Last night, around 3am, I woke up. I lay there in bed wondering why I’d woken up and as my mind started to churn I realised I was very very awake.

In flooded four things I’ve been thinking about for some time, all of which are related but I couldn’t quite make the connection. Last night I cracked it. Maybe.

I’m still thinking it through but here are the four items in question:

1. Single sourcing our documentation – and recent discussions with other areas of the company who could benefit from the same approach.
2. Company Information Strategy – a simple pyramid based model that allows everyone creating content to ‘map’ their audience appropriately and which should start to help with consistency of terminology and messaging.
3. Document Management – there have been some murmurings about this from a few people and it’s likely to fall into my lap.
4. Requirements gathering – we’ve recently rolled out a new process which should lead to better requirements for each project build.

All of these are tied together, and if planned properly can feed off each other. Naturally there is quite a lot involved with all of the above and I’ll be revisiting items one and two in the coming weeks.

Ohh and I’ve still to pull together a slide deck on “selling our services”, which involves all of the above and more. Once it’s ready, I’ll share it here.

Exciting times ahead.

I’m guessing that you don’t want to miss that landing pad because if you do you’ll end up ditched in the ocean, floating around aimlessly and with no real idea of what to do next. Can you imagine how horrifying it would be if that happened? Floating there, unable to get back to land and with who knows what swimming around underneath you…

Yet this is the predicament that many users of online help find themselves in, having strayed into the online help they have been cast into an ocean of information with no real idea of how to get back to shore. Ohhh sure, we tell ourselves that the there is an easy way to get to the information they want through our carefully crafted Table of Contents, or perhaps a more direct route can be navigated using that Index you toiled over for hours, or better yet if they use the Search functionality they’ll find what they want. Right?

And, ultimately, yes these mechanisms work. If you know how an Index is structured you can quite quickly navigate to a keyword that probably matches the information you are searching for and should, hopefully, take you almost directly to the very help topic you need. Same goes for the Table of Contents although they are a little more prescriptive and you need to know what you are looking for to be able to find it, and of course the Search will provide you with several help topics that are, probably, what you are looking for.

Meanwhile the sharks have gathered and are nibbling at your feet!

At the UA conference last year, Matthew Ellison gave a presentation on what he termed “Keystone Topics” and in the Summer edition of the ISTC Communicator magazine (again, chock full of good stuff, it’s worth the price of membership alone if you ask me) Paul Filby covers something similar, outlining how to provide “The perfect help-system landing page”.

And so, with all of that in mind that is my task today (yes, a Saturday).

The concept is simple enough. You create a single topic that will be displayed to the user when they bash our old friend the F1 button. That topic is unique to the help system and, based on context, can be used to display a smarter set of links to potentially useful information. If you have the means you could display the most commonly viewed topics or, as I’m doing, you can point to the start of several paths covering the most commonly used areas of the product.

I don’t expect to get ours right the first time round, but hopefully the concept will work. I’m including a small addition to the foot of each such topic, asking users to contact us if they have improvements. It’s only on the landing pages but I’m hoping it might drive a nice little cycle of innovation with direct feedback from the users driving the content of the landing pages in the future.

Hopefully the landing pages will give our users some where dry to stand and survey the land a little, with clear signs to help them get to where they want to go.

When I get to the bottom
I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop and turn
and I go for a ride
Till I get to the bottom and I see you again!!!!

Ever get that feeling that you’ve been here before?

I write this blog post with haste as I’m halfway through the penultimate week of a particularly arduous project. Not only are we releasing a new version of the product, but we are completing the first major stage of our move to Author-it.

Overall the migration has been pretty painless. There are still some Word templates issues to work around and getting to grips with Variants has still to be tackled, but overall we are pretty happy with our choice. The only major gripe we have is partly our (ok, MY) own fault, and it’s here that I’ll offer the most valuable tip I can.

If you are migrating legacy content to Author-it (we were moving from Structured FrameMaker), make sure you thoroughly test and check the import settings. Time constraints had me rush this stage and we ended up paying for it, spending far too long cleaning up rogue topics than we had planned. Every cloud has a silver lining though, and it does mean that the documentation is now far more consistently written and styled than it had been. However, going through some 5000 odd topics by hand wasn’t the greatest use of our time!

Soon we will be looking to how we can leverage the output to provide better access to information, feeding into the developer community website we have already built, and improving how we deliver information alongwith our product set.

For the former we have taken some inspiration from the presentation by Rachel Potts and Brian Harris (Red Gate Software) at last years UA Conference, titled Delivering Help in a Support Portal. For our implementation the Publications team will take the lead, and it’ll be interesting to see where it takes us. Web 2.0, anyone?

We will also be looking to provide better online help by introducing Keystone Topics, as suggested by Matthew Ellison. Author-it should make these topics, which are the first topics the user lands on when they start the online help and which provide sensible links to common information (rather than just providing repurposed user manuals), very easy to build.

Two of the team will be in Cardiff for the conference this year so it’ll be interesting to see what we learn there and how we can really start to leverage Author-it in more and more powerful ways. I’m definitely keen to start innovating what we do and, in a few weeks time, we won’t have any further barriers to stop us.

One of the more popular posts on this blog is titled DITA is not the answer and, whilst things are certainly moving forward, it’s a little sad that it is still valid.

A recent comment on that post suggested that it’s not just DITA that is lacking, it’s the working realities of single source that is flawed.

Well, that and the fact that I keep referring to single source when I am actually meaning content reuse (for you can have one source for everything but not reuse the content anywhere).

You can read the full comment yourself but the relevant bits are:

I have never seen single sourcing work. Maybe a single author who knows the topics thoroughly enough to reuse, or a tightly knit group of writers synched up at the same level.
…
The only place we are going to reuse content is in web mashups using semantic markup once the content is in the cloud.

It’s an interesting view and one which touches on something that has been on my mind these past couple of weeks as we are in mid-migration towards our single source solution.

Just how do you coordinate a team of writers, working in discrete areas of the documentation, with a large number (3000+) topics?

There are a number of ways we are tackling this and only time will tell if they are successful. Firstly we spent some time discussing how best to structure the source topics. Do we group them by product area? By topic type? Or some other arbitrary method?

We decided to group at the highest level (the top level folder) by user persona, and below that we grouped topics in accordance to how they are viewed from the product, so development kit wide ‘Events’ are stored in single folder, where as topics for a specific piece of functionality in the development kit are stored in their own folder. Your system will be different, of course, but this method suits our needs.

After that we need some way of knowing both what type of information a topic contains, as well as where that topic is used. We are not authoring in a DITA specific environment but decided to model our topic types on the DITA model to future proof us as much as possible (we are using Author-it which will export to DITA XML should we need it in the future). We have different templates for each type of topic (Concept, Procedure, Reference and so on), primarily to allow us to identify a topic (by default, Author-it shows which template a topic is using).

That leaves the final piece of our puzzle. How do know where a topic is used? This is more than just a list of which deliverables the topic will appear in, it also has to hint at the context of how the topic is being used.

Does any of this mean that we are more likely to reuse content? Not necessarily but it should give us a fighting chance, and once we’ve updated the content plans for all of our deliverables we will start to really see the benefits. Those content plans were the very things that suggested we could reuse content across multiple deliverables and I’m certain that, with a bit more analysis, we’ll get further gains.

Can single source and content reuse work? Of course it can. There are plenty of good examples out there and they all share one thing in common, something that isn’t really broadcast by the vendors; content reuse from a single source takes a lot of hard work.

But it is possible.

Recently Scott Abel posted a heartfelt plea to get people all psyched up about how to better promote DITA to the rest of the world. He backs the idea of the DITA Adoption Technical Committee, stating that:

“we need excellent communicators with the gumption, know-how, and network to get the word out about the many ways DITA impacts the world and those who live in it.”

I’m a fan of DITA and as I read his post I could feel myself getting quite excited, he makes some excellent points about finding real world examples of the benefit DITA can bring but something just doesn’t quite fit. It’s taken me a while to get my head around this but, isn’t a standard supposed to be a technical implementation detail, not the main focus of life changing events? Ahhh but wait, Scott agrees:

“DITA cannot be the focus of DITA adoption and publicity efforts.”

OK, so we can’t focus on DITA itself and, as Scott rightly points out, the software vendors will soon turn discussions away from DITA and towards their own feature set, so we can’t look there for an example either. In fact it’s not until the latter half of the post that Scott really hits on what he would like us to do, and in my opinion the following sentence is the key to his entire argument:

“Let’s strip away all the noise that prevents normal humans from understanding what we technology addicts find so wonderful about DITA, XML, content reuse, content management, dynamic content, personalization, and so on. … The focus has to be on the human impact. How does DITA help make the world a better place? How does it make it possible for humans to interact with one another? How will it help everyday humans in their everyday lives? How can it help governments better serve their citizens?”

Big questions.

Whilst Scott is aiming at a top-down view of the world, there are lessons there for those of us who are trying to push these things upwards. Selling DITA as the fundamental part of a single source solution now seems a little odd, particularly when most business cases are focussed on ROI and the whys and wherefores surrounding the choice of tooling, so if you can detach the tool from the business case, and focus thinking on the benefits of DITA (rendering the tooling generic rather than specialised) you can start to really crack the story behind how adopting DITA as a content standard will benefit the customers of your company, THEN you have a much more powerful argument.

So, if anyone has any answers to those big questions, do let me know…

I mentioned this in passing last week but having had a little time to delve into the model in a little more depth I thought it was worth re-visiting.

The DITA Maturity Model as an organic model that is still being developed. Rather smartly it’s presented in Wiki format allowing anyone who is interested to comment and debate any and all of the content.

The model itself follows a familiar pattern with six levels of maturity against which you can map where you and your organisation sit. However the DITA Maturity Model starts with the presumption that you are already committed to topic-based writing, and I think that’s a gap that needs to be addressed.

For me, the model allows me to explain to my boss (and his boss) why investing in DITA as a document schema is worthwhile but it misses the gap of why we should change what we are doing at all. Once you have made the leap, the maturity model is all well and good but MAKING the leap in the first place, well that can be considerably harder.

Of course I’m not the only person who realises this, and in steps the DITA Wiki which has an entire section on building the business case for DITA.

The DITA Wiki is interesting. Not only is it chock full of useful information but ALL the major players in the single source/content reuse arena contribute to the content and discussions. Again it’s telling that it grew up alongside the growth of DITA usage.

Anyway, the DITA Maturity Model is definitely worth a look if you are considering heading down the DITA road. If nothing else it will give you a better understanding of the road ahead, some of the pitfalls you will encounter and the benefits you will gain.

One of the reasons DITA has gained so much traction in such a short space of time is that the people behind it are taking advantage of the internet to publicise and drive it forward. With that in mind it’s great to see them open the new DITA Maturity Model out to the community:

This community is designed to bring the DITA Maturity Model to life, applying the “Wisdom of the Crowds” to the evolution and refinement of this approach to DITA adoption. The premise is that none of us is as good as all of us. The DITA MMC is an evolving resource that will grow and change over time with your active participation and contributions.

Definitely a good usage of the social media tools available at the moment.

One thing that struck me, taken from the Content Wrangler coverage, is a simple reason as to why more people are considering a move towards DITA-based content:

Enterprises looking to fast track their content strategy and minimize the risks of a big-bang initiative are choosing DITA–one of the most popular information models to suit today’s content–rich, multi-channel environment.

For some reason I hadn’t quite figured that out, but if you are putting together a business case built around DITA then it’s worth investigating this in more depth. That said, this is definitely one of those “so obvious I hadn’t considered it” moments!

The maturity model also highlights one of the reasons that DITA is proving popular even if it isn’t the best standard to be using for every circumstance. Quite simply, it’s because it’s young, new and (this is the important bit) is being developed in plain view of everyone on the internet. Admittedly I’ve not gone looking for DocBook or SD1000 resources but as they are already fairly mature they seem to be struggling to keep up with the pace of development around DITA. If DITA is the cool kid on the block, DocBook is definitely the wise old sage, stooped on the corner.

Social media on the internet thrives on participation and with DITA still growing up everyone has a chance to get involved and influence things, and that helps generate buy-in, which drives more improvements, which increases community buy-in… and so on.

So, even if you aren’t interested in DITA but are interested in how social media (online communities, web 2.0, whatever you want to call it) might help you and your company, it might be worth while checking out the maturity model and see if the same … erm… model.. can be applied to what you do.