Information strategy: some manufacturers view it (and its common output, product documentation) as a necessary evil. It is, after all, a legislative requirement in many cases. And customers get angry when there are no instructions. And you’ve got to put something out there for repair technicians, right?
Disgruntled companies will often file “information strategy” under categories like “afterthought”, “I suppose we have to”, and “this will be good enough”.
The attitude manifests in cobbled-together product information, owned by multiple areas, assembled ad hoc into user-facing documentation and stored on servers, in the cloud or even on individual team members’ desktop machines.
Is that the wrong way to go? And, if so, why?
We sat down with Tweddle Group Chief Business Development Officer Claude Vanbeveren, himself a veteran of several large-scale documentation transformations, to get his take on the high cost of poor information strategy.
DEFINING ‘INFORMATION STRATEGY’
So, what do we mean when we use the term, ‘information strategy’?
“Information strategy should really be built from your goals back,” Vanbeveren says. “What data are you storing? What product line does it relate to? What sort of technical variance do we need to accommodate? What sort of technical change will be coming through each year, each quarter, you know? Each month? How do you want to store, maintain and manage all that content, and most importantly, how do you need to distribute it?
“Then, you build a strategy to effectively support those goals,” he says. “What system should we use? What teams should we involve? What distribution channels must we serve? Although, on that last point, if you do everything right, you can add or swap out distribution channels at will. Well-structured data travels well everywhere.”
"Information strategy should really be built from your goals outward. What data are you storing? What technical variance do you need to accommodate? How will you distribute it?"
CUSTOM CONTENT
Of course, the mere act of going multi-channel both addresses and creates additional considerations. Just consider some of the various distribution channels commonly in use: mobile phone, laptop, iFrame, even the touchscreen installed directly in the product. Different content channels often address different user personas and demographics.
Many of the resulting concerns involve the question of buyer personas.
If most of your tablet and laptop users are going to be service technicians, they may need to see different options or information versus users of the desktop site. An embedded touchscreen may requires another, completely different layout with certain content omitted. Metadata enrichment enables this level of curated content distribution.
Information Strategy for Less Waste and Greater Value
All this information can dictate a host of customizations for the various distribution channels. And each customization can leave those end-users more accommodated and better supported.
By tailoring the content delivered to best meet its end use in a particular channel, companies build more brand loyalty for a minimum cost.
INFORMATION STRATEGY VS INFORMATION CHAOS
But what if a company’s information strategy begins and ends with seeing information content as a ‘necessary evil’? Why is that inherently bad?
“There are big problems with the ‘necessary evil’ afterthought approach,” Vanbeveren says. “These problems should be self-evident but, for the sake of clarity, let’s break some of them down.”
PROBLEM NO. 1: NO OWNER = NO RESPONSIBILITY
“When everyone owns a little piece of the information puzzle, you create a situation where, effectively, no one owns the information puzzle.”
In Vanbeveren’s view, this creates a raft of content management issues. “When no one’s steering the ship, so to speak, it’s difficult to determine any single point of truth. Which technical document is THE technical document?
“And when you’ve got multiple versions of a specific piece of data, who do you talk to about fixing the situation? You’ve got three different areas producing three different versions of the same thing. Who’s right? Plus, maybe there’s a new update that’s been dropped onto a shared drive somewhere, but your update just becomes more noise within an already-noisy environment.”
PROBLEM No. 2: MANUAL UPDATES ARE AN OPERATIONAL NIGHTMARE
Even when an organization does designate a particular team member to own their product information content, they open up their operation to a wide range of potential issues.
“First, and most obvious, unless a company only produces one single product with no model, market or trim level variations, their product content is bound to be vast, varied and highly conditional,” Vanbeveren says.
And what happens to this vast and conditionally varied content in the event of an engineering change?
“Even if they only occur on an annual basis, engineering changes often impact the visual aspects of your technical information along with the operational data.” This forces teams to manually update the spare parts catalog and related instructional content.
PROBLEM No. 3: RESOURCE FATIGUE
Finally, and this connects to our first point, even the sharpest human being gets tired, loses track of facts and forgets things.
“It’s unreasonable to expect any content owner to ‘know’ every nook and cranny of their company’s information operation,” Vanbeveren says. “Collating all that data, knowing where it lives, knowing which version of which document is the latest-and-greatest, it’s a lot to manage. This is how things fall through the cracks.”
And when things slip through those cracks, companies face larger issues: duplicated effort, multiple versions of the same documents and, worst of all, inaccurate product information and all the trouble it entails.
THE INVISIBLE ISSUE
Companies often fail to notice this spiral.
Content “owners” keep plugging way in their isolated silos, often without realizing another area maintains a superseding version of the same or overlapping material.
Often, this situation persists over multiple product cycles. With each cycle, the content becomes more fragmented, less accurate and more out-of-date.
As customers butt up against this out-of-date content, they experience high levels of frustration, escalating concerns to help desk associates (themselves confused by the discontinuity in their reference material) or regional managers.
And when these issues do come to light, they require massive rework and a high investment of effort on the part of the related teams.
This creates an organizational nightmare, one which would overwhelm even the most detail-oriented individuals, but which is, in fact, ideally suited to the organizational power of the digital environment.
THE SOLUTION: STRUCTURED CONTENT AND DIGITAL SYSTEMS BUILT AROUND PROVEN BEST PRACTICES FOR INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
Are any of these issues avoidable?
“Absolutely,” Vanbeveren says. “If you survey a range of companies or manufacturers, you really see that some set themselves up for success in this area, and others build for failure. And they build for failure by not really building at all. By ‘winging it’ or not really thinking about it.”
Vanbeveren continues, “Once companies say, ‘Okay, we need to manage all of this data. We need to do more than just, you know, throw a bunch of files on OneDrive and hope for the best…’ Once companies step away from that approach, things start to improve immediately.
“The further along they go, the more they start to realize there are all these methods available for automating the maintenance of their content. And the extent to which they do so successfully really hinges on which methods they adopt. It’s all about scale, of course. You want to match the content management tools to the scope of information you’re dealing with.”
"If you do everything right, distribution channels can be swapped out at will. Well-structured data can go anywhere.”
SCOPE AND SCALE
Once the decision to automate is made, companies need to consider the complexity of their current situation. “One company might have a limited range of products with a limited range of variation in each. Maybe a few features or a few components are shared between some of these products.
“A company like that might be suited for a do-it-yourself lighter CMS solution. Then, your existing authoring team is able to start handling content that way. There’s no need for some big, superpowered CMS or outside vendor assistance. You can get great results that way. You adopt an author-once/publish everywhere methodology, you’re able to manage multi-channel delivery. Those are the must-haves.”
The ‘superpowered CMS’ comes into play for companies with larger product lines, greater model variation, extensive localization needs and frequent engineering change. “For these kinds of companies, the demands are more intense, so you may want to employ something a little less WYSIWYG.
“The same CMS principles apply for a larger or smaller product line. If you have a lot of content or a high level of change, you may need a full CCMS. Either way, you want to adopt an author-once/publish everywhere mentality. Whatever is called for, you want the system itself to do all the heavy lifting.”
WHAT ABOUT LEGACY CONTENT?
Vanbeveren points to companies with large amounts of legacy content, and the value of automating the transition of that legacy content into a more ordered and organized content system.
“In cases like those,” he says. “You really want, number one, a system capable of normalizing and tagging that data on its way in. And, number two, you want specialists overseeing that automation to carefully ensure it’s all being normalized correctly.”
It’s a lot to consider. Is there a way to summarize all of that? “Anything is better than putting it on a shared drive and hoping for the best,” Vanbeveren says. “So, you know, stop doing that.
“From there, the smartest course of action is to step back for a moment. Look at the content you have. Determine the needs of that content. Then, start building a solution to address those needs. Choose one that’s properly scaled so it’s not overkill but also isn’t falling short.”
Vanbeveren continues, “If the system is too hefty for your situation, you’re adding work. If it’s not powerful enough, this also adds work,” he laughs. “But methods exist to easily quantify the demands of your content and pair it with the appropriate system.”
THE ECONOMICS OF Content Reuse
Either way, the notion of content reuse at the heart of the ‘author once’ paradigm constitutes a massive out-the-gate efficiency for organizations.
“Reuse instead of rewrite,” Vanbeveren says. “This has a very positive influence on workload. When you reuse content, you only have to document new features. Going from one edition to the next, if the technical details remain the same, the content remains the same. You truly don’t have to touch it.”
This approach also benefits content consistency. Each piece of technical explanation only appears once within a particular document and likewise remains consistent across multiple publications.
This reduces opportunities for confusion and misunderstanding.
As it reduces duplicated labor, ‘author once’ also reduces the time-to-market for any document or publication.
“I will say it also makes it easier to manage applicability for your content modules,” says Vanbeveren. “People will often generate one module related to a particular function. Or they’ll build one component for product owners, and a counterpart for technicians.” Reuse makes it easier for organizations to assess the applicability of each discrete content module, and to assign them appropriately to different kinds of documentation.
“Much better than different areas struggling to rework a piece of content because they’re not sure it exists for this or that type of user.”
The INTERNAL VALUE of Good Information Strategy
But some organizations still believe it’s cheaper to ‘wing it’.
After all, change is expensive. A good CCMS costs money. Even a light DIY system carries a price tag.
Why not just grit your teeth and stick with business-as-usual?
“That’s really the myth at the heart of information management,” says Vanbeveren. “This idea that it’s cheaper operate in a loose, sort of ‘ad hoc’ kind of way.”
In fact, he says, what the ad hoc adherents fail to calculate is the ever-multiplying cost of rework. The approach burdens content experts with tedious oversight. And it might otherwise be handled with ease by structured data and a smart system capable of handling it.
“Sometimes you can measure the costs,” he says. “Picture your team, they’re working, they’re authoring, they’re doing their thing. Suddenly, they’re confronted by two—or three, or four—versions of the same document.”
What follows is a stopped afternoon of document comparisons, product cross-referencing and fact-finding. These lost hours have a real dollar value. And, they might easily have been avoided with a CCMS maintaining one single source of truth.
The EXTERNAL VALUE of Good Information Strategy
Other costs, like releasing incorrect or out-of-date end-user content, defy bean counting. “To me, the worst-case scenario would be putting the wrong information out there online or in print. The technician is trying to fix something. The image in the repair manual is showing a completely unrelated part. Maybe the text instruction is off base.
“Even worse is a customer who winds up frustrated because they’ve got the wrong information in front of them. So, now, a feature on which you’ve spent a ton of R&D, a feature that might really add to the ownership experience, quickly becomes a source of irritation for the buyer.
“Or maybe the customer wants to do something as rudimentary as updating the clock. And, as it happens, maybe your engineers have updated the process since printing last years’ instructions. That’s a very basic user operation. If the user can’t execute something like that on their own, and quickly, it diminishes their sense of your brand.
“Costs like these are also really hard to measure. How do you measure damage to a brand?”
LOSS OF TRUST
How does the author-once/publish-everywhere management schema help eliminate these types of issues?
Vanbeveren explains, “When the engineering team notifies the authoring team of a technical change they only need to update one relevant content module. When everything is properly tagged, that content then propagates itself everywhere it’s being used.
“If that bit appears in the online manual, it’s now correct. If it appears in some printed publication, the next run will now reflect that updated content. If someone searches for it using AI, the AI will scrape the updated content and respond with an accurate answer.
This schema eliminates the need to update multiple documents and source files. “It’s one-and-done,” says Vanbeveren. “And that’s a benefit for the company’s teams as well as the end user.”
Information Resale
Strong content becomes an avenue for third party resale.
“Independent service outlets are the no-brainer here,” Vanbeveren says. “Right-to-repair obviously creates a built-in competition within the service community, but we expect that market to push $25 billion this year. A smart OEM can turn that into a revenue stream simply by curating and selling information bundles to those outlets.”
It may seem counterintuitive to support service shops outside your authorized network. The benefit here, Vanbeveren says, goes beyond plain income recovery. “Supporting the independent competition in this way is actually very smart,” he says. “Downstream impact, the customer enjoys a very quick product repair.
“Full stop, end of story. The customer says, ‘Oh, okay, I’ve purchased this vehicle or product from whatever manufacturer. Whether I take it to an authorized outlet or to my favorite shop down the road, they’re able to give it back to me very quickly and now I have no more issue.’ That’s a powerful message, and it creates a low-hassle experience of owning that particular product.”
The potential resale value of permissions-based information bundles extends to insurance companies. There, it supports claim determinations. Fleet and rental companies rely on OEM information subscriptions for onsite vehicle maintenance.
Vanbeveren cites multiple OEMs who’ve used the sale of third-party subscriptions to finance their entire service portal solutions or even turn them into income generators. “The companies who do this are able to make money off these information systems,” he says.
INFORMATION STRATEGY VS WORD DOCS IN THE CLOUD
The critical snag, he says, involves the quality of the information content. “You need good information, right? Content must be tagged and structured in a certain way so you can parcel it out appropriately when curating these bundles.”
And, it has to be accurate. “You cannot, sort of, assemble a bunch of Word docs willy-nilly and expect people to subscribe to them. That would be ridiculous.
“You need a central system acting as a traffic control mechanism, so this bundle goes here, and it contains these pieces of data, and so on. You want to control the distribution, and your subscribers expect high quality information.”
Fortunately, he says, these characteristics form the backbone of any smart information strategy.
FAQ
What does “information strategy” mean in the context of product documentation? Information strategy is defined as building documentation processes “from your goals back,” including what data is stored, how technical variance is handled, how content is maintained, and how it must be distributed. As Vanbeveren explains, “How do you want to store, maintain and manage all that content, and most importantly, how do you need to distribute it?”
Why is treating product information as a ‘necessary evil’ problematic for organizations? Seeing documentation as an afterthought leads to fragmented ownership, inconsistent versions, and unclear responsibility. Vanbeveren notes that when “everyone owns a little piece… effectively, no one owns the information puzzle,” resulting in multiple versions, confusion, and updates lost in “an already-noisy environment.”
What risks arise when organizations rely on manual updating their product information? Manual updates create operational strain because product content is “vast, varied and highly conditional,” and engineering changes can affect both visuals and operational data. Teams must manually update spare parts catalogs and instructional content, a process which is labor‑intensive and error‑prone.
How does poor information management lead to hidden organizational costs? Disorganized content often goes unnoticed for years, accumulating outdated, fragmented material. This leads to customer frustration, increased support escalations, and massive rework once issues surface. The article notes that content owners may work “completely oblivious to the fact that their content has been superseded,” causing long-term fragmentation.
What benefits are provided by an ‘author once/publish everywhere’ approach? This method reduces duplicated labor, improves consistency, and shortens time-to-market. Vanbeveren explains that when content is reused, teams “only have to document new features as they’re introduced,” and updates propagate automatically across all publications when properly tagged.
How does high‑quality, structured content create new revenue opportunities? Well‑tagged, accurate content enables OEMs to sell curated information bundles to independent service outlets, insurers and fleet companies. Vanbeveren notes that some OEMs “finance their entire service portal solutions” through third‑party subscriptions. But this can only occur when the information is high‑quality and subject to a centralized control system.
