¤ Shifting the Paradigm from Deliverable-based Content Development to Solution-based

According to industry analysts, technical communication departments who perform best and are most likely to realize business goals implement a topic-based authoring and review process. For most organizations, the decision of whether to implement a topic-based information paradigm to effectively facilitate content reuse is usually made at the managerial level. The relevant questions to ask include:

• Can I save authoring time and costs?
  
  

• Can I significantly reduce localization costs?
  
  

• Can I eliminate DTP of my translations by moving to a structured format like XML?
  
  

• Can I reduce my production costs and significantly reduce turn-around time by automating conversion to various formats such as PDF and HTML-based delivery formats?
  
  

• Will I cut down my support costs by providing my service engineers and other end-users with clear, relevant, up-to-date data filtered to the product, platform, customer they are dealing with at that moment?
  
  

• At what level in my organization and across product lines can I realistically expect to share content?

Once the decision is made to go ahead with the new paradigm, the question of resources needed for the migration must be considered:

• Do I need to spend valuable resources to re-write my documentation from scratch before expecting to benefit from reuse?
  
  

• Do I need to invest in new authoring licenses and publishing engines?
  
  

• Do I need to retrain my authoring and production staff?
  
  

• How will all this affect my production schedules? Deadlines?
  
  

• At what level will my upper management support this with budget and human resources?

These are the real-life questions which we help you to answer. Some organizations answer the questions by migrating to XML. Some answer by moving to structured FrameMaker. Some embrace a solution that allows them to stay in unstructured FrameMaker or Word. All of them agree that a “gentle transition” is necessary to build consensus for the change, avoid shocking the organization, reduce the risk involved, and spread out the investment in resources and budget to an acceptable level.

The DITA XML standard is attractive because it provides both an intuitive information model as well as the technical and practical tools to get the job done. However, the real power of DITA is how it provides an architecture designed for reusing information in different contexts. The main steps to maximize reuse include:

• Authoring technical content in a way that lends towards reuse – in terms of structure and use of language.
  
  

• Employ a basic and clear classification for types of information, such as tasks, concepts, reference information.
  
  

• Enable conditional publishing by filtering on basic parameters – such as audience, product, and platform – and employing variables whose values can change based on context.

Whether you go with XML or structured FrameMaker, once the decision has been made to componentize a documentation set into topics, and maybe even smaller chunks that are reused across topics (conrefs in DITA language) a CMS can be employed to fully leverage that knowledge base and the investment expended to get there. A CMS should allow you to:

• Quickly and easily find topics based on metadata, not just free text.
  
  

• Manage topics in logical hierarchies, apart from the maps that use them. Simply speaking, a map is a collection of information topics compiled to form a deliverable.
  
  

• Easily compile new deliverables, or maps.
  
  

• Manage which topics are used in which maps.
  
  

• See how changes to topics will affect their use in different maps.
  
  

• Manage revisions of maps, including which versions of the various topics are used for different revisions of the maps. Different revisions of your maps are delivered with different releases of your product.
  
  

• Manage the links between different topics, and make sure there are no dead links when conditionally publishing maps.
  
  

• Expand the metadata fields and conditional parameters to meet your organization’s requirements.
  
  

• Filter and publish to multiple formats without having to manually edit style sheets, templates or ditaval files.
  
  

• Easily export packages of topics for translation, including only those topics or graphics that actually changed since the last document release. Integration with a localization management tool such as SDL or Idiom is also an advantage.
  
  

• Provide text-based marked-up files for translation to eliminate DTP costs on translated material, without having to resort to authoring in XML
  
  

• Allow engineers and others outside the technical communication department to comment on topics without requiring an authoring license. The review process should include safeguards against the possibility of non-authorized reviewers changing the actual topics.

Optimally, a CMS should allow you to choose which authoring and publishing tools to use.

The CMS should also allow integration with enterprise product lifecycle management (PLM/PDM) tools, DMS and CRM systems.