Aberdeen’s research has found that organizations pursuing a content reuse strategy manage to reuse 41% of their content on average (The Technical Communicator’s Transformation , October 2008). Compare this to the overall 81% reuse rate achieved by the technical publications team supporting Hewlett-Packard’s Enterprise Storage and Services (ESS) division. The group, responsible for creating support documentation for all of HP’s server hardware, did not arrive at this level of reuse overnight. Tom Erber, Program Manager for HP’s ESS Technical Documentation department points out, “We have 20 different lines of servers, with rather isolated supporting engineering teams. A lot can change between two generations of a product. Even if the product name is the same, the only thing that might stay common between two models is the height. In addition, concurrent product launches makes it difficult to get horizontal visibility into content.”

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Posted by Michael Lai, Marketing Executive, Author-it Software Corporation