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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!

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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

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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.

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Intro duction

“Content is king.” You’ve heard it said in many corporate boardrooms.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.