Eliminate information silos
By Michael Rosenblatt

To efficiently deliver multi-lingual support services and to ensure that information is consistently delivered to users, you have to eliminate information silos. Information silos can be represented in a number of ways. For example: They can fall along functional lines where the call center and the web-self help groups are run independently; or along geographic lines where regional support operations are independent. Both of these cases lead to the possibility of redundant authoring and localization efforts, doubling the cost of creating and maintaining content.

Regardless of the lines that divide your information, the key to resolving inefficiency and reducing cost is to eliminate these information silos. The pain in moving to a single unified knowledge base is far outweighed by the increased efficiency of sharing information across regional and functional lines. There are several steps you can take to create an efficient, centralized knowledge base.

Unify processes, distribute content creation
In both geographically and functionally split support organizations, it’s likely that the groups are responding to similar requests for new support content. Feed these requests into a central queue and distribute them amongst all of the potential authors. This way you can be sure that you’re creating the information only once.

Create templates and “chunk” your content
In many cases, you won’t want to share the information you make available to your internal support organization with your self-help environment. Instead of recreating the same information for both environments, create a modular format that allows you to dynamically share information based on user roles.

It’s more expensive to author content than to translate. Creating information once and reusing it for multiple purposes can cut content creation costs significantly. The bottom line is that by streamlining and consolidating your content repository and knowledge base, you’ll see significant savings in the creation and localization of your support content.

Michael Rosenblatt is an Enterprise Solution Director for Lionbridge Technologies. He is responsible for helping companies adapt existing processes and technology to deliver globalization solutions that meet specific goals. Lionbridge Technologies provides complete multicultural content creation, content management, and localization services for the Global 1000. You can reach Michael at Michael_rosenblatt@lionbridge.com.