First in a series of interviews with sponsors of Gilbane’s 2009 study on Multilingual Product Content: Transforming Traditional Practices into Global Content Value Chains.

Recently we had an opportunity to catch up with Suzanne Mescan, Vice President of Marketing for Vasont Systems. Vasont is a leading provider of component content management systems built upon XML standards. Suzanne spoke with us about the global content value chain (GCVC) and important findings from the research.

 Gilbane: How does your company support the value chain for global product content? (i.e., what does your company do?)  
 
Mescan: We are the “manage” phase of the GCVC, providing component content management solutions that include multiple automatic and user-defined content reuse capabilities, project management, built-in workflow, integrated collaborative review, translation management, support for any DTD, and much more.
 
Gilbane: Why did you choose to sponsor the Gilbane research? 
 
Mescan: As part of the GCVC, we felt it was important for us and for those organizations looking to change and enhance their product content strategies to understand the positive trends and direction of the industry from beginning to end. Being a sponsor enabled this research to take place through The Gilbane Group, a group who has the pulse of this space in the industry.
 
Gilbane: What, in your opinion, is the most relevant/compelling/interesting result reported in the study?
 
Mescan: The most interesting result in the report was that terminology management ranked highest in the approach to standardization of content creation and that this terminology management is still a manual process based on a spreadsheet for half of the respondents. Yet “paper-based style guidelines and glossaries did little to encourage real adoption.” Being a key to global customer experience, brand management, and quality and consistency to 80% of the respondents, it is surprising that terminology management, as well as other content creation standardization practices, is still such a manual process.
 
For more about current terminology management practices, see “Achieving Quality at the Source” on page 28 of the Gilbane report. You can also read about how Vasont customer Mercury Marine is deploying content management as part of its global content value chain. Download the study for free.