Before the information age, car manufacturers only made cars, libraries only stored books, and newspapers only printed the news. Now, however, companies from all industries are realizing that in addition to what they do, they are also publishers, and there is a learning curve.

Carmakers have to create, manage, and produce manuals, catalogues, and brochures. Libraries have to preserve collections and make their stacks available to a digital readership. Newspapers have to splice and dice their daily report millions of different ways to fit the distinct consumer tastes. In addition, these organizations have to publish in multiple languages and multiple formats: CD-ROM, PDF, Web page, hard copy, etc.

In the information age, all companies are publishers, and that's not even counting internal demands for content that every company has: memos, annual reports, newsletters, Intranet sites. However, in this rush to transform content products, many companies are actually losing ground, credibility, and money due to the innovation choices they have made.

The speed and sweep of these new choices - from plates and ink to digital rendering, from product development to knowledge development, from product selling to task support - have caused technology whiplash for corporate America. Sparkling new techniques are being implemented with less-than-sparkling outcomes, causing those promised returns on investment to look puny to the shareholders.

An all-too-common example is the poor implementation of a new vocabulary like Extensible Markup Language (XML) to reflect a historical need (like page layout and typesetting). A shoddy job can cause more complicated, unwieldy systems, and products that still lack agility. This example outlines the difference between page-based views (the old way) versus meaning-based views (the new way).

When a legal publisher "typesets" its law journals in open source codes like XML, the implementation involves rendering words by meaning. By tagging an italicized word as <italic>, the publisher shuts off that content from the advantages of XML. If the word has been italicized because it is a title, the proper tag is <title>. If done correctly, the publisher could later search the full database for titles, an impossible task if the word is simply rendered <italic>. This common mistake, along with dozens of others that occur in content manufacturing systems, is the reason why many global companies are struggling to compete in the information age.

XML does not just make things look a certain way on paper or on the Web. It's a way to build meaningful languages that companies use to specify and reflect the true meaning of the content being developed into information products. Typesetting conventions are used to imply deeper meaning; XML can be used to make that meaning explicit, accurate, and precise. The typesetting, or online rendering, comes later, with the added benefit that the content now reflects a higher knowledge quotient, enabling more targeted search. The tech-savvy consumers' needs are met alongside the companies' traditional buyers, and future reuse, retasking, and redeployment of content are built in with little or no added cost.

The first step is to understand that even if you are not in manufacturing, you depend on a supply chain, a content supply chain, and its proper function is vital to your bottom line. Otherwise, you're putting a drain on ROI from both directions, escalating costs and lagging innovation.

Having evaluated many content supply chains for publishers, manufacturers, institutions, and government agencies, I have ranked the top five traps in content supply chain management:

1.  Inefficient processes: Don't get bogged down in manually intensive tasks (like troubleshooting format problems in a word processing program) or redundancies (like composing the same content twice for a hard copy and a Web site). In addition, hundreds of hours per year can be lost recreating information that already exists (like copying and pasting content from one document to another), or converting Word files to PDFs or HTML. Languages like XML offer a simple way around this kind of time-sapping redundancy.

2.  Organizational boundaries: Don't let separate departments duplicate content production activities (like posting the same information on another page of the company Web site). In-house experts from each department of an organization will often achieve the departmental goal but never see the big picture. When the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, you aren't coordinated.

3.  System limitations: Over the years, different departments have ended up with different systems that don't talk to each other, or don't translate information from one to another. Proprietary systems architectures also make it difficult to move data from legacy systems to newer technologies. Don't let your organization be beholden to a software maker that may be out of business in twenty years. You've got to be able to control your content in perpetuity.

4.  Technology limitations: Don't use a wrench to hammer a nail. Don't extend an application beyond its capability (like using MS-Word for final composition when it usually leads to extra labor hours troubleshooting formatting errors). Many companies pay internal IT staff to write internal "patches" to transfer data from one system to another, which ends up costing more because they perform worse than integrated systems, and you have to keep applying new bandages.

5.  Inadequate use of resources: Assign your high-skill/high-cost labor only to the most important tasks, not to support activities that could easily be outsourced. For example, a production editor whose primary skill is page layout and Web site design may not need to be in-house because the skill requires no expertise in that field. Expensive resources should not spend time doing repetitive tasks.

Let me stress that these are just the top five traps. Many others exist, and companies are discovering new and terrible ways to mangle their content supply chain every day.Proper use of XML and other formats in your business systems requires that you first read the manual, so to speak. I also urge you not to delay. If you don't offer additional value like this in modern content and modern information products, customers will go across the street and get it from your competitor. In a marketplace this competitive, proper XML implementation could make the difference between leading and following.