 | | Q&A |
|
Featured ArticlesBelow are links to PDFs of selected article reprints from previous issues of the Best Practices newsletter. Baumol's Disease: Is There a Cure?
Baumol's Disease: Is There a Cure? In October of 2004, Bill Hackos wrote an article for the Best Practices newsletter, titled "The Information Developers Dilemma." He gave a presentation on the subject at the 2004 Best Practices Conference in the same month. The thesis of the article and the presentation was to demonstrate that principles brought forth in Clayton Christensen's book The Innovator's Dilemma on "disruptive innovation" apply to our own technical-writing discipline as well as with competition among high-tech companies. Bill showed how companies are beginning to use new technology, in this case the internet, to do programming, engineering, and documentation in third world countries that have either a natural English language or people educated in the English language. We refer to this innovation as offshoring. Offshoring is feared by American technical writers as a threat to their jobs. In fact, most of us know colleagues who have lost jobs that were transferred to India or elsewhere. Following the conference last year, Charles Dowdell made the discovery of a 1967 paper by William J. Baumol called "Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth: The Anatomy of Urban Crisis," in the American Economic Review, about the effects of automation on the US economy. We've been astounded by the similarity of the processes described by Baumol and Christensen. It's as if the Christensen book is an update of how the late 20th century technological revolution has added to the woes predicted by Baumol 30 years before. Structuring Your Documents for Maximum Reuse A major topic among information development managers these days is single sourcing—writing information once and using it many times. Structured documents are critical for single sourcing. So, let's explore
Data Merge and Automation with DITA This case study details the process of integrating a DITA-architected Parts and Accessories Catalog with an external pricing XML database using XSLT data merge techniques. The data merge technique improved the publishing efficiency allowing for faster catalog updates and multiple deliverables from the same data source. In general, leveraging a data merge technique, companies can benefit from delivering a single-sourcing strategy to enable audience specific publishing through multiple deliverables (print and web) leveraging a single source of truth repository. Influencing Change: Negotiating vs. Building a Vision In this article I present ideas on how to find data, how to use that data to build both a compelling argument and a vision for your team, and then how to leverage that vision for support and funding. Key to this process is learning how we need to make adjustments to our traditional way of thinking, evolving from "negotiation" to "vision." This article suggests three basic components of using an approach, a strategy, and specific tactics. As a technical publications manager for many years, I summarize these lessons learned about pain points of discovery and perseverance, and reading the true messages behind rejection. Embedded in that discovery is the realization of the absoluteness of data, of using effective rhetoric, and understanding how funding works in the corporate environment. I present five examples of where technical publications managers can find the data to go after the funding they need. Predicting Cost Savings—Backing Up Your Claim Most technical publications organizations today have either implemented a content management system and topic-based authoring or are thinking about how to make a business case for senior management support. At the heart of the business case is the prediction that spending all that time and money on new structure, processes, and tools will result in significant cost savings. In this article, I discuss how to predict cost savings and how to back up your claims so that they exert positive influence on the decisions makers. Why CCM is Not a CMS: Or Why You Shouldn't Confuse a Whale with a Fish People are beginning to realize it is a category mistake to call some kinds of systems a "CMS" (Content Management System), when what they really are referring to is a "CCM" (Component Content Management) system. Under certain circumstances, the difference is critically important. By making this category mistake and confusing a "CCM" system with a "CMS." some organizations are failing to convince their management that they need a specialized system called a CCM. Their management or IT organizations think they already have one, when in fact they do not. Organizations that succeed in adopting a CCM system have argued persuasively to management (if not to their IT organization) that a CCM system is not a CMS. Just as a source control system (which does versioning) is not a CMS and just as a Web Content Management (WCM) system is a specialized type of content management system, so a CCM system is a unique specialized system for the management of another critical enterprise function: namely the management of technical information. Adapting to Change through an Initiatives Program Effective information development teams continually adopt processes to maintain a competitive advantage in today's global marketplace. Many information development groups struggle to meet customer needs while grappling with shorter development cycles, reduced time to market, and tighter budgets. To meet these challenges, our department of 40 employees, which includes information developers, tools experts, editors, and managers, developed an initiative program that ensures continuous improvement to processes, products, and skill sets for the department and individual contributors while increasing customer satisfaction. Adding Customer Partnering to your Information-Development Portfolio Customer partnering is a technique used to design information products by creating a long-term relationship between representative customers and information developers. Through a series of guided interactions, customers and developers learn how their information products are used (or not used). They use this knowledge to design new and improved information products. Like other forms of participative design, customer partnering uses aspects of contextual inquiry and focus groups, but it provides much more detail about how the company can meet customers' needs, and it involves the customer much more deeply in the design process. Note that participative design techniques similar to customer partnering have been used in software development but rarely in the design of information products. Indexing Effectively in DITA DITA is useful for helping writers create small units of organized information that can be used in multiple contexts. Of course, the readers' problem then becomes locating the information they want in a quick, reasonable timeframe. Although DITA provides enough metadata to simplify searching or even to present information the reader needs based on a profile, there are some media that cannot make use of those facilities. To bridge that gap, you can use the tried and true index. |
|
