$GML - The Billion Dollar Secret

The latest addition to the Charles F. Goldfarb Series on Open Information Management, $GML - The Billion Dollar Secret by Chet Ensign, is now going to press. The book will be released this November in time for a signing party at SGML '96.

Most SGML books to date have been aimed at SGML users, system developers and others who are, or will be, technically involved with the Standard. $GML - The Billion Dollar Secret is intended for executives and managers, the people who have to make the strategic decision to invest in this solution vs. that. The focus of $GML is business, not technical, problems and it seeks to put the Standard into the kind of human and business setting that appeals to a broader, less-technical audience.

$GML - The Billion Dollar Secret tells readers why documents have not benefited from the huge investments made in computer systems the way other types of data have. Documents are arguably the lifeblood of an enterprise; they are the vehicle for transfering knowledge from those who have it to those who need it, the key to coordinating the activities of disparate groups within the enterprise. Yet at most companies, documents are costs instead of assets. The systems we use to produce them still stubbornly resist our attempts to:

Improve the productivity of writers
Exploit the intellectual investment in documents again and again
Enhance exchange of information between different departments or different organizations
Reduce the costs of information creation and publication
Respond quickly and cost-effectively to the expanding opportunities for print and electronic distribution

$GML - The Billion Dollar Secret aims to acquaint its readers with why these problems exist in their organizations, show them how to recognize the problems, and explain how SGML fits into the solution.

The centerpieces of the book are case studies of some visionary companies that have addressed these problems using SGML. It chronicles how these companies -- including Grolier, Sikorsky and Mobil -- identified business problems involving key document resources and reinvented their systems for producing those resources by focusing on the structure and content of the documents.Their stories are object lessons for anyone who wants to get better control over the intellectual capital that they invest in everyday.

More information on this and other books in the Goldfarb series, as well as other books available from Prentice Hall, can be found on their Web site at http://www.prenhall.com.