1. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Getting Results: a writing manager’s perspective on how moving to DITA adds value to a business Shawn Benham

2. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 2 Agenda  Q and A  DITA  Business case roadmap  Material you can use: –Starting point/context/general validation –Sharing and re-use –Focus –Productivity –Quality –Value  Summary  Testimonials  Resources  Discussion

3. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 3 Questions for focusing the presentation  Do you know DITA basics?  How many of you have pulled together formal business cases?  Which statement fits your organization best: –We provide content about and for our business –We provide information for customers –We provide value for our business

4. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 4 What IS DITA?  XML language designed for technical information  Open  Topic-based  Strongly typed

5. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 5 What IS a business case  It starts with a statement and rationale  It should use the language and reflect the perspective of the audience…which PROBABLY means it involves: –Facts –Logic –Numbers  And it BETTER clearly show how a change adds value to a business  NET: “those who have the gold make the rules” (many authors)…so if you want the gold, play by the rules.

6. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 6 Cost/context/general validation  Migration is not free. Which resources are spent are up to you but time, people, and possibly money will be involved.  In my exact case, migration was expected and I had support from the start. What I am sharing are the realized benefits so others can BUILD the support they need to go down this path.  Validation: –EFQ –Beta –Project tracking spreadsheets

7. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 7 A business case for DITA: sharing and re-use: 1  Statement: –Moving to DITA and creating strongly typed topics will not only increase potential opportunities for re- use and value of re-used sections, it helps identify new areas for re-use.  Evidence/Example/Points: –Breaking down information from chapters, to “chopics”, to topics taught us a few things: Specific = good for the writer and good for the consumer. Strongly-typed = even better. You don’t need to go crazy with this from an atomicity perspective to see benefit.

8. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 8 A business case for DITA: sharing and re-use: 2 For us, “aha!” moments came not only because one or more particular topics seemed re-usable, but because analysis of sections migrated to DITA sometimes indicated that we were lacking information. Our wrapper information saw substantial improvement. For more information, attend the presentation “Strategizing for reusable content: the big picture” NET: for us, re-use got better and easier.

9. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 9 A business case for DITA: focus: 1  Statement: Moving to DITA helped us focus more on the key mission, content creation, and less on an area folks find a bit too interesting (content rendering). This focus has led to both better content and increased speed of content creation  Evidence/Example/Points: –Do any of you work with or employ artists? –With DITA, there is a clear differentiation between content creation for a specific need/purpose and content rendering to support said need/purpose.

10. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 10 A business case for DITA: focus: 2 Abolishing the word “book”. Moving to review, rendering, and publishing approaches that are based on topics, not chapters or books. Changed our approach to architecture to be component- based, not book based. Made it clear that re-use was good and tweaking for specific output purposes was not. –NET: pure writing time has increased, formatting time has decreased. –SIDEBAR: See Edward Tufte article, “PowerPoint is Evil”, in Wired magazine, September 2003.

11. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 11 A business case for DITA: productivity: 1  Statement: writers will develop new material faster once the learning curve is over and resource sharing becomes more efficient  Evidence/Example: –At this point, I am seeing gains of 10% or more versus a previous baseline for SGML. Reasons include: Writers can use topic types to more effectively outline information needs Fewer tag choices force attention and focus on content.

12. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 12 A business case for DITA: productivity: 2  Evidence/Example: Re-use of strongly typed DITA topics has proven more likely and easier than SGML topics or chapters. DITA topics enable componentization. New writers can come up to speed faster because they can work with both a simpler syntactical framework while working within type-specific topic frameworks. Managers/team leads can more effectively share/move resources.

13. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 13 A business case for DITA: quality: 1  Statement: moving to a topic-based system with clear topic “types” will improve the quality of your information set  Evidence/Examples: –Writers had to evaluate, at a minimum, three categories of information for each assignment or feature to be documented –Said evaluation led to good practices and good questions like:

14. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 14 A business case for DITA: quality: 2 Did you size the information for a minimum of three semantic areas/needs? Do you have any information that covers each basic area? How much of each information type do consumers need? –Which leads to more good questions…like: Do you know your audience? Are you focused on customer information requirements?

15. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 15 A business case for DITA: value: 1  Statement: moving to DITA helps you redefine and expand the potential value of the writing team to your business  Evidence/Examples/Points: –Helping to define “what” the offering will be. –Architecture/design. –Business concept plans Scenarios Componentization plans –Responsiveness to change Business needs Customer needs

16. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 16 A business case for DITA: value: 2  Evidence/Examples/Points: –Translation –Metadata enablement. –Professional growth and satisfaction

17. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 17 Summary  Sharing and re-use  Increased focus  Improved productivity  Better quality  Increased value

18. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 18 Testimonials  For what it is worth, several folks in my department agree. Here are a few of their thoughts: –“You can directly respond to user goals via DITA tagging and metadata” (writer) –“Strong typing—it helps you to be a better writer” (writer) –It is “ easier to organize information and describe relationships ” with DITA (writer) –“Every time I come up with another novel way that our DITA documentation can be integrated or reused with other delivery mechanisms, I'm amazed at the flexibility…” (editor) –DITA maps! (infrastructure team) –Just do it! (many..)

19. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 19 DITA resources  Publications: –DITA articles on developerWorks (http://dita- ot.sourceforge.net/SourceForgeFiles/doc/DITA- dWarticles.html) –DITA Cover Page (http://xml.coverpages.org)  Standards and tools: –OASIS DITA Technical Committee (http://www.oasis- open.org/committees/dita/) –DITA Open Toolkit (http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/)  Community: –DITA Wiki (http://dita.xml.org) Should be up and flourishing by April.  Yahoo! Group: dita-users (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dita-users/)

20. Information Management © 2006 IBM Corporation Page 20 Discussion