May 1998 : Information Management - Who gets the benefits

XML is not just another name for SGML. XML is the vehicle to deploy structured data systems throughout an organization		Table of contents		Indexes		Combining Architectures to Lower the Lifecycle Cost of Interactive Documents with Substantive Behaviours


	Information Management - Who gets the benefits

Edward Moore

Chrystal Software
Key West
Slough Berkshire England SL1 2EE
Phone: +44 1753 559544
Fax: +44 1753 511955
Email: eddie_moore@chrystal.co.uk Web: www.chrystal.com

Biographical notice:

Eddie Moore

Eddie Moore, Sales Manager for Northern Europe, Chrystal Software has been involved in the publishing industry since 1979 as composition systems manager for book, directory and magazine printers. First involved with SGML applications as a publishing consultant in 1989 where he project managed the implemention of a GML system for British Standards Institution and supervised a CALS trial with Westland Aerospace. Since then he has been a Sales Consultant with Database Publishing Systems Ltd who provide information systems based on SGML and organise the SGML Europe Conference until taking up his present postion with Chrystal Software in May 1997.


	Introduction

The intention of this paper is to develop and debate the role of information mangement within groups that contribute directly to the primary business of the company. In doing so I establish the differing business needs and expectations of a selection of industries, followed by a review of document management techniques, what they offer, and how they contribute to management of information through the document life cycle. Finally, aligning the needs of the industries with the technologies in providing tangible and intangible business benefits.


	Business Objectives

We are all aware of the expectations for our own business sectors but having an understanding of other industries contirbutes to how we can address our own goals.

Each of the industry descriptions that follow are designed to highlight general requirements which will enable you to relate with your own company's goals. They are used to provide examples of how informartion contributes to maintaining and enhancing the company's competitive advantage in its own industry sector.


	Semiconductor Industry

Semicondutor manufacturers produce low value products which need to be sold in high volumes for the company to reap profitability.

In achieving the high volumes of product sales continual research and development of many new products is undertaken. When these products are ready for marketing there is a need to publish the product specifications to as wide a customer/prospect base as possible and as quickly as possible. The information has been published using product catalogues and more recently using internet services.

The products developed by the manufacturers are usually variants of existing products, this provides the opportunity to make use of and modify existing product data.

To maximise the sales of a new or variant product the first few weeks after product launch are the window of opportunity for the manufacturer to have an advantage over competitive products. Using printed catalogues is a time consuming process and reduces the window of opportunity.

The primary goal in maintaining competitive advantage in this industry, is to deliver product information in a timely manner using the most appropriate means to reach the largest audience.

In achieving the primary goal it is necessary to maintain current catalogue products and serve the information to the internet, hence there is a need to produce the product information for more than one media.

To summarise, maintaining a company's competitive advantage in the semiconductor industry support for the following capabilities are required:

To deliver the product information using multiple media methods
To reduce the recreation of common product informtion


	Automotive Industry

Automotive manufacturers produce global products with many variant products.

One of the key issues for the automotive industry in maintaining competitive advantage is providing an efficient after sales service that enhances customer satisfaction.

This service is supported by information supplied by the manufacturer for service information, parts information, diagnostics information and standard costing information in addition to support a global market the information needs to be delilvered in multiple languages.

The opportunity in this industry is to provide efficient access to a suite of information in the native language that enables the dealers to provide a quality, timely and cost effective service to its customers.

Developments initiated for emission control by the Society of Automotive Engineers provides a framework by which the information sets can be seen as a whole. This initiative, known as Specification J2008, provides an SGML application as a recommendation for the delivery of service information to the dealers.

The creation and delivery of the information has traditionally been carried out by different departments within an automotive manufacturer and each group have developed systems to manage their information sets. Their task to sustain competitive advantage for their company is to reconcile the information that enables a cohesive application to be delivered to their dealers. To achieve their goal there is a need to support the following capabilities :

To coordinate the development of mulit-departmental information
To make best use of previous model year information
To reduce language translation time
To deliver information in alternative media types
To improve consistency of information from model year to model year


	Telecommunications - Switching Systems

The telecommunications switching systems business is typified by large capital equipment that is technically complex. The support and operation of these systems has been traditionally carried out using technical documentation delivered in the form of paper manuals. The volume and complexity of which reflects the nature of the products they serve.

The main goal for both manufacturer and operator of telephone switching sytems is to reduce the cost of delivering the information and improve the time to access the appropriate information by the field engineer.

To reduce the cost of delivery a simple change in delivery form from paper manuals to an electronic interchange media will dramatically achieve this goal. This moves the responsibility for distibution of information from the manufacturer to the operator. The maunfacturer provides an single electronic application or the base information for the operator to distribute to the users.

The utilisation of multimedia applications to improve access to the information by the engineer means a reduction of time and an improvement in quality of the service they provide. This is further improved by providing electronic information that represents the content use and purpose of the information. The opportunity for the mnufacturer is to make use of common information across products.

To achive the benefits for this industry the following capabilities need to be achieved:

Move to an electronic interchange method to reduce cost of delivery
Reuse common information to improve consistency of the information
To deliver information in alternative media types paper and base information sets
To deliver multi-media applications for end users


	Telecommunications - Mobile Telephones

Mobile phone manufacturers have a global market, which it serves with a continuous stream of new products with short life cycles.

The mobile phone manufacturer is continually developing new models, typically these are variants of a family. The advent of digital systems means that the software supporting the features of the phone is modular and feature sets are compiled at final design time.

The problem in providing user information with the equipment is that there is a very short time between the completion of development and the launch of the product. To complete development of the user documentation within this time frame is currently impossible, this results in lost opportunities in the market.

In addition to the information development there is also a need in the global market to make available the documentation in many languages. The translation process significantly impacts the time to market for individual countries, adding a second key issue that affects maintaining competitive advantage.

To address this there is a need to approach the user features in such a way that the user guides can be compiled using modules of information which are pulled together on an as required basis, determined by the configuration of the phone.

In addition to the user guide modular approach for developing the master information set, there is a need to produce multiple language sets for the global market.

To enable a mobile phone manufacturer to meed their business goals they need support for:

Modular reuse of family product information.
Use tools to reduce language translation time.
Enable demand to determine the production of information sets.


	Aerospace

The aerospace industry needs to provide support information which maximises the use of the equipment for its customer, at the same time having a legal responsibility for tracking the information thoughout and beyond the life of the aircraft production.

The industry has two specifications which provide recommendations for managing and delivering support information, AECMA 1000D and 2000M and ATA 2100. Each of these specifications provides a data schema which describes the information architecture and the means to control the configuration for the information.

The fomal approach described by these specifications enables the use and reuse of common or boiler plate information. In addition it allows the information to be used on an as required basis to perform particular tasks and integrated with other applications such as automatic test equipment.

The approach adopted by both AECMA and ATA allows for the interchange of support information between manufacturer and operator for the development, review and use of the information in such a way as to support paper manuals and electronic IETM applications.

To support the technical and legislative requirements this industry needs:

An efficient record of historical versions of information
Consistency by the reuse of common information
Support integration between information types
Support delivery of information in alternative media types


	Management Techniques Review


	Manual systems

Origination of document management came out of the printing industry circa 1800 whereby the job bag held the galley proofs and information about the galley was scribed on the outside of the bag.

The information would include the galley identifier, a description of the content and where the galley (hot metal chase) physically resided in the company.


	File based systems

When electronic publishing/office systems emerged, the first approach to document management was by file naming conventions and directory structuring to reflect the location and content of the documents held in the system.

The corporate systems would typacally run from a centralised mainframe system which would be administered by a system specialist and it would be his responsibility to set naming and directory conventions for each category of information.

In the mid '80s the desktop revolution occurred, resulting in considerable anarchy, each operator would be responsible for her own information base. In this era the cause for controlled environments was at its most lax.

The last decade has seen a return to centralised systems with local and wide area networks installed allowing central controls to be applied. This has led to the use of Document Image Processing and Document Management systems.


	Document Image Processing systems

The recognition that product data management provided business benefits enabled the use of document image processing systems to grow during in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

These systems took information in paper form and converted it into a viewable electronic form by scanning and indexing each piece of paper. The types of information mostly managed by this type of system would be mission critical reference information including illustrations, technical drawings and supporting specification narative.

Typically the process was carried out by specialist organisations where scanning and indexing was the service provided. Issues in dealing with non-standard size paper and poor quality originals mean that consistency and quality vary considerably. The cost and effort of indexing reflects the value that the end user gets from the document image processing system.

These systems became more useful with the improvements in optical character recognition techniques which exposed more knowledge from the scanning process.

This technology now extends into the office environment with scanning and OCR technology for capturing documents entering the office in the form of paper documents.


	Document management systems

This technology provides an electronic version of the original job bag approach to document management.

Usually based on a relational database which contains and manages meta data concerning the document, its content and the location of the document in the file system. In addition to the meta data text indexing facilitates full text search capability.

These are file based systems which rely on the three components, the document management application, a separate relational database and separate file systems. In the event of failure of one of the components then the complete system is subject to failure. They are not designed to manage document objects only the binary large objects which form the document.

Some of these systems have been developed to support SGML/XML, and implementations of document management systems supporting SGML are not uncommon. Typically, they rely on directory structures to reflect the upper document architecture and predetermine the hierarchical level at which they manage SGML fragments. In the event that there is a change to the hierarchy or production processes that impose changes to the level of fragment management then considerable effort is required to adjust the system to reflect these changes.


	Document component management

Relatively new to the market, this technology addresses document content and context management. Utilising object or object relational database technology, it populates the database with the data. This approach enables more capabilities to manage objects within the database, reusing objects from one document to another, returning objects to queries and enabling the construction of virtual documents from objects residing in the database.

It is a single application reducing the risk of failure between disparate systems and provides the infrastructure for a true knowledge base system.


	Management through the information life cycle


	Create Phase

Document component management supports an efficient approach to reusing and copying information at the appropriate level to facilitate reducing the time to create new information sets. This is particularly appropriate where families of products and their variants are produced. In addition where a global market is to be met the use of existing translated material reduces the time and cost of translation. With regard to new information to be translated an uderstanding of the content, the context and lexicon facilities assists the use of machine translation techniques.