The program is for organizations or content professionals from the following groups:

• Business professionals that are looking to develop innovations from their content, and
• Content professionals and Architects who:
  • Care about the benefits that XML can bring to their organization,
  • Would like to champion the “business case for XML”, or
  • Interested in vendor-neutral XML for their organization

This is a low risk approach using minimum resources and funding that will give you an opportunity to explore ideas about streamlining your content process. Additionally, the program can help you prepare a business case that will define your goals, help you plan, justify, and manage your move to intelligent content.

Intelligent Content will maximize the value of the content that your organization creates, and minimize the cost that your organization incurs in maintaining that content. Intelligent Content will help you to:

• Deliver personalized information to your customers
• Re-use standardized content such as safety warnings, legal notices and branding messages
• Coordinate authoring activities around a single content repository that is efficient to maintain
• Leverage whatever channels are most effective for your customers such as print, web and mobile
• Apply greater automation and standardization to information resulting in decrease in cost and increase in quality and consistency
• Position yourself to exploit the capabilities of the latest device or social media channel
• Generate new revenue from your existing content assets

Selection of the tools or technologies will depend on each individual situation and final goals. The prototype or full architecture may involve multiple products. These products can come from commercial vendors, or from the open-source community, such as:

• DITA Open Toolkit (Open Source)
• Commercial technologies including Microsoft SharePoint Portal
• Web-enabled collaboration and publishing tools
• Microsoft Word
• Intelligent Content Plug-In (http://www.ictect.com/Technology/Overview)

The prototype development will depend on the scope of the project deliverables and generally does not exceed an 8-week development period.

Your team will invest a minimum of 20 to 30 hours in the program during approximately an 8-week period. It is recommended that the organization consider allocating additional resource time with the goal of building in-house capabilities with intelligent content. The goal of the investment will be that the organization will develop new ideas for cost savings and performance improvement that will more than pay for their investment in the process.

The program offers a 90 minutes free workshop. The custom training and prototype developments are fee-based. The fee is determined upon finalization of the scope of training. The fee is reduced significantly based on funding from WiSys, UW-Parkside and Ictect. This fee covers some of the costs associated with undertaking an engagement and it represents significant savings over what would be possible outside of the program.

If additional development is desired, Ictect and UW-Parkside will discuss the needs of the organization and suggest possible alternatives.

• The World Bank, a leading international financial organization, needed to streamline their Process Flow Documents. A prototype was developed in 6 weeks using Microsoft Word, Intelligent Content Plug-In, Visio, and an XML Server.
• Read2Comprehend.com, an innovative organization asked us to develop a content innovation for Reading Quizzes for students using Microsoft Word, Intelligent Content Plug-In, and a custom Web Application.