There is a black hole in most large enterprises into which money flows like a river and vital assets disappear without a trace, never to be seen again.

You know that the black hole is there. It is called "documentation" or "in-house publishing" or "support publications" or many similar things. The money goes for tasks like designing, writing, drafting, revising, searching, converting, formatting, and printing. Then it goes again for redoing these same tasks over and over as products change slightly, new markets emerge, or new forms of information delivery become available.

The vital assets that disappear are the experience, special knowledge, and collected wisdom of your employees - the information, in a word, that makes your enterprise work and be successful. It disappears because your enterprise is spending money to produce publications, rather than managing and controlling its documentary information asset. And because you can't manage that asset:

• You can't respond quickly enough to new opportunities.
• You can't provide the service and support levels your customers demand (and deserve).
• You can't, in a word, become as efficient as you need to be to survive and prosper in a competitive information-based world.

This is the last untamed frontier of management: real information! Not the abstracted, orderly stuff that goes into database tables, but the information in documents of all kinds that flows through your enterprise.

Chet Ensign has been exploring this frontier for many years. And he has found many companies - including household names whose products you know and use - that have succeeded in taming it. These enterprises share a billion dollar secret: they use the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) to manage their documentary information. And they don't just shuffle around digitized images with long filenames and call it "document management." With SGML they get at the heart and soul of the information - its structure and its meaning. They get even greater control and flexibility than they have for their business transaction data.

Chet brings an expert eye to this work. He has been on the inside of companies that have had - and used SGML to solve - the communication problems that complicate the coordination of projects. He is also an internationally renowned speaker on SGML, and a founder and chairperson of the SGML Forum of New York. As chair of the External Communications Committee for SGML Open, the SGML industry consortium, he has helped bring the SGML "secret" to the world.

In this book he shares that billion dollar secret with you, in the form of engaging real-life case studies, written for the non-technical business executive. You'll learn how to manage those vital assets in your own enterprise, and how to use SGML to plug the black hole, as other smart companies have done.

And it literally is a "billion dollar secret," because SGML's cost-benefit ratio is phenomenal. Just the industries profiled in this book (and there are many, many others) have already saved over a billion dollars using SGML. Read on and Chet will show you how.

Charles F. Goldfarb Saratoga, CA