Avoiding DITA Roadblocks

December 30, 2005 Blog No Comments

Technical writers hoping to implement the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) can avoid costly project delays and other snafus by following the advice in Get Ready for DITA: Bypass Four Costly Roadblocks, a white paper from Innodata Isogen.

The four roadblocks include:

Inefficient processes
Organizatinal boundaries
Technology limitations
Resource utilization

The paper also addresses what the authors call “the significance of specialization”, pointing out (among other things) that the process is measurable.

“When new requirements appear, such as a new product that needs slightly different documentation,” the authors say, “managers can accurately determine the cost of satisfying those new requirements with additional specializations and then make an informed business descision.”

While DITA is a hot topic in technical communication circles these days, not everyone can or should author technical content in DITA, the authors say.

“Not all technical writers are willing or able to write in the modular context-free way DITA tends to require. Using DITA can require more sophisticated authoring and content management tools than are typically needed for doing non-modular books. Thus, for some enterprises, DITA may be overkill.”

The authors also advise organizations with legacy content that cannot be easily mapped to DITA that it may be better to “apply DITA ideas of modularity and specialization” without trying to conform to the standard. Moving some types of legacy content can require a lot of rework and expense that may not deliver return on investment.

If you’re planning a move to DITA, Innodata Isogen offfers this advice:

Adopt a content structure that provides the ability to flexibly create and managae reusable chunks of content, and
Approach the creation of content in a new way, where the content is developed as single units of information that can then be combined and recombied into different products.”

And while the authors offer up numerous positive benefits to adopting DITA, they also warn that “many companies may be underestimating the level of expertise and effort involved to implement DITA smoothly.”

Read Get Ready for DITA: Bypass Four Costly Roadblocks.