize the data model and count the redundancies you have after the first year. Monitor how the number of redundancies decreases over the years. In general, these KPIs will only work if you keep them the same over years. The evolution in the figures—the trends—are much more important than the exact numbers. After defining and measuring the KPIs for your project, you have to act on changes in the figures. If you notice an increase instead of a decrease in the number of redundancies, for example, you need to figure out why that happens. If some departments still publish independent websites with product data from independent sources, you have to ask them why they do this. These questions give you good feedback, and sometimes good ideas about how to improve your project. It is also wise to implement a guideline signed by the management which states that all new projects have to be built upon the centralized solution.

12


Summary and Conclusion Implementing one centralized and non-redundant product database for all of your websites is an almost impossible task. In most cases, you will have distributed product information on your system landscape (CMS, MAM, ERP, etc.) with the need of integrating rather than merging. Integrating different systems with your CMS and making use of existing data is beneficial when it comes to data quality and content management processes. The organizational part of PIM is also important. Define and publish the responsibilities for data management and automatize workflows where it makes sense. In the end, a well-implemented PIM solution enables better customer service through up-todate and correct data, and less editorial effort through integration and automation. This is something which is definitely worth a try!

About the TIMAF Library This ‘Information Management Best Practices’ book is a publication in the TIMAF Library. The publications in the TIMAF Library are aimed at promoting Information Management and are published on behalf of TIMAF. TIMAF, the Information Management Foundation, is an initiative of information management practitioners to provide a strong and clear foundation of information management. TIMAF encourages authors from around the world, who are experts in their particular information management sub discipline, to contribute to the development of the TIMAF publications. Are you interested in sharing your ideas and experiences online with the TIMAF Community? Visit www.timaf.org and join the discourse. Have you experienced the merits of a specific approach to information management strategies, methodologies, technologies or tools? Submit a proposal according to the requirements listed in the ‘Call for Best Practices’ at www.timaf.org. The following publications are available in the TIMAF Library:

Introduction books Information Management Framework paper edition - release: September 2011

Best Practices books Information Management Best Practices 2009 Sneak Preview online edition - www.timaf.org

Information Management Best Practices – Volume 1 paper edition - ISBN 978-94-90164-03-4

Pocket Guides Information Management Framework – A Pocket Guide paper edition - release: November 2011

Social Networks Information Management Framework Wiki www.timaf.org/wiki

We will publish new books and other instruments on a regular basis. For further enquiries about the Information Management Library, please visit www.timaf.org or send an email to [email protected].

Introduction Information? Manage! Information is the term we use to stand for all forms of preserved communication that organizations care to produce, store and distribute. If we communicate it and record it, it is information. So, for us, information is anything from sales figures in a database to a video on philosophy viewed on a mobile phone. We define information management as the organized collection, storage and use of information for the benefit of an enterprise. Our definitions are intentionally wide enough to cover content, document, asset, data, records and all other ‘information managements’ that organizations do. We believe that while each of these “sub-disciplines” has its own tools and types of information, there is much more that unites them than divides them. Our definitions are intentionally quite practical. For us, information management simply means moving pieces of recorded communication from creation to consumption to retirement. Our definitions are crafted to carve out a niche for the information manager. Information managers make sure that recorded communication can be amassed and distributed in a way that benefits their organization. Finally our definitions are crafted to be a simple guiding principle. Any person working in any information project can use this definition to remain focused on the ultimate aim of their particular kind of work.

Information Management? TIMAF! The field of information management is currently fractured and incoherent. Each sub discipline (content, document, asset, data, records management to name just a few) has its own practitioners, applications and professional communities. We believe that behind the seeming differences between these ‘managements’ there is a deeper unity that will eventually define a strong and clear foundation for all of them. We do not believe that all managements will or should merge, but rather that just as business underlies a variety of business practices including accounting and finance, there is a common foundation for the various forms of information management. The Information Management Foundation (TIMAF) tries to provide this foundation by publishing these information management best practices. In addition, TIMAF develops and maintains an information management framework that brings the commonalities between sub disciplines to light and helps to organize the best practices that we publish.

Best Start? Best Practice! Just as business is practiced within a more specific context, information management is also practiced in context. Thus, we believe that the best way to illustrate the concepts and practices of information management is within the context of one or more sub disciplines. So, this best practices book tries to show global principles of information management in the context of projects in one or more of the sub disciplines. This is the first volume of ‘Information Management Best Practices.’ In future publications we will provide an ongoing compilation of high quality best practice guidance, written for and by experts in the Information Management field from around the world. These best practices are designed to help professionals overcome their information management challenges. They bring complex models down to earth, with practical guidance on tough problems. In this volume, practitioners describe nineteen projects that you can learn from, In return, we ask that you let us learn from you! Please let us know what your experiences are with these or other projects at www.timaf.org.

Colophon Title TIMAF Information Management Best Practices – Volume 1

Editors Bob Boiko – USA - Erik M. Hartman – NL

Copy-editors Jonah Bull – USA – Jenny Collins – USA - Elishema Fishman – USA

Publisher Erik Hartman Communicatie – NL

Edition Volume 1 – 1st impression – November 2010

ISBN 978-94-90164-03-4

Design & Layout Nevel Karaali – NL

Print Wöhrmann Print Service – NL

© 2010, TIMAF All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form by print, photo print, microfilm or any other means without written permission by the publisher. Although this publication has been composed with much care, neither author, nor editor, nor publisher can accept any liability for damage caused by possible errors and/or incompleteness in this publication. TRADEMARK NOTICE TIMAF ® is a Registered Trade Marks and Registered Community Trade Marks of the Office of Government Commerce, and is Registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Please contact the editors for ideas, suggestions and improvements at [email protected].