What an Accountant can teach a Technical Author about single sourcing

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.