Our company, Componize Software, is delivering a Component Content Management System to industry-leading, international companies across multiple sectors. Our CCMS has been helping businesses make the transition toward structured content and DITA for more than 12 years.
Our expertise is optimizing every stage of the content lifecycle, from authoring through to publishing, for teams of ten to several hundred. We’ve built and nurtured bonds with each and every business we’ve encountered. Through these relationships, we’ve learnt what works well with structured content, but also what the challenges are. On reflection, we believe that the evolution of technical writing can be summarised by three key observations…
1: Technical writers are captivated by the endless possibilities of DITA
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML-based, end-to-end architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering readable information as discrete, typed topics. DITA is an open standard maintained by OASIS and it’s trusted by technical writers because its unmatched in a number of areas:
- Improvement of content consistency through reuse,
- Multichannel publishing through single-sourcing,
- Productivity in authoring and translation,
- Improvement of the quality of content through better information structure, etc.
DITA is designed to adapt to the needs of individual companies or industries while remaining valid against the standard (the DITA specialization mechanism). This means that you continue to benefit from the advantages of working with a standard: using DITA-compatible tools, sharing content with other organisations, etc.
Thanks to all of this – the DITA standard has revolutionised and overthrown many other structured formats.
2: SME uptake of DITA has struggled to take flight – but not for a lack of trying
It’s been 15 years since DITA first landed on the content creation scene. It’s provided a brilliant range of benefits that have boosted the productivity of documentation teams. It’s versatile: it can adapt to its surroundings, which makes it very effective in a range of business contexts.
Despite all of this – the usage of DITA has remained limited to a specific circle of digital communicators, but we know that it can do so much more than this. There’s an unnecessary barrier blocking the smooth exchange of information between authors and their knowledge source.
Sadly – plans to bring SMEs into the world of DITA have been faced by a variety of complications, or have simply been too difficult to implement. The emergence in recent years of ‘intuitive’ XML editors, supposedly directed toward SMEs, has not helped to solve the problem. We’re still yet to see any example of mass adoption of structured content within a large organisation with thousands of editors. The marketing of these simplified tools confirmed a ‘need’, without actually providing the solution. Businesses that have structured their content in an XML solution are now looking to streamline the information gathering process – and this information lies with the SMEs.
3: Agile is the new normal and it’s changing the way technical writers work
In just 10 years, most Software and IT teams have moved from Waterfall to Agile project management. Good practises spreads fast and Agile methods quickly spread to other departments such as operations and marketing. Today, as many as 85% of organisations have already, or are in the process of adopting a product-centric delivery model (Source).
To be successful, technical writers have no choice but to embrace ‘Agile’. This is a departure from the old way of thinking about the separation of teams and responsibilities. Technical writers now need to be more versatile and proactive in their collaborations – they no longer write content in their corner based on specifications, as they’re now integrated into multi-disciplinary teams. They must engage and elicit feedback in working relationships where frequent, efficient and effective interactions are essential.
Conclusions
These observations were interesting and resonated with all of us at Componize, so we decided to take action. We wanted to reinforce our theories with statistical evidence, so we launched an international market research study. We created a survey that would dive into the experiences of technical writers globally, from hundreds of different industries.
We wanted to know everything – so we made sure the questions really tapped into ‘the good, bad and the ugly’ aspects of the role. After sending thousands of messages via LinkedIn sponsorship – we received more than 170 responses, from 15 different countries and from businesses of all shapes and sizes.
We were grateful for the response we received, but even more intrigued by the information these technical writers shared. This blog marks the beginning of a series of blogs where we will reveal what we’ve learnt through our research. Be sure to tune in next week to read the first second installment, where we’ll begin to dig into the results.
In the meantime – let us know what you think about our observations through our social media channels!
