Pipe dreaming?

July 16, 2002 | 0 Comments

I really like the idea of cross media publishing. I work for a hospital, where we have a wealth of great content and almost none of it is up on the web.
It would be nice if we could put a system or process in place so that we could publish content easily among various media, unfortunately it’s not as simple as that. With XML, I know the technology for this is out there, the problem is getting the organization to buy off on it and getting people to own the content. Right now it seems some of our “Master Content Documents” are ownerless print pieces, the original file in the hands of some vendor outside the organization somewhere.
I read all the time about how technology will help us get our content where it needs to go. Unfortunately we don’t have the foundation in place to put that technology to good use, and I would bet that is the case for many organizations. Heck, we don’t have simple web content editors, let alone someone who can set up the business processes needed to make this stuff work. I mean it’s like herding cats sometimes just to get simple information up on our web site, forget about all the great clinical content we have available to us. That’s not even taking into account any publishing processes and conversion resources, we have two column PDFs up the yin-yang. It’s really too bad.
Ah well, we do the best we can and hope that someday the organization will catch up with the technology. I’d be willing to bet we’re not alone in this boat.

Filed under: Web General