The key to maximizing your CCMS investment: why data beats opinion

Executives approved Component Content Management System (CCMS) investments based on projected ROI (faster publishing, content reuse savings, reduced support costs), but after implementation, they're flying blind. When the CFO asks, "Did we get our money's worth from that content system?" - they can only offer anecdotes. This creates two critical problems: 

• HiPPO-driven content decisions: Without data, content decisions default to whoever has the highest title or loudest voice, rather than what actually works. This leads to resource misallocation and missed opportunities. 
• The Strategic Invisibility of Content: Content operations remain a "black box" to executives - they know it's expensive and important, but they have no visibility into whether it's performing well or poorly compared to industry benchmarks. 

With data as the new cornerstone of decision-making, organizations simply must avoid the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) effect. Avinash Kaushik coined the term HiPPO in his book "Web Analytics: An Hour a Day." When teams face tough decisions without solid data to guide them, they tend to default to whoever has the biggest title and longest tenure. 

Google famously refuses to let the HiPPO decide. At Google, a junior engineer armed with data can easily overrule a senior VP relying on a gut feeling. They rigorously prove every change through experimentation, measuring everything from the shade of blue used in search results to user engagement metrics. 

The lesson is clear: You can’t improve what you can’t measure.

Let’s switch gears to the world of documentation and CCMS. Relying on gut feeling or executive assumptions about ROI is as dangerous in documentation strategy as in product strategy. A documentation manager might feel content reuse is improving because writers seem less busy. An executive might assume the new knowledge base deflects support tickets because it sounds logical. 

How many times have you heard grand claims about a new CCMS’s ROI? “It’ll save us hundreds of hours!” “It’ll reduce support calls dramatically!” “It’ll pay for itself in a year!” Vendors and enthusiastic sponsors love to toss around such promises. 

But "sounding logical" is not data. 

Without hard numbers, you're telling your CEO, "Trust me, I think this investment is worth it." Without data, you're just another person with an opinion, and the highest-paid opinion usually wins. If your VP believes the CCMS isn't pulling its weight and you have no data to prove otherwise, their opinion carries the day. 

The harsh reality is that CCMS ROI claims are meaningless if you’re not measuring anything. Without data, those claims are just hope and hype, essentially a HiPPO’s decree wrapped in buzzwords. And hope is not a strategy. 

An example here is Google’s blue-links story: Google’s team once couldn’t agree on which shade of blue to use for a link, so they tested 41 shades of blue in an experiment. In a traditional HiPPO-driven company, a creative director or VP might have simply picked their favorite color and that would be that. Google refused to “ask the chief designer to pick a blue” and instead ran dozens of A/B tests to measure which hue users clicked more. Google gained $200M by rejecting assumption in favor of measurement. 

In the same vein, your CCMS might sound like it’s delivering ROI… or it might not be at all. You won’t know – cannot know – unless you instrument your content operation with real metrics. It’s time to demand evidence for every ROI claim in your documentation strategy. 

That’s what Tridion’s User Metrics feature allows you to do.

To translate Google’s data-driven zeal into the CCMS context, focus on specific, relevant metrics that tie directly to ROI. Here are three big ones documentation teams and managers should be tracking rigorously within Tridion Docs: 

1. Content Reuse Rate: How much of your content is reused across pages, guides, or deliverables? A core promise of CCMS is write-once, reuse everywhere – saving writer time and ensuring consistency. Measure it.
   For example, if your team authored 100 new topics this quarter but reused 30 existing topics in multiple places, that’s a 30% reuse rate.
   Why it matters: A higher reuse rate means less duplicated effort. If 30% of content is reused, you’re effectively saving 30% of the writing and editing time (and translation costs) on those topics. That is real efficiency – but you need data to quantify it.
   Without tracking reuse, any “time saved” claim is just a guess. With data, you can say, “We reused X words of content this quarter, which saved roughly Y writer hours – that’s Z dollars saved or reallocated to higher-value projects.” Now you’re speaking the CFO’s language. 
2. Support Case Deflection: Are your docs actually deflecting support tickets? This is huge for ROI – good documentation can resolve issues so customers don’t call (saving support costs). Track how often users find answers in docs instead of opening a support case.
   For example, add analytics to your help center to track sessions where users search the docs but do not open a ticket, which likely means they found their answer. Also consider pairing that data with dwell time or a brief deflection survey to confirm.
   Why it matters: Support calls are expensive, often around $90 to $150 per ticket in agent labor alone. If your documentation resolves even a fraction of those issues, you’re directly cutting costs. Industry research suggests up to 60% of support tickets could be solved by good docs – but is that happening at your company?
   If you measure and find that, 20% of customers who visit documentation don’t end up opening a case, that’s a 20% deflection rate. You can then confidently tell execs, “Our content is deflecting 1 in 5 potential support calls. At ~$100 per support case, that’s roughly $N saved per month.”
   Those are the kind of numbers that turn skeptics into believers. And if the numbers aren’t good yet, well, now you have a baseline to improve – just like Google would treat an experiment result.
   Bonus: AI can turbocharge case deflection. An AI-driven documentation chatbot can instantly answer common questions by drawing from your docs – what we at RWS call “Trustable Chat”, which pulls responses from verified content only. If such an assistant helps customers self-serve even more effectively, you’ll see that deflection metric climb higher (and support costs drop further). 
3. Time to Publish (Publishing Velocity): How quickly can your team go from draft to published documentation? Another ROI promise of a CCMS is faster publishing cycles through better workflows, component reuse. Track the average time it takes to push an update, or a new article live.
   Why it matters: In fast-moving industries, documentation that lags behind product releases or bug fixes isn’t just a nuisance – it’s a business risk. If your CCMS implementation cut the publishing time from, 5 days to 2 days, that’s a significant boost in responsiveness.
   Customers get updated info faster, support incidents due to outdated docs drop, and your company can respond to feedback in near-real-time. But again, you only know this if you measure it.
   If you proudly claim, “We feel faster now,” that’s not compelling. Instead, imagine reporting, “Pre-CCMS, our doc updates took nearly a week to go live. Now we’re averaging 48 hours. We’ve more than doubled our publishing agility.” That is a concrete outcome attributable to your investment.
   And here’s another accelerator: generative AI assistance can shrink time-to-publish further. For instance, using an AI writing assistant (like Tridion’s Draft Companion) to generate or polish content can drastically cut drafting and editing time. When authors get instant suggestions and summaries right within the CCMS, they produce high-quality content faster – meaning documentation changes spend less time in draft and more time live, supporting customers. 

By focusing on metrics like these, you transform ROI from a fuzzy concept into tangible results. You shift the conversation from “I think the CCMS is helping” to “Let me show you how the CCMS is helping.” Just as Google demands, you bring data to the table instead of opinions.

Tridion Docs includes a comprehensive metrics solution, uniquely designed to empower documentation leaders with clear, indisputable data, placing insight over opinion.

Core Tridion Docs Metrics Features

Executive-Level Benefits of Tridion Docs Metrics

• Objective decision-making: Replace anecdotal evidence with dashboards presenting precise, defensible metrics. 
• Clear financial justification: Present ROI in terms CFOs appreciate, demonstrating clear cost savings and efficiency. 
• Strategic benchmarking: Compare performance across teams, products, and timeframes to encourage best practices. 
• Continuous improvement: Use actionable insights from metrics to optimize processes, rapidly addressing inefficiencies. 
• Scalable and secure analytics: Gain sophisticated analytics without compromising system performance or security.

The beauty of measuring what you manage is that it doesn’t just prove value – it shifts power and culture. When documentation teams track and transparently share metrics, two big things happen. 

First, you disarm the HiPPOs. Executives and skeptics can still have opinions (they always will), but solid data will neutralize unsupported claims. If a exec grumbles, “Nobody reads the docs anyway, why invest in them?”, your data on support deflection or user engagement can shoot that down in flames. On the flip side, if an exec champions a CCMS but the data shows poor adoption or no efficiency gains, that fantasy needs to be confronted with facts before more money is wasted.

In either case, metrics keep everyone honest. They ground debates in reality, not rank or bias. 

Second, embracing metrics empowers your team at every level. When a content strategist or tech writer can point to analytics and say, “Here’s what’s really happening with our content,” they gain a voice in strategic decisions. Data is the great equalizer. As Google’s experience shows, an entry-level employee with a graph can beat a VP with a hunch (much to every junior employee’s delight). 

By cultivating this culture in your documentation department, you encourage ideas and innovation from below. Team members know they can propose changes or new initiatives and prove their merit with a pilot metric or A/B test, rather than hoping the boss just feels it’s a good idea. Metrics shift the power from hierarchy to insight – creating a healthier dynamic where the best ideas win, not just the highest titles. 

Lastly, a metric-driven approach forces continuous improvement. Just like Google’s perpetual experiments, your documentation team should always be asking: What can we measure and improve next? Maybe your content reuse is 30%, can you push it to 50% and save even more effort? Perhaps case deflection is 20%, what would it take to reach 30% and save more money - interactive tutorials or an AI chatbot? 

With each improvement, you’ll have the data to back it up, celebrate it, and justify further investment in your tools and team. 

It becomes a virtuous cycle of data => insight => action => improvement, repeating endlessly.

• No more guessing at your CCMS ROI; you document it clearly with real metrics.
• No more bowing to the HiPPO; dashboards (and now intelligent assistants) drive your decisions.
• No more vague optimizations; analytics pinpoint exactly where to improve, and AI helps you execute those improvements faster.

• Why Google has 200m reasons to put engineers over designers
  The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/05/why-google-engineers-designers 
• The ROI of Case Deflection
  Zoomin https://www.zoominsoftware.com/the-roi-of-self-service-and-case-deflection-report 
• Harness the power of Tridion’s built-in Al features | RWS
• Tridion Docs Genius and Draft Companion | RWS
• What is Model Context Protocol (MCP)? | RWS Glossary
• Generative AI Data Services for Fine-Tuning AI Models, TrainAI | RWS