Understanding and Communicating the Financial Impact of XML &

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Understanding and Communicating the Financial Impact of XML & DITAWhite Paper

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AN XMETAL WHITE PAPER

by Bret Freeman: Director, Content Lifecycle Solutions

Understanding and Communicatingthe Financial Impact of XML & DITA

How to Forecast and Measure Continued ROI, Cost Savings and ProcessImprovement in Content Creation, Localization, and Publishing

Understanding and Communicating the Financial Impact of XML & DITAWhite Paper

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In the technology age, bottom-line impact is the holy grail: savings in costs, time and resources. Any new investment orprocess improvement starts with infectious optimism, but ROI-focused executive teams need more proof than potentialto give the green light – once the deal is signed and the work begins, how can we make sure this technology delivers theresults it should?In this paper, we’ll help you to understand and better communicate how the advances of XML and DITA can reduce thecost of content creation, localization and publishing for information-rich companies managing documentation in multiplelanguages. And further – how time and cost savings translate into revenue growth.We’ll explore how to assure your leadership team of a predictable, sensible transition, and will detail the results-basedformulas you can apply to your own organization to help make the casefor an investment in a content lifecycle solution based on DITA.

The Ripple Effect: How Global Targets Inﬂate Content Volume

Let’s look at a case in which a consumer electronics company decides to grow its business by expanding to include newregional markets in Europe. Such ambition, while good news on the strategic front, can often elicit logistical concerns forproduct, marketing, operations and documentation teams. After all, ﬁve new countries requires ﬁve times the amount ofwork in creating, translating and delivering all the information necessary to support sales, marketingand service activities.

Market Expansion Scenario: BestBet DVD Players Expands Sales to Five European Countries

Content requirements per unit:

North America only

Content requirements per unit:

North America + 5 New European CountriesOwners Manual x 10 modelsService Manual x 10 modelsQuickStart Guide x 10 models= 30 publicationsOwners Manual x 10 models x 5 languagesService Manual x 10 models x 5 languagesQuickStart Guide x 10 models x 5 languages= 180 publications

It’s safe to bet that the above scenario would send any documentation team into panic mode.In addition to authoring, validating and updating English content with accuracy, teams need tomanage a complex delivery process under already-tight schedules – and run the risk of becominga bottleneck that impedes time-to-market, a competitive shortfall that will surely draw the ire of both sales and theexecutive team.As teams rush to adapt to a much larger mandate, they will have to understand and communicate the implications,limitations and suitability of:Navigating all the potential solutions available can be daunting. In the following section, we’ll help you formulate a list ofpriorities that will help narrow the ﬁeld, and lend context to your case as it’s presented to the executive team.

DITA, or Darwin InformationTyping Architecture, is one ofthe most popular informationmodels to suit today’s global,multi-channel environment.

Budgets to support additional languagesStructured authoringSkill sets and staff resourcesInformation architecture strategyContent management systemTranslation memory and workﬂowTranslation providersContent to be (or not to be) translatedChanges to current processesSupport for new character sets

Understanding and Communicating the Financial Impact of XML & DITAWhite Paper

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Step One:Choose and Evangelize your Information Model

Before we delve into the math of ROI, let’s review the basics of the investment itself – an investment in technology (XMLand DITA) to better manage large volumes of content and documentation.DITA, or Darwin Information Typing Architecture, is one of the most popular information models to suit today’s global,multi-channel environment. It is a technology foundation that controls and manages the creation, translation, workflow,and publishing of content.DITA’s approach to content is to break information into reusable modules to make the creation, translation and workflowprocess easier, and to then automate the publishing of content into manuals, online help, and other formats. The XML-based architecture breaks down and structures modules of information for multiple documents – much like parts thatare reused and assembled into multiple products through a bill of materials in a manufacturing environment. It identifiesrelationships between ‘topics’ of information (for instance, all the corporate boilerplates, specific instruction sets, andreusable descriptions that come together to make complete documents) and ‘maps’ that enable you to identify whichtopics are used in which deliverables.With this topic-based authoring and management structure, you can then reuse content and automate publishing acrossas many channels as your organization requires.More important than the mechanics of how DITA works is the ‘why’ of DITA – why it is a good business investment forglobal organizations, and how it helps content teams to reduce costs and work faster to reach markets in more languages.

DITA:The Platform of Choice for Global Content

Content-producing teams – including documentation, operations, marketing and product development – have a mandatethat has exploded in scope. As sales targets expand to include new international markets, information products arerequired in increasing numbers of languages and delivery channels. And unless resources, budgets and deadlinesexpand accordingly (which they most often do not), content producers are pressed to ﬁnd new ways of streamlining theirwork to do more with less.By helping organizations leverage the efﬁciency of XML-based content creation, the DITA standard revolutionizes howpublishing teams author, manage, and deliver information.DITA gathers the best concepts deployed in XML systems and packages them together for production-ready use. All ofthe best practices, techniques and lessons learned serve as the foundation, on top of which you can customize a uniquesystem.

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DITA provides a framework for maintainable evolution of content, facilitating quick adaptation to new products andinformation.

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DITA is a standard that can seamlessly be applied throughout the content lifecycle, allowing multiple applications andpeople to share and leverage a uniﬁed library of content.

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DITA is ‘topic-oriented’ rather than ‘document oriented’, which provides greater ﬂexibility in content management andpublishing of many different types of content – from printed books and articles to dynamic, online help systems, e-learning channels and websites.

By helping organizationsleverage the efﬁciency of XML-based content creation, theDITA standard revolutionizeshow publishing teamsauthor, manage, and deliverinformation.

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