Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler himself, has asked Dave Kellogg, CEO of Mark Logic, for his top ten content technology predictions for 2009. You can read the article here.
Dave Kellogg’s first prediction is that DITA will start making inroads as a document production standard in areas outside the relatively limited technical publications community. Dave’s second prediction is that Microsoft SharePoint will continue to grow in importance and strength against other more cumbersome content management systems.
These two predictions are very interesting as far as I am concerned: I am the UK Authorised Reseller for DITA Exchange, a single source publishing and content collaboration platform for small, medium and large enterprises, which brings together the DITA open standard and Microsoft SharePoint Server. If Dave Kellogg is right I can look forward to a busy time in 2009!
Since I started being more involved with a specific DITA product, I am seeing opportunities for modular writing everywhere. This may be a case of “when the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail”, but every new prospective technical writing assignment looks to me like an opportunity for a modular approach.
A modular approach to technical writing doesn’t mean adopting a particular technology or tool, it means adopting a different way of thinking about what you write. In an August 2001 article in Technical Communication, Michael Priestley of IBM urged writers to “ditch the book as the basic structure” in order to maximise the potential benefits of content reuse using DITA.
But even without adopting DITA, thinking of content in a more granular way can have benefits. Don’t think I’m writing “three books for this client’s product”, rather think “I’m writing seventy-five topics”. Ask yourself how this material can be split up into smaller stand-alone portions (“chunks”)? Where are the concepts, and where are the procedures? What user steps are needed in more than one situation? What material needs to be repeated in every publication?
You can then decide separately how to assemble those topics into whatever publications and formats are most suitable. There are dozens of different tools to help make that job easier, and each tool has its own pros and cons.
I know that many technical writers think that a modular approach can be artificial and limiting, but I take the opposite view. It liberates technical writers from worrying about the presentation of technical information, so that they can concentrate on getting the content right – timely, accurate, concise, and relevant, and del=ivered as close as possible to the point of need.
I’ve been invited to speak at a British Computer Society event on XML and DITA in London on 15th July. Details and registration at: http://tinyurl.com/4ayvjb
Many businesses regard the need to produce user documentation for their products as an unfortunate and expensive necessity, and they are therefore ready to classify their tech docs department as a “cost centre”, rather than a “revenue centre”. When times get tough, workers in “cost centres” are the first to feel the squeeze.
As someone who as spent the last 15 years of my professional career producing user documentation I am bound to see this attitude as wrong. Good technical documentation which focuses on user tasks helps people get their work done using the products you sell. People who are happy using the products you sell are more likely to renew their support license next year, or to upgrade to your next release, or to specify your products for their next expansion. They are less likely to clog up your customer support lines with trivial questions about your products. These are definite financial benefits to your business, but they are difficult to quantify.
Luckily there is a contrasting attitude that is beginning to gain popularity. In this approach, all types of information within a business organisation are regarded as business assets, that need to addressed, managed, and exploited. A recent blog on The Content Wrangler web site, written by Jake Sorofman of JustSystems takes this idea one step further. In Thinking Outside the (Tech Docs) Box: Structured Authoring as Competitive Advantage Sorofman emphasises the advantages of adopting an information management policy based on a system of structured authoring. He places technical documents – the user guides and help systems used regularly by customers – at the centre of the corporation-customer relationship, and calls such documents “value generators” as they help build trust and confidence. Structured authoring, which allows content re-use to create multiple and flexible (and in some cases, on demand) information products from the same sources, means that writers can become more efficient. One of the most interesting systems for structured authoring is the Darwin Information Typing Architecture or DITA, which is an XML specialisation managed by OASIS.
Sorofman makes a convincing case for technical writers and their work to be recognised for their significant role not only in providing user documentation but in building the customer relationship, and of course, I think he’s quite right.
I hope to be offering more comments on DITA in this blog in the next few weeks.
