Sometimes my personal life and my Author-it professional life collide. It feels like this is happening this week. The two stories are related – just stay with me on this.

Personal life first

We have owned a Leonberger dog for the last 2+ years, originally gotten to keep the Aussie company and be his best friend. She was about 6 months old when we got her and for about 18 months, all was well in my house. The dogs played together and liked each other very much.

And then something happened.

We don’t know why but the Leonberger no longer likes the Aussie and attacks him given half a chance. This has resulted in several massive scary dog fights. Because combined, they weigh more than I do, the fights were also hard to stop. And someone is going to get badly hurt.

So we hired the trainer we’ve worked with before and did everything she suggested – kept them separate, encouraged happy interactions, etc. All of it. Right down the line. We love these dogs and want to help them be friends again.

Seven months later, it’s not working. The Leo doesn’t like the Aussie. Period. The Leo likes other dogs very much but not the Aussie. The trainer says it’s personal. And personal means we are very limited with what we can do.

After thinking about what’s best for both dogs, we’ve come to the devastating conclusion that one of them has to find a new home. Because we had the Aussie first and because he has health issues, we decided to keep him and turn the Leo over to the local Leonberger Rescue.

The hand-over happens this weekend. There is a lot of sadness and crying in our house. But it’s the right decision, regardless of what we want or how much we love the dog. And we do love her.

Professional life

In the world of content development, we acquire tools and then often fall in love with them. Which is fine – it’s a happy place to love the tools you work with day in and day out.

But sometimes, the situation changes. Perhaps we discover the tool we love very much is not scalable and we’re growing. Perhaps we need a new output format and it’s really hard to get it, using this tool.

Things can change over time.

A new tool may be needed, But it’s hard because you really like the tool you have and it was such a good fit until things changed. You almost feel like a bad tool owner by changing tools.

But a smart professional understands the limits of what they are doing and recognizes sometimes you really do need to get new tools. It’s in the best interest of your content and your users to do so. It’s a hard decision to make but it’s the right decision in the end.

To help you make the decision, you may hire a consultant to advise you. If you do so, take them seriously. If you thought enough of them to hire them, then pay attention to what they recommend.

Why are these stories related?

In the end, you have to make decisions that are best for the situation, which may be very different than what you want.

I want my Leonberger to be best friends again with my Aussie. But that’s not going to happen, in the very experienced opinion of my trusted trainer (my consultant). As a result, both dogs are stressed and potentially I or the dogs are going to be badly hurt.

You may want your tool to work for your group after you add 10 more people. But if the tool was never designed for what you need now, then it’s the wrong tool. You can pretend this is all going to be OK or you can face the facts and make the right decisions.

It’s up to you.

For most companies, the content they create is critical to the running of the business. Consider for a moment:

• Policies and procedures – state how the business is to be run, who does what and how. In industries with oversight, such as finance or medical, the business also must show auditors how the company has been running since the last audit. Failure to show this content can result in heavy fines or other bad things.
• Internal product documents – describe how products should work, the thought processes, the solutions, and so on for developing the products sold. Without these documents, a business has no idea how it builds what it builds. It also don’t know why decisions were made to do X rather than Y.
• External product documents – explain how to use the products to the people who purchase the products. If the external documents are not helpful, the business (at best) incurs an unreasonable support cost or (at worst) has a high return rate. Both impact available capital in the business. If the business functions in a regulated industry, it must keep the history of the external documents to show potential auditors how the product was described to work or potentially face large fines.
• Customer support documents – help internal support teams and external customers find a solution to their problems. For expensive internal support teams, quickly finding and understanding how to help a customer gets the customer off the phone and able to move forward. External customers who find a solution on the support site and never call is the ideal, as it costs the company less than pennies per customer.
• Training materials – few staff arrive knowing how the company works, what safety information they need to know, or how the products work. Training is how a company shares it’s tribal knowledge with the new tribe members. Many companies save a great deal of money on their insurance by making sure all new employees are trained in the required safety protocols. If the business needs to train customers on how the products work, the training center is a profit center.
• Marketing collateral – positions the products to the appropriate sales market. Few companies have a product so needed that no advertising is needed to sell the product. Failure to attract customers to the products negatively impacts the business.

Content as a business asset

The groupings above just touch on the broad types of content a business needs to manage. Even a small mom-and-pop store has some of the types of content listed above. For large international companies, the sheer amount of content assets, just as with hardware assets, for example, can be overwhelming.

Best of Breed companies know their business content is an asset that needs to be managed, just like the other assets in the company. Most companies track the computers and cell phones they use, for example. Annually, all the equipment is inventoried to make sure they have what they think they have.

Many companies never think about the business content as a business asset. The content that’s critical to the business is in Word or Powerpoint files or who knows, saved everywhere: on people’s local computers, somewhere on the network, maybe on a Sharepoint site. No one has any idea how much content they have, much less where it all is or what the most recent version might be.

If you ever wondered what Author-it products do, this is what we do. Our products help you manage your business content as the business asset it is.

In other news

We have a new line-up of free webinars coming your way in April and May. We’re really pleased with the offerings and hope you are too.

High on the list of must attends are 2 in particular:

Content Development: Future Trends, Future Solutions
Paul Trotter, CEO of Author-it Software Corporation shares his vision of the future in this hour long event. You’ll leave knowing what trends are and what you need to prepare for now.
April 25 at 4pm Eastern time.  To sign up for this tools-neutral webinar, click here.

What’s New in Author-it 5.5
Additionally, we have several webinars scheduled to show you what’s coming in Author-it 5.5. To see the times and dates, click here.

Not a lot of blogging this week, as we’re at WritersUA in Long Beach.

Sunday, we did the Author-it Morning and had a great time. People got a lot of value out of the 4 or so hours we were together and it was fun.

Today, the booth is very busy and the show attendees are full of excitement.

Watch Twitter for the #writersua keyword to find out what’s going on.

And if you’re at the show, stop by the booth and see what the buzz is all about.

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?

Drove over and am at the hotel. It’s a really nice, quiet, calm place with lots of bold spots of color. It’s really nice.

I’m unpacked and on my own for dinner. I may eat in the hotel bar, where I can get happy hour and Spanish Tapas, one of my favorite things. I love nibble meals.

Good night sleep and setting up the conference starts tomorrow!

This week is really busy – the holidays are certainly over!

I don’t have a lot of time for a post today but I wanted to share with you the next interesting result from the Content Trends Survey. Remember, we’ll be publishing a white paper about these results shortly.

Interesting question

The question was “If you were to invest in new tools, rank what matters to you” with a list of options. I’m including Critical and Important as the colored bars.

This is hard to read at this resolution so click the graphic and then click it again to see the large view.

What I found interesting is that Easy Content Reuse and Reducing Layout Time/effort were so important. Other things are interesting as well.

Discuss!

This is most likely the last blog post of the calendar year. Most of us are on vacation from Christmas Eve to after the first of the year, including me.

As such, this would be a great time to review the year at Author-it, but, since I’ve only been here for 3 months, we’re not going to do a lot of review. Next year will be different.

What is this post about, then?

The week after Christmas is typically cleaning week for my household. Obviously, we clean the house more than once a year, but I use this week to sort through our belongings and get rid of things. Some things go in the trash but most things are donated to a local charity.

My husband and I are not big on having lots of possessions but it’s amazing what you can accumulate over the course of a year. I find clothes are the big one for both of us. I’m not a clothes horse, but my tastes change or something I like shrunk in the wash (when you’re a woman just over 6 feet, this happens a lot!).

Off to the charity it goes.

We didn’t get to my office last year and so it’s first on the list this year. I have too much stuff in this room and it’s impacting my work area. Books are a large part of the clutter. Time to pare down.

I like this sorting at the end of the year. It let’s us start the year with an appropriate amount of stuff, I feel good about donating to the charity, and we know what’s going on in the household. We feel orderly.

How can you start the new year feeling more orderly?

If this is not a habit you’ve gotten into, I strongly suggest it. It feels good to get rid of the extra stuff and streamline your environment.You get a fresh perspective.

I am really looking forward to having my home office cleaned out. I’ll have a better, more available work area to do lots of work. I also won’t be so worried about an earthquake killing me under books crashing off the book cases behind me!

How about your content?

Another thing to think about cleaning up is your content. I bet you have a lot of content you don’t need or could be standardized. For many companies, this is a quiet time of the year so now may be a great time to get that started.

Think how much better you’ll feel if you can finally get that content organized and cleaned up. Every time you can easily find what you need, you’ll be happy you did it.

It will also be easier to make the business case that your current tools are not working if you can get that content cleaned up. You can see what you have and more easily identify the places that are not working for you.

Happy holidays from Author-it

Regardless of the specific holiday you may celebrate this time of you, we wish you a joyful and happy time. May 2011 be the best year yet for you and your family.

See you next year!

The new issue of the journal Technical Communication is out and there’s an article that I found very interesting.

Single Sourcing and Content Management: A Survey of STC members. David Dayton and Keith Hopper.

I’m not going to do a detailed review because you all can read it yourself. But what I found interesting was some of the results.

Results

Of the 276 respondants to the survey, half reported using single sourcing or single sourcing with some sort of content management. I would have expected that number to be higher, since single sourcing has been around since at least 1996. The cost (time) savings alone make the content development method make sense. It’s just not a new technology and I was surprised that not 90% or more are single sourcing.

Drivers of moving to a single source and/or content management development method were unsurprising:

• faster information development
• regulatory or compliance issues
• translation efforts

About half the people using single source and/or content management said there are downsides and tradeoffs, which I found completely unsurprising.

These information development techniques are potentially restricting if you want to just focus on writing. These methods force you to think about how and where your content is going to be used and that can feel restricting. But it’s critical, I think, to consider when you develop information.

A surprise

Apparently, the majority of people are using Word to author and are trying to do some sort of single source and/or content management. Which I think is doomed to failure.

Word is a delightful tool for short documents. But if you’ve written a 400 page book in Word (as I have, several times), you know it’s the wrong tool to try anything like single source and/or content management. They don’t give us numbers for the failed projects that were done in Word, but I’d like to see those.

They do seem to find that more larger companies have moved to single source and/or content management as compared to smaller companies. I have to wonder if larger companies see the business benefits of managing their information the way they do any business asset. Smaller companies may not have reached that point yet.

I’d also like to know how many small companies are using Word, as opposed to the larger companies. Again, smaller companies might be using Word because they are not thinking of information as an asset to be managed.

The summation

The summation was interesting to me – the authors say that a single source and/or content management environment has hit critical mass. This information development method is now into the early majority.

But if you look at just those using a content management system (which should include single sourcing but the authors say it doesn’t have to), then this development method has not quite crossed the chasm.

There are a lot of other pieces of good info and you should look up the entire article. It’s worth it.

What are your thoughts?

I have always loved words. All words. I like to play with words, talk about words, I married a writer.Even as a child, I played with language. I just like words.

Because I love words, I read a lot. A lot. My husband got me a Sony eReader last Christmas and I stopped reading physical books at that moment. I have over 200 books on my Reader right now. And the entire device fits in my purse. Wonderful.

The physical world

So imagine my surprise when I ordered a physical book the other day. I wanted Ann Rockley’s updated book about DITA. I realized that for a learning experience, I wanted the physical book in my hands.

It took the better part of 2 weeks to arrive but it’s been good reading.

Even if you’re not moving to DITA

Last time I was docs manager, I had a large group writing a large library. I saw that we would need to move to some sort of re-usable CMS/authoring thing.

Step one for my group was to get everyone writing in what I called Structured Authoring. We needed everyone to be talking about the same stuff the same way, both in words and in how we structured the content in topics.

Structured authoring helps

DITA 101 is a great refresher on why and how you approach writing in a structured way, even if you’re not making the translition to DITA anytime soon.

If you are thinking about DITA, this book shows you how to work towards it. It’s really not a matter of running down to the DITA store and getting a bucket of DITA. It requires planning, retraining, and testing to make this move. It’s a process.

I recommend you get and read her book, even if you’re not making the DITA move. The recommendations she has for writing in a more structured way will help you or your team.

by Sharon Burton

Tom Johnson once again said what I wish I said.

He’s right – if you ignore the information the users need to support using your product, things are not going to go well when you release.

I would add that his list is also applicable after release. User needs may change over time and it’s important to at least be open to revisiting existing product to see if there is more to be done.