How One Standards Development Organization Transformed Their Content Process and Stepped Into the Subscription Economy
The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) issues sustainability accounting standards that help public companies disclose material, decision-useful information to investors in SEC filings. SASB standards are designed to help investors assess corporate sustainability performance and identify sustainability risks and opportunities throughout their portfolio.
In 2016, SASB moved their entire content development and deployment infrastructure to XML and into the Heretto. The result has been significant improvements in productivity and usability and the move to a new subscription business model.
With a constantly increasing volume of documentation, the ad hoc workflows and legacy systems SASB used for authoring, reviewing, editing, and distributing this information no longer fit their needs. SASB analysts track latest industry news and provide an analyst perspective on how a particular news article is relevant in the context of SASB standards, adding 15-20 of these updates to SASB’s Research Library weekly. In addition, they author and manage sustainability standards for a wide variety of industries. Existing tools could not support the Information Architecture (IA) and taxonomies required to organize and deliver this high volume of content. The decision was made to move the content to XML and into a knowledge management platform. After a competitive review, Heretto was chosen. The move took place in two stages, focused around access and distribution, both for internal authors, editors, and analysts (The Research Library), and external users of the information (the SASB Navigator web portal).
