Did DITA Cross the Chasm?

Did DITA Cross the Chasm?

DITA in the light of the technology adoption life cycle: Just hype or ready for you?

by G. H. Krause, Senior Manager TechDoc

Copyright © Qimonda AG 2006. All rights reserved.

Qimonda_ghk_rev111.pot Krause, QAG PD PDE 2006-07-03 Page 2

We Are A Top 3 Global DRAM Manufacturer*

• NYSE listed since August 9, 2006 • 13,000 employees globally • R&D operations in 8 locations on

three continents • Manufacturing facilities in

Europe, North America and Asia

• Broad and growing range of DRAM products for infrastructure, graphics, mobile and consumer applications

• Standard DRAMs for use in PCs and workstations

Our Global Footprint: FY 06 Revenues EUR 3.8bn

20%7%

31%

42%

Europe

North America

Asia / Pacific

Japan

Our Company

Our Products Strong Customer Base

*Calendar year 2006, by revenues. Source: Gartner, February 2007



Qimonda TechDoc in Numbers

One central department with about ten people ● information developers, authors, programmers, contractors and students Responsible for ● More than 300 documents ● two variants of almost each, ● based on 500+ text insets ● and 1000+ illustrations



Current Work Mode

TechDoc uses structured Framemaker® 7.1 since 2004 ● Developed its own DTD (as part of Infineon Technologies AG) ● Currently with more than 350 elements

We achieved full XML round-trip and integrated XSLT processing ● Use of XML and SQL databases, ● Automatic build of tables from data and figures from tables, ● Filters text and even table columns based on Boolean expressions.

DTD updates have always been a major issue ● No simple roll back after evaluation period of new release ● Many XSLTs need update



Business Demand

Currently the deliverables are ● English only – for engineers to build systems and applications ● PDF only – for download, no hardcopies distributed

Key performance indicators ● Accurate documents in time for each new product ● Updating old documents within short cycle time

Qimonda is speeding up product development and increasing product portfolio to serve its customers better and to reach out for new customers.



Current tools and process would require significant increase in headcount to barely match the upcoming demand.

● Review on document level is inefficient due to high reuse rate

● High amount of administration work



Use up-to-date tools that support ● Topic-based editing & review

● Automatic build of deliverables



The Mission

Go and buy a DITA-based single-sourcing CMS and re-engineer the process.

Main Arguments ● DITA is topic based. ● DITA supports multiple reuse strategies. ● Out-of-the-box support of DITA advertised by many IT vendors ● A CMS reduces manual work and provides administrational support. ● The internet is full of white papers, case studies and reports that support this

strategy.



Survey

The subtitle of this presentation ● DITA in the light of the technology adoption life cycle

My questions to the audience 1. Have you already heard about the Technology Adoption Life Cycle? 2. Are you familiar with Technology Adoption Life Cycle? 3. Do you have marketing background?



Technology Adoption Life Cycle (1)

Where did I get to know? ● Reading about best practice in the recently

published book (2007) “Information Development” by JoAnn T. Hackos

● As technical author you support marketing to sell a technology (product/service) to different customer groups.

● The technology adoption life cycle – is a marketing model – significant when products require change of

behavior (discontinuous innovations) – clusters customer groups (market segments)



Technology Adoption Life Cycle (2)

Why does this apply to DITA? ● I rate DITA as a discontinuous innovation. ● Moving to a DITA-based system makes you

the customer in a high tech market. ● So I read the book covering this model in more detail:

“Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey A. Moore

And this theory serves beyond buying new tools ● Do you remember any IT project that failed due to

lacking acceptance of the target users? – I do! ● You will need great marketing skills to sell your

new DITA and CMS stuff to your colleagues! ● Colleagues have to invest time and trade their old tool, skill and processes.



Ideal Technology Adoption Life Cycle

t

Number of potential

customers



Innovators

● These are fellows that you refer to as techies, tech junkies. ● They are risk takers and are willing to try out new technologies that

come to their radar screen and look appealing. ● They have special radar screens as they go to industry-wide meetings

and congresses that foster new technologies.



Early Adopters

● These visionaries are the rare breed of people who have the insight to match an emerging technology into a strategic opportunity.

● They have a dream and take significant business risks to achieve breakthrough improvements.

● Visionaries bear with bugs and bad documentation as long as there is the commitment to their project and good support.

● They are easy to sell as they are in a hurry to leapfrog competition.



Early Majority

● The pragmatists, a rather huge group! ● Their target: solve daily problems with incremental improvements that

are proven to work. ● Pragmatists want case studies and references - but they trust only

other pragmatists. The work of early adaptors/visionaries is suspicious to them.

● They want to calculate the ROI and TCO (return on invest and total cost of ownership).

● Their strength is to wait and see, which technology evolves as mainstream as mainstream gets most support from other resources which is great for ROI.



Late Majority

● They will adopt new technology after some time watching the pragmatists.

● No need to be ahead of the crowd. ● Such followers are known as conservative. ● They want one thing for one job, a scanner to scan and a copier to

copy. ● If you survive without the new stuff why should you bother.



Laggards

● There are fellows that always find one more reason not to change unless forced.

● This critical group is a great source of feedback if you know how to address them.

● They are called the skeptics.



Revised Technology Adoption Life Cycle




Techies Visionaries Pragmatists Conservatives Skeptics





The Chasm !!!



Time to brainstorm!

Please rate ● yourself, ● your team, ● and your management. And then rate ● your IT department ● and the consultancy company. Finally rate ● DITA and the vendors ...


The Chasm !!!



Where is DITA and the tools?

Out of the Box ● How much configuration is possible, how much customization is needed?

Support ● Do you have a choice between in-house-IT and consultants? ● Which amount of budget and/or skills is available? ● Do your consultants help you to stay as close to standards? ● Are they proud of implementing any thought you mention?

BYO ● Bring your own tutorial and task description? Documentation?



DITA the marketing buzz word

The vendors say "We do support DITA“. The case studies say "We make use of DITA“. And I say "I am about to use DITA". My personal conclusion (From webinars, conferences, meetings, demos and white papers, workshops,

discussions and evaluation) ● DITA can be used in a very flexible manner ● No one uses all features and maybe there is no second (yet) that uses them

the same as I want.



Algebra of sets for DITA (by G. Krause)

information typing on topic level information typing

within topics

topic structure inline elements




structure specialization and generalization


within topics

indexing

metadata

domain specialization in general

map elements


cross references

provides some sample domains






within topics

indexing multiple reuse

strategies metadata attribute specialization


map elements


cross references

provides some sample domains




filename rules



within topics


strategies

hardware domain

condition attributes

with Boolean

equations

metadata

attribute- based filtering

attribute specialization


map elements


cross references

provides some sample domains procedure topic

Config file based rendering

variable definition files




filename rules



within topics


strategies

hardware domain


with Boolean

equations

metadata




map elements


cross references







filename rules



within topics


strategies

hardware domain


with Boolean

equations

metadata




map elements


cross references







filename rules



within topics


strategies

hardware domain


with Boolean

equations

metadata




map elements


cross references







filename rules



within topics


strategies

hardware domain


with Boolean

equations

metadata




map elements


cross references







filename rules



within topics


strategies

hardware domain


with Boolean

equations

metadata




map elements


cross references






Examples for DITA “support”

Solution 1 ● Implemented maps as file folders with shortcut links to topics. ● No dedicated map editor. ● No relationship table, no view of map content.

Solution 2 ● Limited support of inline tags like superscript and subscript (XHTML editor). Solution 3 ● No experience with conref to report, yet. ● No large scale usage, yet.



Obstacles (1)

IT department does not like every database or technology or vendor! ● ActiveX and/or Java allowed? ● Standard relational database versus proprietary XML database? ● Some tools are not yet certified for Windows Server 2003 ...

Your important users might be non-mainstream using UNIX / Linux / Mac ● One editor tool is available for UNIX but the ready-to-use CMS integration

requires Windows Internet Explorer.



Obstacles (2)

Qimonda TechDoc is request driven ● TechDoc has no clue when a topic needs to be updated.

– SME -subject matter expert- may submit requests with technical details and deadline – SME must review content block for technical correctness

● Our SMEs may create and edit source files on their own – But they lack interest in documentation details and reuse strategies – They do not care much for the writer’s guide – They (ab)use structure to achieve their favored look-and-feel – Quality check of DITA files necessary by TechDoc department.

Review on topic level mandatory for Qimonda



Obstacles (3)

Review options ● PDF-based review

– The only online option in some solutions – No closed loop back to authoring tool – Requires search-and-find as well as copy-and-paste by TechDoc department.

● XML-based review

– Solution stays within paradigm of XML – Server-based review allows collaborative review by multiple reviewers – Build-in in the “wrong” CMS – Stand-alone XML review tool comes without ready-to-use integration into CMS and

workflow



Issues that seem to be neglected

Filename convention Link management Publication control



In file-based CMS you need a filename

Such a filename should not be the topic title ● In our data sheets we have plenty of chapters titled "Overview" that are not

based on the same topic. ● If title serves as filename you are locked

– Updating the title destroys the consistency with filename – or you update the filename, too, and all the references are misleading to the old

revision or dead or need to be updated by a daemon.

If title is just a metadata like topic type ● Then you can use the topic ID as filename.

– A GUID is 32 or 36 characters long – Very long in a decent list of topics with multiple metadata columns.

● I prefer something with 18 digits or less like part numbers in SAP® systems. – A counter or unification engine is needed inside the CMS.



Linking is very important for relationships

The DITA standard supports URIs as link target ● In map: topicref. ● In topic: conref, link, xref , source, lq; image; author, publisher. ● In programming domain: fragref. Update support ● You either install active link management, ● Update links when target gets changed (where used list!), ● Or calculate links at editing or publication time

Suggestion: Replace links by metadata describing the target.



Variables as special links

Variables can be realized with conref ● During editing a generic topic with variable definitions is preferred ● During rendering this topic should be replaced by the specific one with

values for the intended output file.



Publishing by config file instead of dialogs

Applications do provide dialogs for rendition. ● How often do you render a day? ● How many different rendition settings do you use?

Standardization and reuse call for config files. ● Some renditions use the same publication format. ● Some renditions use the same filter settings. ● Some renditions use the same topic with variable values. ● Some renditions use the same map.



Publishing by config file instead of dialogs

Output file is the rendition of the config file ● Any output file is only one rendition of many for each map ● The metadata of the output can be derived from config file. ● Check if rendition is up to date can be derived from data in config file.

– Trigger auto-rendering?!



Conclusion

There is a DITA standard

But there is no standard DITA implementation

... and DITA does not even cover every aspect.



The old tools and processes are not fit for the present and future



Evaluation of DITA-based single-sourcing CMS in the technology adoption life cycle


The Chasm !!!



For Qimonda the DITA tools are available but barely through the chasm



How much of DITA do you need?


The Chasm !!!

How do you rate yourself and your team, ...?

Thank you

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