While I’ve spent my career in the software/consumer electronic world, I’ve done a little in the regulated industries. My favorite was working for a company that reported to the Federal Railroad Administration.

How is a regulated environment different?

It’s different in a number of ways, depending on who is regulating you.

For example, you may be lightly regulated, as the rail equipment company I worked for was. By this, I mean that you have to track things like the big edit reviews and resulting comments and all previously released product documentation. Design specs after a certain point had to be auditable, as did factory floor policies and procedures. As did training materials used to teach people how to use the products.

Fundamentally, anything that was required to show auditors how the product and the product instructions got be the the thing out in the field has to be tracked. And, because this equipment was very robust, they had to track it essentially forever, as the products worked in the field for at least 50 years.

If a railroad crossing failed and people or property were damaged, the company had to be able to show the documents that shipped with the products, how that information came to be in the manuals, how the equipment was made, and how the end users were trained to use the equipment. For as long as that equipment was functioning in the field.

They had a lot of paper in a lot of file cabinets.

What they all have in common

Regardless of the industry – FDA, Financial, SOX, Solvency II, other government – it comes down to audit trails. You have to be able to show the trail of content that got you to the place you are right now. And that means history of content development in some manner.

If you’re using Word or InDesign, you have to depend on an external document management system and somehow track when and how the changes came to be.You must track versions of what shipped and when to who and why. You have to track review comments.

You wind up with a lot of paper in a lot of filing cabinets.

There are better ways

There is another way – you can track and manage the components in your content. Using the right component content management tool, you can use the history features to show you this information. You can also manage your review comments electronically. It’s a lot easier than trying to manage all these parts on your own.

To see how Author-it manages history and audit trails, watch the movie below.

Have you worked in a regulated environment? What were the restrictions you faced?

If you are interested in a great conference, I strongly recommend the India STC conference in December. I’ve not been (yet), but hope to at some point. Apparently, the energy of the conference is amazing.

From their email

The 13th Annual Conference of the STC India Chapter will be held in Chennai on December 1, 2, and 3, 2011. Please send us a proposal with an abstract of about 250 words. Request you to include information about your profile in the proposal. If you have experience presenting at conferences, including STC, mention that in the profile. The best of the paper proposals stands a chance of winning a prize!

For information about paper proposal categories, visit: http://www.stc-india.org/conferences/2011/?page_id=18

Mail your proposal in .DOC, .TXT, or .PDF format to conferences@stc-india.org on or before August 5, 2011.

For more information regarding sponsorships and conference, drop a line to Saravanan Manoharan: treasurer@stc-india.org.

We look forward to meeting you at the Chennai conference.

I was talking to a friend whose employer has merged with another company. My friend’s company spent the last 5 years clawing its way to supportable and repeatable processes throughout the company as they build software products. If you are familiar with the 5 levels of the Capability Maturity Model, they had finally reached something close to a level 4.

It was hard and they struggled but development, testing, and documentation had stable processes that supported consistently developing products.

Then the merger happened.

Post merger

As they bring the 2 companies together, they are also breaking the company into 2 parts, based on markets. The split is not based on previous company affiliation, but rather on the needs of each vertical market both companies sell into. It makes sense to break it up this way, because the products are related but the needs of each vertical are very different.

This could all be very good, except for one thing: the company they merged with has no actual product development processes.

And that could all work if Company A (my friend’s employer) consumed Company B. But that’s not what’s happening. As they break the companies apart and regroup into 2 separate business units, the processes of each company are staying in place. Those people who are moving into the business unit that was Company A get the existing and stable processes of Company A. Those who are moving into the business unit of what was Company B get all the processes of Company B, which is to say, none.

6 levels of the CMM

My friend and I have thought for years there are actually 6 levels of the CMM. We both discovered this level when we ran our own consulting companies. We also learned to identify and then run away when we first met with these potential clients because nothing good ever happened.

The 6th level is negative 1. Working with a negative 1 level will destroy your processes if you are a contracting company providing outsourcing services, like product documentation. Think of it as entropy.

There is a place for the negative 1 level – three people creating some wild new technology in a garage somewhere can actually benefit from this level because it strongly encourages crazy mad ideas that then get tried. These ideas would be shot down any other place because they are crazy mad ideas. But for these people in that garage, it’s a creative environment that works.

The moment these people move into any level of developing the crazy mad ideas into some actual products, level negative 1 will kill them. Perhaps slowly, perhaps quickly, but entropy will have it’s due.

And how do tools fit in here?

Very often, companies with few to no processes decide the problems they’re having are because they don’t have the right tools. If they got the right tools, they reason, this would all be better.

So they build a feature list.

And they buy new tools.

They don’t bother to train anyone, or set up any Best Practices for using the tools. They just buy them, install them, and then continue on the way they’ve been. And nothing changes, except some vendor somewhere got a nice fat check.

New tools are not feature lists

If you (or your company) are thinking about improving how you do the business of what you do, new tools can help a lot. But new tools also require that you look at your existing processes and be brave enough to change what isn’t working. And something isn’t working if you’re looking to get new tools.

Think of purchasing new tools as a time of reflection for your company. Identify what’s not working in your processes and then find tools that support your efforts to make it work better.

Don’t look for new tools based on a feature list – look for new tools based on the business problems you have and the business solutions you need. When you identify the business issues you need to solve, you’re going to be looking at processes as well. You can’t help it.

After a webinar the other day, I would up chatting in email with a fellow about useful books. So I thought I’d post a list of books I think should be on your bookshelf.

Listed in no particular order:

• Illustrating Computer Documentation: The Art of Presenting Information Graphically on Paper and Online by William Horton

Altho this book was published in 1991, it’s still very relevent today. He covers how to present information visually, especially important for us non-visual learners.

• DITA 101, 2nd edition. by Ann Rockley

Even if you’re not moving to DITA, this book is valuable because it makes you think about how to structure your information to be useful to your readers.

• Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People by Joann T. Hackos

I cannot recommend this book enough. She clearly discusses why content is a business asset and how to manage it.

• Single Sourcing: Building Modular Documentation by Kurt Ament

Do you have any to add to the list? What have I missed?

I came across a question today on LinkedIn asking “What’s stopping the wider use of DITA within your company?”.

Some of the responses that were given included reasons like

• I don’t have time right now to do this
• I did this at my last job, and it cost me my job
• Too hard to migrate content to DITA
• Too expensive to buy the tools

What really surprised me was that I don’t think most people really understood the question. I believe the question was asking, what is stopping other departments using DITA, not what is stopping more technical writers on more projects using DITA.

In my experience, which is very broad, the key factor that is “stopping the wider use of DITA within organizations” is that DITA is a content model designed to meet the needs of producing technical product documentation, more specifically software documentation and is not applicable, or even easily adapted outside that use case. DITA was after all designed by IBM to meet their internal requirements and has not changed much since entering the public domain.

The other major factor is that outside professional writers, like technical communicators, users lack the skills, discipline, and desire to be able to understand or use the complex set of technologies and tools required to make DITA work. It’s simply too hard.

To make matters worse, even professional writers struggle with DITA and many organizations are abandoning their DITA (and other XML) implementations in favor of less complex and more user-friendly solutions that can be easily adopted across the organization by users of all skill levels.

Last year we replaced dozens of DITA and XML based implementations with Author-it, in large and small companies alike. I remember meeting with one particular group that had been working with DITA for about a year and was very adamant that it was the only way to do it. During the presentation of Author it we showed them how easily they could migrate their DITA content, do everything they were doing with their XML based tool set, and much more, while continuing to use the DITA content model and validation within Author-it. Needless to say they are now happy Author-it users.

Paul Trotter
Founder and CEO
Author-it Software Corporation

I had a conversation today where I was discussing strategies for content architecture with a Fortune 100 high tech company. The person I was speaking with stated that they wanted to create a strategy where the content was completely independent of the tool set used to create and process it.

I believe his premise was that by making the content tool agnostic, that it enables independence from tools, and allows different parts of the organization to choose different tool sets independently to meet their specific requirements. Provided all the tools can magically inter-operate and just load and save the content in the same model everything will be wonderful.

So my question is. Is this really feasible, or is it just a flight of fancy?

My opinion is that if you are focused on satisfying the actual business requirements of users who are authoring, managing, translating, and publishing that content you cannot practically separate the tools from the content because the requirements themselves are not satisfied by either the content model or the tools, but the combination of both.

This is why you never see this type of separation in other software categories like CRM, Financials, or ERP.

If your organization was looking for a new CRM, would they design an independent data model and strategy around managing client information, then find tools that will use the model? I doubt it.

Instead they would most likely gather their business requirements, which by definition need to be independent of implementation, then go to the market with an RFI or RFP. This enables them to consider all the possible ways and technologies available to solve their problems.

I would love to hear your opinions and feedback on this subject.

Paul Trotter
Founder and CEO
Author-it Software Corporation

I have followed and used Author-it pretty much from the beginning. I have to admit often being confused at family barbeques with the technical aspects, but maybe it was just the beer..?  However, conceptually, Author-it has always been ahead of its time and a breath of fresh air. I first used Author-it in 1999 for a military application in East Timor and ever since it has been my primary authoring tool. When the opportunity to represent Author-it in the Middle East came up several years ago, I gladly took up the challenge.

One of the things that became clear at the time was that I did not know much about the Information Management field. So I set out to rectify this. I researched courses that could educate me and provide me with an informed and balanced view of the industry. I chose to undertake the Graduate Diploma of Information Design at the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology in New Zealand. It was a tough course that probed deep into this field and kept me very busy for a couple of years. I expected this course would arm me with the knowledge to understand how Author-it fits into this industry. What was unexpected was that Author-it would be covered in two of the six papers on the course.

The first time was in the Research and Theory paper. This paper mentioned Author-it in the context of changing the standard mould and being an industry leader with new concepts. Author-it’s single-sourcing and component content management concepts were explained and highlighted as the next big evolution in information management. This was produced in the context of historical theory of information management.

The second time was two semesters later in the Information Design paper. The context this time was the techniques used to produce professional documents. Author-it was specifically highlighted as one of the first end-to-end solutions to provide a single-sourcing solution to the industry. Single-sourcing concepts were covered in depth as obviously this is seen as an important evolution of the way we manage information.

I am personally impressed that Author-it and associated concepts are being recognized in these courses. It is confirmation that Author-it is indeed an industry leader and that conceptually they are on the right track. I think the ongoing developments (Author-it Live, Xtend, Publishing Profiles, Structured Authoring, Aspect, Assist etc.) that have come out of Author-it are a tribute to them also. It is one thing to be an industry leader, however staying on the leading edge is an even greater challenge. Author-it is doing this well.

Posted by Mark Trotter, Author-it Certified Consultant, TrotterShaw LTD

The year 2006 was an exciting year, for all sorts of reasons. It was an exciting year for Author-it Software Corporation when Author-it 4.3 was released with support for the still-embryonic DITA standard. Who knew, in 2006, that DITA would come so far? (Well, we did, obviously.) As Author-it is a controlled authoring tool, built on top of a component content management system, with a multi-channel publishing engine back end, we were pretty much the first end-to-end DITA solution. (After all, end-to-end is such a fluid description. Just because we have more at the starting end (authoring), the finishing end (publishing), and that lumpy bit in the middle (content management), what’s to stop someone else from picking up the pegs and moving them closer together to create their own definition… sigh).

The independent CMS Watch published an industry report in 2008 covering DITA tools, XML, and component content management systems. As one of the few vendors providing a end-to-end DITA solution Author-it rated very highly. High praise indeed. Author-it being an out of the box solution that requires no third party tools or programming certainly helped. Interested in the report? If you are reading this you should be*. 2009 version out soon, I believe.

I don’t want to sound fussy, but first usually means… first. And 2006 is definitely before 2009. So unless I’m missing a very finely tuned definition of ‘First Authoring Software to Support DITA Publishing With No Programming or Third-Party Tools Required’ that somehow magically makes 2009 occur before 2006, I think someone at MadCap is taking liberties with the truth. Now I like Lewis Carroll and George Orwell as much as the next person but such blatant and farcical manipulation of the truth should remain in works of fiction. Or people should hire PR companies that do their homework.

Or, we could agree that MadCap has never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Lovely folks at MadCap, and Flare works very well and lots of people like it, but if no one else is going to call them on the blatantly inaccurate press releases seen over the past year, I will.

Posted by Matthew Armstrong, Sales Director Asia Pacific, Author-it Software Corporation

*From the CMS Watch website:
About the Report
The XML & Component Content Management Report 2009 provides an overview of leading CCM products as well as XML editing tools, including detailed comparative evaluations of 25 CCM vendors XML editing products.
How it will help you
The report can help your team:

• Save time in the selection process
• Create an effective vendor shortlist
• Avoid selecting the wrong product
• Budget more accurately
• Avoid painful setbacks

Who needs this report?
Check out this report if you are considering to undertake any of the following projects:

• Complex content re-use
• Extensive content translation
• Technical Documentation and other DITA projects
• Structuring common office documents
• Multichannel publishing
• Structured authoring with XML editors
• Managing information components at an enterprise level

One of the most striking issues facing our clients is how to extend Author-it’s collaboration further across their organisation.

The ubiquity of Word, PDF and email means these tools are a familiar, and therefore de facto, method to share and check content everywhere, but they offer poor methods for groups to collaborate.  I know Word and PDF both have review and collaboration features and I’ve seen some brave efforts to actually make these functions work.

After all, the thinking goes, if Word and Adobe Reader are on every desktop it’s easy to distribute a file and allow 50 people to comment directly in the document.

But this doesn’t scale – it’s a simple as that.  No matter how sophisticated your SharePoint system, or the forceful personality of your project manager, amalgamating and approving the comments from more than a few people is an arduous and error-prone task for the people responsible for managing the review process.  There’s either the comments from 50 people in one document (not pretty), or 50 documents with comments from one person.

So how to solve the problem? How to continue using a document distribution method that everyone is comfortable with, but keep the granular control and consistency that Author-it provides.  All without making the review process more difficult or timeconsuming.

We decided the best way to achieve these goals was to start where people are familiar (Word and PDF) and use this document as an entry point to Author-it.  That is, automatically create links to the relevant Author-it content directly within the Word or PDF file.

When a reviewer wants make changes or suggestions to any part of the document they simply click the link next to that section.  This opens the relevant Topic in Author-it for the reviewer to begin making changes immediately.

Because the review is now taking place directly in the original content source, all of the standard Author-it content controls, workflow, reuse, and release functionality applies.

The Word or PDF file no longer become the platform for collaboration, a task neither perform well.  Instead the Word and PDF file remain what they should be, a distribution and publication format, now with added benefit of linking directly to the original (controlled) source with proper collaboration.

As per I’ve created a short video http://www.author-it.com/videos/collaboration/Collaboration%20Plus_demo.swf to outline workflow and a few business cases.  Please check and let me know what you think.  This functionality will be freely available to all Author-it users but requires some scripting skill to configure for your own domain and database details.

(Just a summary for people unfamiliar with Author-it – software licencing is concurrent.  This means the Windows software can be installed on any number of PCs (the web version, obviously, doesn’t need installing on any user’s computer).  The software is smart enough to know who you are and configure functionality appropriately.  That is, no separate ‘review’ or ‘lite’ copies are required – if you are a reviewer the ‘advanced Author-it functions’ are automatically switched once you have logged in.)

Posted by Matt Armstrong, Sales Director, Asia Pacific, Author-it Software Corporation

I was recently sent some information regarding The Center for Information-Development Management that you may find of interest if you are a publications manager. If you’re interested in information about communicating with senior management, building business cases for new initiatives, understanding customer information needs, or confronting the myriad issues and problems faced every day you may wish to consider CIDM membership.
CIDM is an organization of information-development, training, and support managers from around the world who facilitate collaboration regarding information development among skilled managers in the industry. Members include managers, senior managers, directors, and vice presidents of information development and training who are remarkably skilled and happy to share their experiences.
New members join CIDM as a department, which means that all staff members and managers are invited to participate in CIDM activities.
There are two membership types–regular departments and small departments. Member organizations receive one or two complimentary registrations to attend the flagship CIDM conference, Best Practices, each September.
Benefits of membership also include discounted rates for attendance at the Content Management Strategies/DITA North America and the DITA Europe conferences, as well as workshops and seminars held throughout the year. Members receive a subscription to the bimonthly Best Practices journal. They receive the monthly Information Management e-newsletter and a subscription to the management listserv as well as participation in the scheduled teleconferences to share current issues and experiences.
If you are interested in learning more about CIDM or becoming a member, please call to arrange a discussion with Director JoAnn Hackos at +1
(303) 232-7586 or visit the website.
While you’re there, sign up for the monthly e-newsletter for continuing news about the management of information development.

Posted by Kathy Howes, Marketing Manager, Author-it Software Corporation.