White Paper – Technical Communication industry Adopting XML

A recent survey by Scriptorium Publishing found that most technical writers will be working in a structured authoring environment by 2010. Structured authoring is a publishing workflow that defines and automatically enforces consistent organization of information. Implementations are generally based on Extensible Markup Language (XML).

 

Sarah O’Keefe, President, Scriptorium Publishing says, “This survey shows that our anecdotal experiences, such as the importance of change management, match the industry situation.”

In the February 2009, 600 responses cited content reuse, document consistency, and cost/effort of developing content as the primary factors driving them into structured authoring.

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) standard was the dominant standard employed. Nearly 40 percent of existing implementations and approximately 60 percent of in-progress and planned implementations are based on DITA.

• 90 percent reported that they had improved document consistency.
• 86 percent were successful in content reuse, and
• 70 percent reduced the cost and effort of developing content.

When asked about implementation problems, 37 percent cited difficulties with project management, including “failure to plan” and “insufficient analysis.”

Change management was a significant concern. Of the 16 percent who did not plan to implement structured authoring, one third cited the inability of the staff to adjust to a new authoring environment as a factor. 56-page report is available from Scriptorium Publishing for $200.

Need help with your web writing? Click here for a Free Quote

Tagged as: Adobe FrameMaker, Audience, Chunking, CMS, Conditional text, content management, Content reference, Content references, Data Management, Dita, ibm, maps., Metadata, Modular, platform, Policies, Procedures, Strategy, Styling content, Technical Publications, Technical Writing, Topics, XML