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DITA For Everyone
It’s not just for Tech Pubs! Using DITA-based knowledge, experience, and tools to help the whole organization succeed.
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DITA FOR EVERYONE It’s not just for Tech Pubs!
1
In the corporate world, the technical
publications department is often viewed as a
cost center, necessary as a provider of content
to support a packaged product or service
offering, but having no value to the core
revenue generation functions of the enterprise.
As a result, technical publications managers
must fight hard to get the budget for any new
technologies and must be prepared to show
strong ROI arguments to justify those
investments.
Over the last decade, the implementation of the
DITA standard has greatly optimized the
creation, management, and publishing of
technical content. DITA-based tools and
processes have resulted in dramatic cost
savings and process improvements. However,
despite the large investment of time and money
2
made by technical publications organizations,
the rest of the enterprise has not benefited from
the potential advantages of moving content to a
standards-based environment.
Is this a missed opportunity? Why hasn't DITA’s
success been replicated by other corporate
organizations that produce content? Why aren’t
other departments leveraging the skills and
knowledge of the technical publications staff to
increase their own value to the enterprise? This
paper will highlight some of the potential
benefits for these "other" corporate
organizations as they interact with the technical
publications department, and provide some
insights into how they can achieve similar
productivity gains.
+
Intro duction
“Content is king.” You’ve heard it said in many corporate boardrooms.
1
With the increasing popularity of online search
engines, cloud-based software, and mobile
devices, the need to access relevant and
useful content has never been more urgent.
And yet, the people responsible for producing
the technical information that supports
products made by these companies are often
hidden deep within the Engineering or IT
organizations, struggling for respect and
relevance as they compete for budgetary
survival.
In their efforts to provide the most useful, rich,
and effective content in the shortest possible
timeframe and for the lowest possible cost,
many technical publications groups have
embraced the DITA standard. By moving away
from proprietary authoring and publishing
tools that require years to master, and by
adopting standards-based approaches to
content creation, management, and
multichannel publishing, these writing
departments have been able to dramatically
reduce cost and increase efficiency related to
the content life cycle.
Structuring corporate technical content into
reusable “components” (tasks, concepts,
topics), DITA-based environments have
resulted in dramatic cost savings and faster
time-to-market. As industry success stories
pile up, the proof is clear: DITA is a winning
proposition for managing the process of
producing technical publications.
2
And yet, despite the clear and proven benefits of
DITA, not much else has changed for those
technical publications departments from a
cultural perspective across the enterprise. The
success of a departmental DITA implementation
rarely extends beyond organizational
boundaries to be replicated in other
departments. In most cases, other organizations
do not recognize the benefits of DITA for their
own content, and they are somewhat fearful of
the costs and time required to successfully
implement a DITA solution for production use.
This paper will illustrate four
scenarios where the technical
publications departments can use
their DITA-based knowledge,
experience, and tools to support
cross-organizational success
across the enterprise, including:
• Product Engineering
• Marketing
• Customer support/field
support
• Training/Education
For each of these scenarios, we will describe the
typical current environment, the potential
benefits of DITA-based collaboration with the
technical publications staff, and illustrate with
examples based on real-life success stories with
the easyDITA™ platform for authoring,
management, and publishing of DITA content.
+
One DITA implementation at a Fortune 500 technology
company resulted in 40% reduction in product
documentation costs.
By reusing 80-90% of their content, the company reduced product development time by
4-6 weeks and localization costs by $800K per project.
+ Product Engineering Typical Current Environment
1
In a typical technical publication process, a writer will
interact with engineers and/or subject matter experts
(SMEs) in several phases of development: to gather initial
specifications in order to produce draft content and to
facilitate the content review by the engineer/SME. There are
often problems associated with each of these phases:
Content contribution
SMEs typically do not follow a structured process for
sending initial content to the writer. If the writer is lucky,
there will be formal specification documents that are
managed by version control and follow an approved format.
If the writer is not as fortunate, the contribution can range
from a myriad of Word documents, email messages, Wiki
discussions, and even handwritten notes.
Often, there is no formal tracking mechanism in place to
determine if complete, up-to-date information has been
provided to the writer. If specifications are modified, the
writer often finds out too late (if at all).
2
Content Review
Again, there is often no formal tracking process to
determine the status of SME content review. Engineers
are often busy with development project tasks, and
review of technical documentation is not always
prioritized as highly as these other responsibilities.
Therefore, review comments are typically late and often
incomplete.
The most common mechanism for SME content review is
for a writer to send MS-Word or PDF documents via email
to each stakeholder in the review process. Each reviewer
provides comments and edits to their own copy of the file
and returns the edited version to the writer. Once all
comments are received, it is up to the writer to face the
challenge of consolidating these comments into one final
document - and even acting as a referee when comments
from different reviewers are not in agreement.
+ Benefits of a DITA Environment
A technology platform based
on DITA can help address
many of the issues with content
contribution and content
review:
A DITA component-based
content management system
provides a centralized storage
area, with versioning to track
content as it is updated in the
system. Imagine if functional
specifications were authored
in DITA and stored in a
centralized repository: if a
specification was changed, an
automatic notification could
immediately be sent to the
technical writer.
A collaborative workflow
environment helps the writer
to determine who has
completed their review tasks
and who is overdue. It also
helps facilitate the
management of comments
from multiple reviewers and
encourage online
collaboration to resolve
discrepancies.
Example: The easyDITA content management system has powerful versioning and notification features. This screenshot shows a topic’s version history, indicating who to notify if this content is updated in the future.
Example: easyDITA has robust automated workflow features, including an intuitive browser-based review tool for SMEs to easily add comments and edits to content, and reporting to show status of outstanding review tasks.
Marketing Typical Current Environment
Marketing departments do not usually
have much interaction with technical
publications groups. Marketing
deliverables are vastly different from
product manuals, which tend to follow a
standardized, usually simple, format. In
contrast, marketing brochures,
newsletters, catalogs, and data sheets are
highly graphical in nature and very
layout-intensive.
Some marketing content is targeted for
web delivery (e.g., blog postings,
websites, etc.), while other deliverables
are primarily print-based. Due to these
factors, marketing organizations use a
variety of tools to produce their end
deliverables, ranging from simple web
editors like WordPress to highly
sophisticated layout tools like Adobe
InDesign.
+
What’s the issue?
Some of the issues that marketing
organizations face include:
The variety of content creation tools
make it inefficient to produce multiple
output formats. For example, a brochure
may have to be designed and produced
with a layout tool and then adapted later
for delivery to web or mobile devices.
Many companies serve a global audience
and have a need to produce multilingual
marketing collateral. Because marketing
content is usually developed in different
formats (e.g., Adobe InDesign files,
HTML, MS-Word, etc.), it can be costly
and time-consuming to translate these
deliverables into other languages with
the proper layouts.
+
Multi-channel publishing
Because DITA is based on “format-neutral” XML markup; the written content can be
created once and transformed to the required output formats in an automated way.
Tools exist to easily flow XML content into desktop publishing applications for further
layout, while delivery to online formats like HTML5 for delivery to the web and to
mobile devices can be completely automated.
Multi-channel publishing from the same source DITA content at the click of a
button from the easyDITA component content management system.
Multi-lingual output
DITA is a highly efficient format for content localization. Most professional translation
service providers have experience working with XML/DITA (and usually prefer it!)
When you receive localized DITA content back from your localization vendor, you can
use the same automated publishing processes for your target languages as you do for
your source language.
With easyDITA you can export and import content to and from your translation
partner for an end-to-end localization workflow.
Benefits of a DITA Environment A DITA-based platform provides marketing organizations with an efficient way to produce multiple outputs for web and print in multiple languages from a single source.
Customer Support
In our experience, we’ve seen a mystifying phenomenon at many large corporations: The customer support organizations use issue-tracking systems and knowledgebases to troubleshoot problems logged by customers, while technical writing departments produce manuals that are designed to help customers avoid having to call customer support in the first place. Even though it seems logical that there would be a symbiotic relationship between these two organizations, in many companies these departments are completely isolated from each other and do not share information!
Benefits of a DITA Environment
A DITA-based platform provides significant benefits to both the product support and documentation organizations:
Because the technical writing teams typically create DITA content at a topic level (e.g., task), they can provide very discrete units of information that are highly targeted and easy to query against. If the support organization could get direct access to these DITA topics, imagine how much easier and more efficient it would be to troubleshoot an issue!
Support engineers could provide valuable feedback to the technical writing team. If a support person finds mistakes or incomplete information in a task, they could add comments to the DITA topic and send it back to the original writer for editing and incorporation into the next product release. This leads to potentially significant cost savings and higher customer satisfaction, because people would not require as much customer support if the technical documentation is more accurate and understandable.
Example: easyDITA integrates with the intelligent content portal SuiteShare, which can be configured as a support troubleshooting tool using technical content authored in easyDITA. The illustration above shows an example of SuiteShare configured to help customers self-diagnose an issue.
+ Training/Education
1
Typical Current Environment In another example of the “islands of content” dilemma, a
corporate training/education department is usually under a
completely separate (often revenue-based) department
within the enterprise. Even though the educational content
being developed typically has a high percentage of overlap
with the content produced by technical publications, there is
commonly very little content reuse between technical
publications and training departments. In many cases,
learning content is developed redundantly to the technical
publications content, and is often stored in a completely
different repository or Learning Management System (LMS).
If the educational content is being developed for a global
audience and needs to be localized, this content is also sent
out for a separate translation, at a real cost to the company.
2
Benefits of a DITA Environment The primary benefits of migrating your training content
to DITA are localization and consistency:
Localization: By “chunking” your content into
reusable topics, you will only have to translate the
individual topics that have changed since the last
localization cycle. Furthermore, because the content is
marked up in format-neutral XML and can then be
automatically rendered to several output formats, you
will no longer have to pay a localization service provider
for desktop publishing (DTP) in your target languages.
These 2 factors have been shown to reduce localization
costs by an average of 70% for many technical
publications groups!
Consistency: Most popular tools in the “learning”
space (such as PowerPoint or Captivate) give the course
developer many creative liberties. As a result, the final
output from different courseware creators can look quite
different, thus diminishing your brand recognition.
+
Jorsek LLC 302 N. Goodman St. e201 Rochester, NY 14607
(877) 492-2960 easyDITA.com
7 More Habits of Highly Successful DITA Teams 1. DITA encourages the writing of concise topics that can easily be
assembled in any order. For example, a training department could use a DITA specialization to reuse technical writing topics and leverage it for educational purposes.
2. DITA conditional processing allows one set of content to automatically produce documents with different uses, like instructor and student guides.
3. Because DITA is format-neutral, the same source content can be automatically output as print-ready manuals, PowerPoint slides, or optimized for a tablet device.
4. The separation of content from presentation (style, format) frees writers to concentrate on what they do best: create valuable content...instead of spending time adjusting fonts and troubleshooting layout issues.
5. DITA/XML content is highly desirable as a language translation format. If technical publications topics are already translated, other departments will not have to spend as much money “re-translating” the content for their needs.
6. If the DITA repository is robust enough, there may be no need to invest in setting up and maintaining a separate content management systems like an LMS, easing the burden (and associated cost) related to IT support.
7. A powerful DITA repository can also manage video and multimedia content that could be shared by both the technical publications and other organizations.