Tag Archives: single sourcing

How much content can you actually re-use when you move to single sourcing?

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One of the challenges when considering moving to a single sourcing authoring environment, such as DITA, is determining the Return on Investment. This often boils down to a key question: how much content can you actually re-use?

Organisations typically attempt to answer this question in a number of ways:

  • Conducting a semi-manual information audit of the existing content to identify the number of times the same chunks of information is repeated. Unfortunately, this can be a large and lengthly exercise.
  • If the content is translated, getting reports from Translation Memory tools indicating where content might be repeated. Unfortunately, if you’re not translating your content, you won’t have this information.
  • Using benchmark industry measures. Unfortunately, these can vary enormously (from 25% to 75% content re-use), and your situation may be totally different.

In an ideal world, you’d be able use an application that could look at all your content and give you a report telling you the where content is repeated. It could do the “heavy lifting” in the information audit automatically for you. This programmatic analysis of reuse within existing content, at an affordable cost, is now starting to become possible.

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Building intelligence into business documents

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Often business documents, such as sales proposals and annual reports, are a joint effort between various people and departments. It involves collaborative writing and incorporating existing content. For printable documents, this collaboration can make it really difficult to maintain a consistent level of quality, writing style and “look and feel”.

For Technical Communicators, there’s an opportunity to provide their organisations with systems that produce key business documents in a more efficient way. They have the skills and experience to build systems that can (a) guide a writer through the process of developing a new document, and (b) enforce content and layout standards.

The advantage of a such a system is that writers who might not be familiar with writing a particular document are no longer faced with a blank sheet to begin with. It’s possible to create a system that can build the bulk of the document in a matter of minutes, leaving the writer with the task of customising the information to suit the requirements of each particular situation.

The result of this approach is that:

  • A document is pre-structured in the appropriate format
  • Mandatory information is included automatically in the document
  • Actual writing time is greatly reduced
  • The skills required to produce high quality documents are significantly lowered
  • People can contribute easily, and can be guided on how to best write their contributions
  • The organisation creates more consistent documents

To build a system like this, the organisation needs to:

  • Create a global design for the document, including contributions from other departments
  • Define the workflow and sign-off procedures
  • Develop base content and reusable content objects from various departments
  • Create boilerplate documents for various situations
  • Deploy the system to the contributors and editors

The good news is, if it has a Technical Author working for them, then the organisation already has someone with the skills and experience to carry out these tasks correctly. If you don’t, then don’t forget Cherryleaf can help.

So what is Single Sourcing and what is DITA?

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Single Sourcing reduces the need to create and maintain duplicate content, by enabling you to use existing “chunks” of content. This means you can have the same information in different publications, and you can have a library of existing content to re-use when you’re developing new documents.

The content is stored independently of the formatting, the same content can be published to different media. These can be used many times to generate paper manuals, Web pages, online Help and e-learning material.

Single Sourcing can significantly improve the way you create, develop and maintain content.

What is DITA ?

DITA is an increasingly popular open source XML-based framework for designing and delivering well-structured technical documentation efficiently and consistently in a single-sourcing environment. Cherryleaf can help you understand when, why, where and how to use DITA.

What an Accountant can teach a Technical Author about single sourcing

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Many people struggle to see the difference between cutting and pasting and true single sourcing. It’s difficult to come up with an analogy that people understand.

One way is to compare single sourcing to accountancy, and look at the impact financial software has had on book-keeping and accounting. Before the days of computers, companies would have to enter individual sales into a number of different ledgers. If a mistake was made, you’d have to go and fix the problem in all the different books of accounts that were impacted by it. It was time consuming, lengthy and costly. Financial software applications have transformed that process, as they update all the relevant day books, ledgers and accounts automatically.

Image by takeabreak (Flickr Creative Commons)

Single sourcing works in a similar to these financial applications, but cutting and pasting doesn’t. At a recent presentation for Author-it, its President, Steve Davis said cutting and pasting content from one document to another simply creates “graveyard” documents. In other words, it’s fine if you want to leave a document to grow old and die, but it will cause you problems if you ever want to update the document at some stage in the future. You’ll then need to spend time searching for the places that have used that information and then recreate the content in all those different places. You’re like the book-keeper running up and down lists trying to keep them all in harmony.

Single Sourcing manages content so that it can be updated centrally: any changes to important information (such as a legal notice, company overview or terms) will be reflected everywhere that content is used. That’s because documents are not stored as files, but as chunks of information managed by a database of same form. By storing content in this way, content can be easily reused in multiple documents, ensuring greater accuracy and consistency.

It’s also likely to be at less cost – something Accountants also know a great deal about.

The infinitely reusable document

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Alongside Education and Publishing, Design is a profession from whom Technical Communicators can learn a great deal. The BBC TV series, The Genius of Design, looked at new trends towards green, “cradle to cradle”, design, where components in objects are designed to be capable of being stripped down and reused infinitely.

I’ve never head anyone talk of an infinitely reusable document, but that is, in essence, where we are heading with DITA based content. DITA offers the promise of being able to reuse topics over and over again. Unless the content becomes irrelevant or incorrect, that is.

So can technical authors apply the concepts of “cradle to cradle” (C2C) to its profession? It might offer new and useful ways to explain the value of DITA based authoring.

Technical writing company creates single source cost reduction calculator

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We’ve added a further simple online calculator to the Cherryleaf Web site. This one is for calculating the potential savings in support costs derived from a single sourcing content management system.

See our Single Source Cost Reduction Calculator page.

We’re also developing a more comprehensive spreadsheet to help you measure the value of documentation. Contact us if you would like a copy.

Case Study: User Documentation at Red Gate Software

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Our latest interview is between Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf and Rachel Potts of Red Gate Software, concerning user assistance and documentation at Red Gate Software.

We discussed working in an Agile environment, providing a single support centre for all user information and how Web Analytics can help improve user documentation.

This is the full interview, and it lasts 30 minutes.

Part 1:

Link to Part 2

Link to Part 3

Link to Part 4

This interview will form part of Cherryleaf’s Learning Zone for technical writers. The Learning Zone has been our “skunkworks” project for 2010, which we’ve been mentioning for a while now.  All the initial content has been uploaded and reviewed, and we have additional content ready to be added. We’ve a few things to sort out before we can go live: User feedback/pre-release review (we’re looking for volunteers) and some shopping cart and folder security protection tasks.

Your future as a republisher

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Visualisation Magazine has created a diagram showing how you can use Web 2.0 tools to increase the number of readers of your content – “building an online presence”. It shows the extent to which content can be republished today, through free sites, Web feeds and embedded content. It also shows how you can monitor and receive statistical information on its progress.

So why keep your content tucked away in a Help file, when it can be republished in some many other places as well?

Link to an explanation of the diagram.

Manager’s guide to single sourcing: What’s the problem, why is there a need?

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I thought it might be useful to look at a simple question: Why is there a need for single sourcing technical documentation? For people who aren’t technical authors, it’s often unclear why technical authors talk so much about “single sourcing”. Isn’t that just cutting and pasting? What’s the problem?

In later posts we’ll look at the possible solutions, but this post will focus on the need to change things.

What’s the problem?

Many documentation departments produce detailed and well-designed documentation. Increasingly, however, one manual is often not enough.

Users are rarely all the same. They have different product knowledge, different backgrounds and they may have different reasons for using the product.

Customers don’t want to search and scanning through lots of information that’s irrelevant to their situation. They often need specific documentation rather than a standard one-size-fits-all document.

In addition, as companies expand their product offering into new markets and strive to broaden the product offering and stretch the lifecycle of existing products, so the producers of the technical information must manage, at the same time, more than one edition of their documents.

Internationalisation intensifies the burden even more, with the need to provide translated versions of documents. Indeed, it’s illegal to sell a product in the European Union if it doesn’t have documentation written in the language used in that country. That’s not to mention the  risk of out-of-date legal, safety and compliance information being sent out to customers.

This means there is often a need to produce lots of documents that are only slightly different from each other.

If these new documents are created by cutting content from one document and pasting it into another, you do not have an automatic way of keep each version of these documents up to date and consistent to each other. Someone has to remember to change “Document B” whenever “Document A” is updated – and have the time available to do it.

When many versions of the same core document exist, they have a habit of becoming more and more different from each other. Differences in wording and content start to creep in, which can lead to confusion in the minds of both your customers and your document authors.

It also means that same information can be written and translated more than once. Translation costs, even when “translation memory” software is used, can be very very expensive, so it makes sense to re-use existing content as much as possible.

In short, poor and inefficient management of content is expensive. Staff can spend hours dealing with content that’s unstructured, disorganised and unable to be reused. The company can waste money on unnecessary translation costs. As for the poor old customers – they can end up with  documents that just don’t meet their needs.