A thousand times more efficient?
So to begin, if rich media information is going to be managed by a content management system, the rich media needs to be “manageable.” The most effective way to manage information within a document repository (particularly a large one) is to organize information by topic, preferably to a very granular level.
Well-organized information is easy to find, easy to manage, and easy to deliver. It’s also particularly useful to be able to go down to a very fine level of detail in terms of how content is managed, regardless of media type. If the answer you seek can be answered in two sentences, why would you want four pages of information delivered (which is how most content management systems deliver information, chunk-style).
The rise of DITA as a standard for documentation has taken hold across a number of very large companies and industries with a lot of pull in the marketplace, enabling much tighter collaboration and cooperation among vendors across a broad number of supply chains, both manufacturing and informational. (If you’d like to dive into the details of DITA please click here.)
Or better yet, if the answer you seek can be illustrated by an image (still or moving), why read 1000 words when you can get the same information from looking at a picture or diagram? Is it reasonable to assume that if someone is creating visual content that can be tagged to a specific product in terms to explaining a process or methodology, is it also reasonable to assume that the information is going to be created in small, usable elements?
For example, if you were to create a video for an automotive technician on repair procedures for a BMW, no one is going to create a four hour epic film. They will create a brief video that addresses a specific procedure; here is a two minute clip on replacing the front brake calipers, here is a three minute clip on removing a compression cuff, etc. So the video is created in discrete elements, tagged by topic using DITA, then uploaded into a content management system that is designed to manage rich media objects. The same process would be applied to Flash, if you were to create a tutorial that uses flash as the basis for explaining the concept, you would create short animations of whatever particular process requires a visual reference for its use, as opposed to creating something lengthy.
The interesting aspect of all this is that most people who work in departments that require information resources as part of their end deliverable would be able to repurpose this information to additional uses. The basic concept then becomes repurposing information across the enterprise. A number of our customers are already doing this with traditional text content and have found savings in the neighborhood of as much as 70% (this actually translates to millions of dollars in most cases, click here for an example).
It is therefore reasonable to assume that if you can save that kind of money with pure text, what kind of savings are possible if you could apply the same metrics to media formats that conveys much more information in a more efficient style (if a picture is worth a thousand words, that implies it’s a more efficient information delivery system), so presumably a more efficient delivery system would have a higher rate, of return once you begin to repurpose the content that is being delivered. If you start doing the math, the numbers get really large, really fast.