Ph.D thesis "The Viability of Multimedia Retrieval Systems for Marketing and Sales" by prof dr M. J. Hoogeveen  

3.8. The Marketing Documentation Archive (MDA)

3.8.1. Introduction

A Marketing Documentation Archive (MDA) is an on-line central archive for the storage and retrieval of valuable marketing documentation, that support document centred back office marketing processes. For larger organisations especially, an MDA may result in synergy effects, efficiency gains such as increased reuse of these marketing communications materials.

The marketing documentation contains only non-promotional marketing documentation, in contrast to a Marketing Communication Archive.

This envisioned MDA system is based on experiences with the Criminal Investigation System of the Dutch police, OCTOPUS, for retrieval aspects (Hoogeveen, Van der Meer & Sol, 1992b; Hoogeveen & Van der Meer, 1994), and the PTT Research PROMISE project for MR and M&S aspects.

3.8.2. Business objectives

The business objectives of an MDA may be analogous to the business objectives for an MCA:

• more efficient archive management, storage and retrieval (O1);

• improved document processing support of marketing departments using the MDA (O2);

• improved management insight into MDA costs and performance (O3).

 

In the current situation no clear MDA function exists. In fact the MDA function is distributed over the hundreds of small secretariats within the PTT Telecom marketing units. This probably means that archive management, storage and retrieval is not organised economical (O1) since specialist archivists may perform better, especially if a central MDA system is supporting them. In particular, retrieval of documents, having a department exceeding value, is more efficient when direct access by interested marketing people is possible. Manual retrieval from a physical archive is also inefficient, this is a common and time consuming activity. Information retrieval reduces retrieval times to minutes, saving the valuable time of marketing people and their secretaries. The physical reproduction and distribution of documents is also time consuming and thus expensive. Further, efficiency can be improved by electronic reproduction and distribution, but one should be aware that this will induce local printing of documents since people prefer to read from paper rather than from computer screens.

With respect to efficiency we should consider the structural system management costs of the MDA, which need to be recovered by the efficiency and other gains.

Document processing support can be improved significantly (O2) by setting up an MDA function. The MDA would guarantee short delivery times for required documents. It is also possible that electronic versions of documents are delivered, this is rarely the case in the current situation. The advantage of electronic documents are that they can be reused for new documents using cut and paste functions, and they can be very easily reproduced and distributed by e-mail to interested people on an electronic distribution list. Reuse of parts of documents is extremely common: often marketing plans are updates of older ones, many documents have similar objectives and/or have an overlapping content.

Another very important document processing support aspect of the MDA is that valuable marketing documents become available company wide, and that these documents are not lost.

Sometimes it is important to get more management grip on and insight into marketing document processing costs and performance (O3). As is the case with the MCA, this control and insight is not available if the MDA function is scattered, but it becomes available if the MDA function is centralised. Centralisation versus decentralisation is a policy issue, which should be resolved before the MDA is set up. It is important, however, to realise that IT is malleable, like wax, implying that both centralised and more distributed solutions can be supported.

Another aspect of management grip on an MDA is that the integrity and quality of documents can be checked and evaluated centrally. Company policies and changes in these policies with regard to quality and authorisation of documents can be applied easily and without delay.

Yet another aspect of management grip is the possibility to perform flexible authorisation management. If some documents require a certain level of authorisation this can be arranged by assigning privileges to users and security levels to documents; it is also possible to assign documents to certain closed user groups.

It is assumed that setting up an electronic MDA is more efficient (O1), that it helps to improve document processing support (O2) and helps to improve management insight and grip on document processing (costs) (O3). The choice of a multimedia archive may be made because of the nature of many marketing documents. These documents, as do many documents today, include graphics and pictures. It would be counterproductive to remove all graphics and pictures.

3.8.3. Information processing tasks Figure 25. MDA tasks.  

If an MDA is going to be introduced, what information processing tasks are to be supported?

An MDA supports the storage, maintenance, retrieval and distribution of internal marketing documents like marketing plans, promotion plans, plans for market pilots, and market and marketing research reports.

Further, an MDA offers access to commercial on-line marketing databases (i.e., secondary data). The marketing staff and their secretaries may retrieve and store documents on-line or via an MDA archivist. The archivist is responsible for unhampered retrieval and delivery of marketing documents, and access to secondary data. The archivist provides management with marketing reports on the use of the MDA, and updates the MDA if new (authorisation) policies need to be implemented. If the MDA system itself needs to be updated then a system manager or system developer is needed. Apart from the electronic MDA system a physical MDA is used to store special documents. Such special documents are, for example, historic documents or documents having a legal value.

Documents can be electronically distributed to anyone on a send list. This implies that the MDA may also have the function of supporting document flows through the marketing organisation.

A number of information processing tasks that can be supported by an MDA are discussed above. Some additional options are:

• MDA support of mail registration and archiving by marketing (and other) secretaries. This brings into the picture a customer relations function. Thought must be given to whether such a business relations functions should be combined with the marketing documentation function.

• An MDA might include general purpose business presentations: sheets that can be reused or have just an informative function.

• Another option is to take care of links to other systems like the MCA. It is possible to foresee a marketing document in the MDA that refers to a video or picture in the MCA and vice versa.

• Another possible option is to offer document life cycle support to marketers, i.e., that documents are routed through the organisation until they become obsolete and need to be deleted.

• Consideration should be given to offer market research organisations, that perform market research for PTT Telecom, restricted access to the MDA. These organisation can look up certain non-confidential reports, and can store and distribute their market reports via the network. It is of course clear that the security of the MDA should not be endangered by such access from external organisations.

3.8.4. System functionality

A description of the functions of the MDA system is given in this section. First, general MDA system functions (see figure 26) are discussed, then MDA database system functions (see figure 27).

The main system functions are:

• Document retrieval: the MDA interface offers archivists, marketing staff and their secretaries document retrieval functionality. The document retrieval module sends retrieval and presentation requests to the MDA database system or to the external database interface for access to external marketing databases. The MDA database system or external database interface returns result sets and presentable documents.

• Distribution: an MM mail system, connected to the document retrieval module, offers the user of the MDA system the possibility to distribute retrieved documents to people on a send list. The distribution module can also accept input documents which need to be stored in the MDA database system.

• Optical reading: the archivist is able to use an optical reading system for the input of non-electronic documents to the MDA database system. Both machine written and hand written text can form input.

• External database access: this function offers integrated access to commercial on-line databases for document retrieval. Retrieved documents can be imported in the MDA database system.

• Report generation: the archivist and marketing management can use the report generation function to abstract management information from the MDA database system, with regard to the use of the system.

• Maintenance: a maintenance function can be used by the archivist and system manager to update authorisations, to delete obsolete documents and to update indexes, etc.

 

Figure 26. MDA system functionality.

Figure 27. MDA database system functionality.  

The main database system functions are:

• Searching: the search facility offers the MDA interface search functionality. The MDA interface sends queries. The search facility returns result sets. The authorisation database is consulted to check the authorisation of the user for searching certain categories of documents.

• Presentation: the presentation facility accepts presentation requests (including references in a result set) from the MDA interface and returns information objects from the document and send list databases. The authorisation database is consulted to check if the user is authorised to retrieve the document.

• Exchange: the exchange facility is used to export document selections together with the associated send lists. Further, the exchange facility is used to import documents via the external database interface. The exchange facility can update the document and indexes databases directly or indirectly via the update facility.

• Update: the update facility offers document updating and indexing functionality in connection to the MM mail system and optical reading system. Further it offers update functionality to the MDA interface for the updating of the send list database and authorisation database. (Updating includes adding, replacing and deleting documents)  

3.8.5. Implementation aspects

An implementation scenario for the MDA is discussed here. The MRS implementation aspects for the MDA system are based on the MDA system functionality (see figure 26) and the MDBMS aspects are based on the MDA database system functionality (see figure 27).

The MDA interface consists of PC/MS-Windows based access software. The PCs make use of a LAN connection to print documents.

The editing or authoring of documents is done using the standard word processor (part of T-Workplace) of PTT Telecom, that is gradually upgraded by newer versions. Upgrades of T-Workplace can include an upgrade towards Multimedia PCs, which offer the possibility to digitise VHS or S-VHS video, and audio tapes, and afterwards edit the audio and video files. Further, these MPCs can contain CD-ROM drives for the input of digital text, audio, video, animation, etc.

If business presentations (sheets) are to be included in the MDA a business presentation tool is needed as part of the standard workplace. Audio and video cards are required in the MPC for presentation of MM documents with a high audio and video quality. No special video boards are necessary for low quality video, for example, video for windows (AVI).

The MDA interface offers easy to use document retrieval facilities like hyperlinking, graphical browsing, QBE, and a hierarchical menu-interface for all types of users. Full text searches using inverted files and set manipulation for incremental searching are possible for somewhat more advanced users.

To improve precision and recall, the MDA interface, as far as support of archivists is concerned, includes enhanced IRS facilities , such as a thesaurus, ranking and clustering, an (inexact) query language, and the set up and maintenance of search profiles as part of a service to the customers.

An MM mail system is used to distribute documents. Special tools, like Lotus Notes, can be used for document flow support. MM mail software or document flow software is integrated with the software environments of the user PCs and the MBC database server.

The exchange of MM documents will result increasingly in an overload of the business networks used. A consequence of this is that the business networks will need to be upgraded. For example, LANs will need to be upgraded towards MM LANs (e.g., 100 Mbit/s Ethernet-LAN).

An optical reading system is used by the archivist for the input of printed documents. The optical reading system consists of:

• a scanner, connected to an update PCs, to digitise a document;

• OCR and eventually ICR software on an update PC for character recognition.

• a LAN connection to update documents to the MDA database system.
 

After (semi-)automatic document import the document arrives in the MDA database system. The MDA database system consists of an MDA server on a LAN. Remote access to the MDA database system is supported by an N-ISDN gateway to PCs in other LANs.

The MDBMS facilities needed most are an update facility, exchange facility, search facility and presentation facility. The MDA database system is probably based on a full integration approach, external integration approach or extended DBMS approach using an MDBMS, which fully integrates IRS, DBMS and additional MDBMS facilities, as all the related facilities are needed together.

The search facility of the MDBMS supports full text indexing, SQL extensions, search profiles, thesaurus searches, and ranking and clustering as discussed above.

To guarantee easy exchange of documents de facto document standards like WordPerfect and MS Word are supported. MS Word and WordPerfect are the most commonly used word processors. All graphic, audio and video information that is accepted by such a de facto document standard is accepted by the MDA system as well. A presenter for such a document standard is needed in relation to the presentation facility of the selected MDBMS. The conversion between MS Word and WordPerfect documents does not present a large problem for text documents, however, conversion of documents containing graphics, pictures and other information types conversion is troublesome. Use of de jure document standards like ODA and SGML is not effective, as no marketers use an SGML editor.

With time, when the processed marketing documents have evolved into real MM documents, MM document standards will need to be supported. In this case de jure MM document standards, such as HyperODA or HyTime, might be accepted by business organisations and industry, and it is wise to use such MM document standards. If this is not the case, the next versions of MS Word/WordPerfect would be better.

Extending the DMF with support of the object oriented model makes it possible to take care of data definitions for MM documents of whatever document type. The external model, as presented to the user, will also be MM and object oriented . MM external models support the presentation of objects in time and space.

To code and decode MM objects, information coding standards like MPEG1, and its successors, will need to be supported by the MDBMS for more efficient storage and transmission of MM data.

3.8.6. Discussion

An MDA is technically feasible with current IT, but the viability of an MDA for marketing departments is highly uncertain. Not only because of hard to quantify business value added, but also because of 'business politics' when so many departments are involved in the change process. The major strengths of the MDA system are that clear business objectives, comparable to those of the MCA, are aimed for: increased archiving and retrieval efficiency, improved document processing support for marketing departments, and increased management insight. It is a drawback that the organisational costs can be quite high: the many marketing people involved and their secretaries need to change their way of working. Such costs have yet to be estimated. The assumed value added of MR for the MDA is based on more effective and efficient retrieval, and processing of realistic representations of original documents including multiple information types.

Other strengths of the MDA system are the synergy effects that occur when IRS, DBMS and hypermedia facilities are combined in one MDBMS: both information retrieval specialists and ad hoc users can make use of the same system. Moreover, a growth path towards use of MM documents is supported. Since there is already a tendency for documents to contain more and more different information types (texts, tables, graphics, pictures) it is not unreasonable to assume that, within some years, MM documents containing time based data (video, audio, animation) will be exchanged within marketing departments.

© 1995-2002 Martijn Hoogeveen