Content Agility Conference

More recently I managed to get together with Noz Urbina who has been organizing the Content Agility conference that is happening in Crawley, U.K. June 25-27, 2013 next month and ask him a few questions about the conference and what attendees can expect. (Read to the end for a special offer!)

DITAWriter: Can you explain what “Congility” means?

Noz Urbina: Simply put, “Congility” is the combination of the words “content” and “agility”. Bringing agility to content means making content portable, reusable, manageable and ready for new dynamic needs. After nearly 13 years in structured content, I’m constantly amazed at how the industry is still wrapping its head around how profoundly different our work can be if content is freed from proprietary, unstructured formats. Writers want to collaborate and produce content faster and to more audiences and devices, and the way we structure and store the content itself—at the most basic level—needs to be up to the job. Content with agility is ready for today’s market demands and applications.

Please, however, don’t just take my word for it. Check out the answers the 2011 speakers gave when asked what Content Agility meant to them. Just a note, we’ve called the conference this year “Content Agility” to distinguish it from the background Congility organisation and team, which puts out webinars and other events at other points on the calendar. It’s a subtle change but we think it’s important.

DITAWriter: What is the theme for the presentations this year?

Noz Urbina: This year we’re looking at “The Next 5 Years” and mastering content in a multi-channel, world. The “next 5 years” is not to be confused with “in 5 year’s time”. We’re looking at what organisations have already done, and can be doing during the next 5 years, so that when 5 years goes by, we’re not caught out. Many organisations were caught out by the introduction of the internet, the mobile web, and now we have native apps and all sorts of devices on the horizon. We’re trying to help people start thinking of what this year, next year, and the years in between need to look like, so that in 5 year’s time your organisation is not going to be left behind and scrambling to catch up.

When we say muilti-channel, we could have added, “multi-device”, “multi-format”, “multi-national”, “multi-lingual”, “multi-audience”, and the like, but no matter how we say it, the world we’re living in has multiplied the complexity of content work. We see that content projects—especially revolutionary ones—take years to go from inspiration to production. This means that even those who need to be thinking about reuse across deliverables and devices in 3-5 years time need to be laying the groundwork now; rejigging their mindsets, and networking with those who have the required skills.

Many of us are still wrestling with just reusing content inside one format, or managing two formats for the desktop, but the Content Agility conference and all Congility events are suited to those just learning about the future skills and formats to anticipate for this year and the years to come.

DITAWriter: There are a few conferences every year that tackle DITA. What makes this conference different?

Noz Urbina: Although we’re not specific to DITA, invariably it features highly on our agenda. The Content Wrangler just released a report that 81% of structured projects in techcomm are using DITA. The report also cited that lack of a content strategy was the market’s biggest challenge. Content Agility is unique in the market in that it is a dual-focus event, bringing together Content Strategy and Structured Content (most of which these days is DITA).

We gather the best DITA minds in the industry – people like Tony Self, Eliot Kimber, Charles Cooper – and have household names and multinationals like eBay, Motorola, SAP Business Objects and more presenting their case studies (yes, there’s some smaller companies in there too, but you’d probably not know their names because… well, they’re smaller companies). Then we pair that with content strategy thought leaders who will help those DITA projects work successfully. We bring in names familiar in the DITA community, and others that you may not know. This year I’m particularly excited about Kevin P. Nichols who manages content strategy and an army of content strategists at the biggest web agency in the world and the presentations from people like Ray Gallon, Sharon Burton, Anne Caborn, Lindy Roux who have decades of combined experience in regulated, challenging environments that tie content into business process and organisational goals.

Any decent thought-leader in this space will tell you that the DITA technology, tools, and methodology are things you’ll need to tackle, but also the human, business, process and strategic issues around DITA will kill your project dead if not properly addressed. Doing DITA without a proper content strategy is foolhardy and potentially costly. A failed project can set your DITA initiative back years – it takes ages for managers and users to trust you again! So, at Content Agility we bring you both to make sure you’re DITA capable and skilled up in all the required related areas as well.

DITAWriter: It seems as though DITA and related XML documentation standards are beginning to make an impact in UK companies. Is that what you are finding too?

Noz Urbina: Definitely, Congility is a UK-based organisation backed by Mekon Ltd., which means we’ve been at the centre of DITA in the UK since its inception at X-Pubs back in 2006. Each year we see a larger number of DITA-related case studies being submitted to our conference, and others. There are persistent myths and misconceptions about DITA and its uptake, but there’s a growing fire. The enormous dominance in the U.S. and Canada makes DITA and structured content a sort of eventuality in the UK as partners, competitors and head-offices make the move there’ll be a natural ripple effect as there is so much trade and business between the two.

DITAWriter: What’s the audience you are trying to reach and what do you expect them to learn by attending?

Noz Urbina: We’re looking at content professionals. Note that’s not necessarily technical communicators, but we do have a strong base in the techcomm community and the majority of attendees are definitely still techcomm folk. However, as I said, we’re trying to push people to think content, not be boxed into silos. This means that having a pure techcomm focus would be contrary to the message that techcomm needs to evolve and think outside the box to keep up with the change in market demands.

We want attendees to see that with user demands spiraling ever higher and ever more platforms to support with our products or content (or both), we are in more danger of providing users with a fragmented experience if we don’t start to think strategically. Today we need to at least make a entry-level effort to align with the rest of the organisation – this is what Kanban, Agile, LEAN and so forth all recommend too. Without better cross-silo collaboration, productivity and quality suffer across the organisation. Once they’ve seen the issues, we hope to teach attendees how they can tackle them in their own careers.

DITAWriter: I was genuinely impressed by the quality of the speakers who were at the last Congility conference I attended. Where do you find these people?

Congility interviews and hand-picks every speaker, and again, because we have one foot in the content strategy community, we have a wider pool of expertise than most techcomm or DITA-focused events. I try to make sure I get some phone time with speakers to go over the vision for each year’s conference, and get them fired up and focussed on what people have been saying they want to hear.

Noz Urbina: I understand this year’s conference will have a number of workshops scheduled. What do you have planned?

The workshops this year alone are worth more than the price of the conference. The fact that you can get a chance (if you act fast!) to get in to not one but two of them is really a great thing to be able to offer. We’ve never been able to offer this kind of value before.

We are proud to have Tony Self – author of the DITA Style Guide and the world’s only PhD in DITA – delivering one of his famous workshops. I’m also delivering one on the ever-challenging subject of topic-based information development. I’ve found across many projects that topic-orientation is one of the biggest challenges to DITA, so it’s great to have someone of Tony’s pedigree addressing it.

I’ll also be delivering one with my colleague Mark Poston on Dynamic Delivery, as this is a much-talked about but much misunderstood area. We’ll be defining and exploring it and looking at how any why organisations are moving to this type of delivery around the world right now.

Our Platinum Sponsors Schema and Adobe will be contributing a workshop each. Schema will be bringing their years of component CMS experience to the table to look at how today’s complex documents can be effectively and efficiently managed. They’re reference experience includes laundry-list of fortune 500 companies including Siemens, Bosch, Philips, GE, Toyota and more.
Adobe – working with Jang Graat, a well respected name in Europe’s DITA community and frequent conference speaker – to deliver a session how you can move to structure in an organisation that has to keep delivering against their usual schedules and doesn’t have resource to throw a dedicated team at the problem (i.e., just about all of them!).

We’re offering this level of value on the workshops to encourage early booking. European conference goers like to leave booking to the last minute, so to make sure people get a move on, we’ve offered them on a first-come, first-serve basis. So if people want to get a spot, they need to register early.

To get people going, I’m pleased to announce the I can offer DITAwriter.com readers a chance to win two free tickets to the conference if they’re the first to register on this special ditawriter.com registration form: bit.ly/ca13FREEdw

The first two registrants only get full access to all three tracks for both days, they just have to cover their own travel and accommodation. Workshops are not included (we’re not crazy!) but they can get them at a discounted Workshops-only price.

List of DITA-related YouTube Videos

Here’s the list:

If I am missing anything, please let me know and I will add update the list accordingly!

Three Anonymous Responses on DITA Semi Use

The first two anonymous responses are from senior people at two separate semiconductor firms who are currently using DITA, and the third is from someone at a different firm in this sector that is not using DITA, but are using their own custom XML instead.

Their responses to my questions below:

DITAWriter: From a semiconductor industry perspective, what are the chief benefits of using DITA?

Anonymous 1: On the hardware side, we see the key benefit as enabling reuse of collateral across product lines. It’s harder to quantify the ROI with this, however, than with easier use cases like translation or single sourcing, and it’s taken us longer to prove the value than I would have hoped.

Anonymous 2: It’s too early for us to give proper answers for this but I can say that we have been approached by at least two of our business partners regarding closer collaboration in DITA content.

Anonymous 3: XML or structured data is required for process automation. Having content in structured XML means you can do “stuff” with it. Syndicate, segment, feed data, parse, automate, work with other standards like ipxact, etc… It’s data, not a doc. It is also the preferred medium for translation.

DITAWriter: Are you looking to implement the DITA Semiconductor specialization when it is released alongside DITA 1.3?

Anonymous 1: No. We may revisit in the future.

Anonymous 2: We are not considering the specialization at the moment. We would have to see what might be added for DITA 1.3 as the current specialization has some limitations that we would need to address (I cannot go into detail).

Anonymous 3: No, but would consider if we were not on XML already. I actually worked on the DITA specialization committee for one year. We had decided to stay out of DITA at that point, so we dropped out of OASIS.

DITAWriter: Have you had the opportunity to import DITA XML from a firm you do business with?

Anonymous 1: No, but it looks like we may have that opportunity soon with some third-party vendors.

Anonymous 2: Yes.

Anonymous 3: No, but we have imported or transformed other XML to our schema. It is fairly easy as long as you are both using XML.

DITAWriter: Not all semiconductor firms have taken on DITA. Why do you think that is?

Anonymous 1: The main DITA use cases with the easiest ROI to demonstrate are translation and single sourcing. Most semiconductor companies do only a minimal amount of that. The use cases are harder.

Also, semiconductor firms are heavy with engineering authors, who are often resistant to the complexities of DITA and DITA authoring tools, especially if you haven’t really built out your information architecture yet.

Anonymous 2: Cost, fear, use of other equally functional solution (there are other things out there that do the job), perceived complexity, not ‘compatible’ with corporate systems, not invented here mentality…

Anonymous 3: The primary one is people’s resistance to getting off whatever tool or system they are currently using. Beyond that, if you were on XML or SGML early on, tools or standards were not quite there. Once you are buried in your own custom schema, there is little reason to migrate to a new one. Also, if your current content isn’t DITA friendly, there is a lot of work needed to get in into shape. Not really a big value add if you are already on XML and reaping those benefits. Cost in dollars and resource is always a factor.

DITAWriter: What is your best experience using DITA? What is your worst experience using DITA?

Anonymous 1: Worst experience is getting management to properly understand and resource the need the information architecture development.

Best experience is getting management to properly understand and resource the need the information architecture development.

Anonymous 2: @conkeyref and @conkeyref. Seriously, the issues we have are in the main to do with people not the technology. The best part is the, for me (?), relative ease with which I can construct complicated content from properly reusable blocks. The hard part for me is the OT.

Anonymous 3: Never used it other than evaluation.

————–

That’s it for my examination on DITA use in the semiconductor industry, at least for now.

One significant update: earlier this week Bob Beims posted a significant milestone in the development of the DITA SIDSC register description specialization, where the DITA SIDSC has been publicly delivered.

To see the results:

1. Go to www.freescale.com/infocenter/topic/qoriq/index.html
2. Navigate to P1022 and P1013 > Reference Manual > I2C Interfaces > I2C memory map/register definition click the I2C link

The topic that is displayed at that node was generated entirely from an SIDSC component file. You’ll find similar register description topics for each of other peripheral modules on the P1022.

One other final note: I also contacted the makers of two leading DITA-optimized XML editors and was told that they intend to support the semiconductor standard when it is officially released, or soon after.

Colin Maudry on Semi DITA Use at NXP

Colin also gave me some further background as to how they use DITA in general at NXP:

NXP uses DITA mainly for managing what they call “value proposition” (i.e. marketing) content. This content is published on the NXP public website on their product pages, and category pages. It is also used for their mobile applications. What I found interesting was that he told me that a significant proportion (almost half) of NXP’s data sheets use DITA not as the final output format but as an intermediate rendition format, so some of their topics (like the “value propositions”) are managed in DITA, while others are generated on-the-fly from their product information database (which is not stored in DITA). The rest of their technical documents continue to be done using either Framemaker or Word.

Their DITA setup: Componize 1.5 for Alfresco and they XMetal XMAX for their XML editor, though they intend to replace it with the web-based version on oXygen. XTM Suite is used to handle their translation process, and FOP is their XSL-FO processor of choice. What I also found interesting was the fact that they have done some minor specializations as well, primarily so that they can add internal metadata and constrain the content model—they have gone public with this information, and their DTDs can be found here.

With all of that in mind, I was looking forward to hearing what they had to say about their experiences of using DITA. Here are their responses:
DITAWriter: From a semiconductor industry perspective, what are the chief benefits of using DITA?

Colin Maudry: Using a standard format gives access to a market of standard tools (authoring, CMS, translation) and to a user community that is eager to share experience. This greatly decreases the effort in R&D, we basically just have to customize it to our small specializations and branding. NXP makes chips, we don’t develop techdoc formats, CMS or publishing tools!

To us a standard equals lots of people who have the same problems as we have plus lots of software companies who are anticipating our needs without us even asking them.

DITAWriter: Are you looking to implement the DITA Semiconductor specialization when it is released alongside DITA 1.3?

Colin Maudry: The SIDSC only covers the registers domain so far, and a limited part of our portfolio uses registers. We use IP-XACT extensively for these products and, although the author there is a DITA enthusiast, she didn’t see the migration to DITA SIDSC as a must have. She did play with it though and we definitely keep an eye on the progress made by Freescale.

When we joined OASIS, the plan was that NXP would start developing a new domain, electrical parameters. However, we were also discussing internally the future of our product data management, and the decision was made to use an XML ISO standard called OntoML (Wiki at eCl@ss, Wikipedia). It made perfect sense as our dictionary is based on IEC 61360 and OntoML is a valid serialization format.

Last but not least, our position regarding the usage of DITA is very clear: DITA is a good fit for natural language in semi-structured content, not for structured content such as product data. Since our ‘golden’ document is a data sheet, that gives some indication of the type of content to expect.

We are currently thinking of ways to touch base with fellow semiconductor companies and, rather than working on a standard format in a format organization, working on a common abstract data model and good practices.

DITAWriter: Have you had the opportunity to import DITA XML from a firm you do business with?

Colin Maudry: No, never. I heard certain distributors might be interested in getting our content, but that’s all. To be honest, we’re mostly a source of content, I don’t think we import much content from other companies. This is mostly down to the change in focus of NXP over the past years from “vibrant media” technologies (with lots of IP blocks) to “high-performance mixed signal with a strong standard products foundation”.

The only situation we had that comes close is when the author mentioned above generated some SIDSC register spec DITA and we were able to load it straight into the CCMS and output some basic renditions.

DITAWriter: Not all semiconductor firms have taken on DITA. Why do you think that is?

Colin Maudry: Switching to DITA requires introducing new tooling and new concepts, in an area, technical documentation, where you usually don’t find many IT enthusiasts who will play with the DITA OT for fun. This is one of the reasons why the software industry is keen on adopting DITA.

I also think many companies don’t see benefits in investing in an area that doesn’t generate direct revenue or give a fast ROI.

Finally, I’m too young to have known the old times (26 y.o.), but since keyboards have been used to produce documentation, the final document has always been in the writer’s mind. Switching to a topic/map structure and considering reuse at authoring time is a tough challenge for a population that has often been working for decades with a document-centric approach.

I can’t find reasons that are specific to the semiconductor industry and would not also apply to any other industry.

DITAWriter: What is your best experience using DITA? What is your worst experience using DITA?

Colin Maudry: My best experience happened in 2008, I was an intern localization quality engineer at Translations.com, and I remember perfectly that preparing XML content for translation and delivery could be a nightmare (encoding, broken markup, content to be translated or not, etc.)

Last year, when I created the first translation project in XTM Cloud. I only had to upload a zip with DITA content: it was segmented and analyzed without anything to configure, translators could start working right away. The @translate attribute was obviously supported. It really felt like I was in 21st century!

As for the worst experience I have had with DITA, that happened shortly after I arrived at NXP (December 2010), when I had to use an existing set of stylesheets to render PDF data sheets. It had to be done in two steps:

• Integrating them in Componize (thanks for their help!)
• Fine tuning them to include the latest improvements (XSL-FO, be damned!).

I had not received proper training from Componize at that time, and though I knew the theory, I had never developed much in XSLT. These were the longest working days…

Friday: answers to these same questions from people working with DITA in the semiconductor industry who wanted their answers to remain anonymous…

Bob Beims on DITA Semi

As I have contacts with a number of people in this industry (having previously worked in it myself) I decided to send several questions to people on their reactions on the upcoming specialization and what their general experiences with DITA have been. The responses I received will appear in a series of posts on this site over the course of the week.

Bob Beims has long been one of the main drivers of the semiconductor specialization at OASIS. He is the Information Development Program Manager at Freescale Semiconductor. He’s been there for over 10 years and prior to that almost 15 years within the Semiconductor division at Motorola. He pushed for the adoption of a DITA-based platform within Freescale, which he says reduced cycle time, increased quality, and improved customer satisfaction with their documentation. In his “spare” time he works with several cross-functional teams within Freescale to improve business processes in addition to chairing the OASIS Semiconductor TC.

Here are his responses to my questions about DITA and his own experiences in the semiconductor industry:

DITA Writer: From a semiconductor industry perspective, what are the chief benefits of using DITA?

Bob Beims The chief benefits of DITA for semiconductor companies are obviously similar to other tech industries at large: proven topic-based approaches to information development help customer understanding, and DITA enables topic-based authoring on large scales. But beyond that, the benefits that are specific to semiconductor companies were outlined in my CIDM BP article (Volume 13, Issue 6 – Dec. 2011) and later recognized in our being awarded the 2012 Rare Bird Award: integrating product development and information development via XML-enabled data flows. The staggeringly large scale of the effort required to define, develop and document today’s SoCs is simply untenable without such automation (in my opinion, based on 32 years in the industry).

DITA Writer: Are you looking to implement the DITA Semiconductor specialization when it is released alongside DITA 1.3?

Bob Beims Yes. Of course, we intend to be at the forefront of that effort. (BTW, the current plan is to make the semiconductor specializations a profile of the DITA spec, rather than a part of the DITA 1.3 spec itself.) After discussions with the DITA Technical Committee, the Semiconductor Committee (SC) decided that the best course of action was to “decouple” the Semiconductor Information Design SC specialization body of work from the DITA 1.3 corpus. This will give the give the SC more flexibility in scheduling updates to the specification. It also helps the DITA TC from charges that DITA is getting “too complicated”, as the specialization is entirely optional.

The downside for the SC is that we can’t “ride the coat tails” of the TC in order to get the SIDSC work ratified. So we’ll have to garner “yes” votes from at least 50% of 15% of the OASIS voting membership… knowing full well that only a few OASIS member companies will have any knowledge of semiconductor information development issues that are solved by SIDSC.

DITA Writer: Have you had the opportunity to import DITA XML from a firm you do business with?

Bob Beims Not yet, as we’ve yet to find one that has reach a level of maturity where we could pilot such an effort. But hopefully we’re getting close!

DITA Writer: Not all semiconductor firms have taken on DITA. Why do you think that is?

Bob Beims Because it presents such a radical departure from legacy methods. After 5 years of proven success and maturity at Freescale, I’m still fighting adoption battles here and there. “I want my FrameMaker back!” continues to be heard frequently from the non-ID community with whom we must integrate workflows. By and large, the semiconductor industry ignored the complexities of robust end-to-end information development for decades while climbing up the Moore’s Law device curve. Now that we’re producing such massively complex devices with shorter and shorter design cycle times, that inattention to such a critical workflow is really causing problems for customers. So it is now time to pay the piper!

DITA Writer: What is your best experience using DITA? What is your worst experience using DITA?

Bob Beims Hmmm…

Best: outlined in the CIDM article (significant cycle time reductions for non-ID workflows due to XML-based ID workflows).

Worst: staying ahead of the adoption curve without sufficient funding to meet the needs of all end users (we’ve focused 95% of our investment on content management, publishing and delivery and somewhat “ignored” authoring tools usability; and we’ve focused primarily on the needs of the ID community… which is coming back to bite us now as we attempt to get late-adopters from outside of the ID community to join the party).

Stilo DITA Knowledges Series

I am told that the webinar will contain some real-world examples that illustrate why it is important to re-work content prior to converting it to DITA XML. There’s also a promise of how to create useful metrics around cleaning up legacy content prior to conversion versus after conversion.

The webinar is 30-minutes in length and will run on Thursday, February 28, 2013 at 10AM PST (which is 1PM EST and 6PM UK time).

For more information head to the webinar registration page.

DITA News

DITA Metrics 101

DITAToo’s Final Survey Results on Converting Legacy Content to DITA
CMS Vendor DITAToo has released the final results of its survey that looked at how firms are converting their legacy content over to DITA. You can skim through some of its highlights, or read the full report here. Again, I hope to do an analysis of this in a future article here.

Survey: Following the Trends – is your content ready?
Speaking of surveys, the folks at CIDM and DCL are trying to understand how companies content delivery strategies are being impacted by the latest trends in technology. They would like to know more about how the changing requirements for delivery are affecting your business today and how you anticipate those requirements will affect your business decisions in the next few years. As an added incentive, they are offering a draw for a $100 American Express Gift Card for those who complete the survey. Here a link to the survey.

DITA per Day Blog Launched by Don Day
DITA guru Don Day (dare I call him the “Father of DITA”?) has just launched a new blog called “DITA per Day“. As he says on the site, it is dedicated to “sharing my perspective on the standard, whether in explaining my own take on element usage or giving some insight on how certain elements or features came to be”. Currently there are four posts, which look at <dita>, <map>, <title> and <topic>. Definitely a site to bookmark and keep an eye on.

oXygen Editor Updated to 14.2
It’s a point release, but there are a number of significant updates in the updated version of oXygen, including:

• Complete support for XML Schema 1.1
• A “Review Panel” which seems to be a Track Changes-like function
• The ability to share dictionary additions at the project level
• Edit MathML equations using MathFlow in Eclipse
• Author mode now directly supports input for Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters
• SharePoint support in the DITA Maps Manager

…and plenty more. Full information can be found on oXygen’s What Is New in XML Editor 14.2 page.

DITA Tools

• Thanks to a posting on the LinkedIn DITA Awareness forum, there are several additions to the Sample DITA-Produced Output page.
• One new editor added to the List of DITA Optimized Editors, and updated information on a couple of other editors there.
• A few changes/updates to the DITA Tools listing
• Mark Lewis’ new book has added to the dedicated DITA Books page, along with expanded descriptions to some of the other books listed there.

Pictures from the Last Intelligent Content Conference
Just ran across this page, which contains shots of the people who presented and attended the most recent Intelligent Content conference in San Francisco. It’s great to put names to faces, and it is clear from some of the candid shots posted that people had a fun and interesting time there. Now if only we can convince those holding these conferences to record and post online videos of some of these presentations…

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

Area 51 – DITA on StackExchange

For those who are not familiar with StackExchange it is a set of question and answers websites that focus on a given topic, ranging from various programming languages and software applications, to patent advice, bicycles, project management, Lego, cooking, and more. The one for DITA is still considered to be in the development stage, but it has rapidly gained a significant following from some senior members within the DITA community and there appears to be considerable momentum that ought to make this a site worth keeping an eye on. Some of the top-voted questions that the experts are committing to answering include:

• What is the best way to create SVG images for DITA when transforming with DITA OT?
• What is the best way to embed multimedia and non-DITA XML in DITA topics, and provide suitable transforms that enable its use?
• How do I use Antenna house or RenderX engines instead of the default open toolkit PDF render?
• What’s the best approach to reusing DITA content in a version control system (not a CMS)?
• When would you use a relationship table as opposed to adding relationship links to topics?

So as you can see, some good nitty-gritty questions having to do with DITA implementation. Some people have already taken a stab at providing summary answers, but the focus at this point is having people sign up and commit to providing their expertise in order to get things going on the site.

Anders has said that one of the reasons for wanting to start up this Q&A site for DITA is that older forums, such as the still-popular DITA-users group on Yahoo is showing signs of its age: there is a concern that the extensive code samples once posted to the site are disappearing, and that some posts are disappearing altogether. Hence the desire for something that is (hopefully) more permanent.

If you think you can lend a hand, or are just interested in seeing the answers to some of the questions that have already been posed, please check out the site!

Recently I ran across another blog post that extensively referenced one of my recent articles here looking at the sizes of the types of companies that are using DITA. I considered posting a response to it directly on their site, but I figure I can do a better job of it if I can include a chart to illustrate my point.

The blog post in question wonders aloud whether or not the relative success or failure of DITA adoption within companies may in fact emulate a Power Law, which would show that most of the market can be split among the big players, and the remainder being the classic “long tail”. He believes that DITA is “a solution aimed primarily at ‘big player problems’” and states that if DITA adoption by big and small companies does follow a Power Law distribution, it would mean that it is successful only with big firms and not with smaller ones.

It would be true if that were the case. It’s not.

Here’s the graph he uses to show what a Power Law distribution would be like:

Power Law Curve (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

If I re-graph the numbers from my original pie chart in the same manner as this chart, this is what you get:

Size of Companies Using DITA – Bar Chart with Trendline

Clearly these things are not the same. The line I’ve added is a trend line showing clearly that there are in fact at least three peaks in terms of the sizes of the firms using DITA: one with the largest (10,000+ employees) firms, another with the medium-to-large sized (1,001-5,000 employees) firms, and a third clustered around small-to-medium sized (51-200 employees) firms. You could still argue that on the whole it tends to be larger companies that choose to use DITA (and to fair I said as much in my original article) but the distribution we see here definitely does not match the standard Power Law curve, and more closely matches a classic “triple peak”. While it is true that the data is informally-derived, what I didn’t say before is that the amount of mathematical confidence that these numbers show a real trend is high given the relatively large sample size.

You could still argue that the majority of firms using DITA tend to be larger firms, but you just can’t deny that a considerable number of smaller firms are also using DITA.

Okay, that’s busted. The more interesting question though is why? Why does DITA seem to work well in companies of large, medium and small sizes?

More on that in the next DITAWriter article…

In a previous article I looked at job descriptions for Technical Writers where “DITA” was mentioned and found that they comprised about 4% of all such jobs in the United States. That number is significant given that FrameMaker is mentioned in 10% of all such Technical Writer jobs listed on the Indeed.com site, given that it has been the tech writer’s tool of choice for decades.

There are other questions that come up from this type of survey, such as:

• In what context does “DITA” appear in these job descriptions?
• What types of firms are doing the hiring?
• Is it just “Technical Writer” jobs where DITA experience is needed?

For the answers to these questions, read on.

DITA in Context within Job Ads
DITA has not been around as long compared to many of the typical tools of the trade, including FrameMaker and Word for example, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of the job ads find DITA a desirable skill, but not necessarily a requirement. The two phrases that come up in the most recent set of job listings for “Technical Writers” + DITA on Indeed.com are:

• “Experience writing online content using DITA desired, but not required.”
• “Experience/Skills Desired: Knowledge of DITA.”
• “DITA experience is a plus.”
• “Familiarity with XML markup and DITA an advantage.”

So presumably at these firms DITA is either being used or is at least being thought about seriously, and the expectation is that a new hire ought to be able to pick up the skill.

DITA is often only one component that potential employers are looking for in a skilled Technical Writer. Often the names of other specifications or tools are mentioned in job descriptions:

• “Experience with HTML, XHTML, CSS, DITA, and content management systems (CMS).”
• “Knowledge of structured FrameMaker, XML, DITA, XSLT, HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, and Perl is a desired.”
• “Solid understanding of DITA, CMS, XML, topic based authoring, and working in a content management system.”
• “Working knowledge of RoboHelp, Captivate, MadCap Flare, and/or DITA/XML authoring tools.”

When DITA is mentioned along with other tools and standards, the terms that come up the tend to be “single-sourcing”, “FrameMaker” and “Content Management System (CMS)”. The last two terms are often mutually exclusive, so that if FrameMaker is mentioned, experience with a CMS is not, and vice versa. This is not universally the case though I think the following line from a Technical Writer job says all that needs to be said: “Currently, [company name] uses FrameMaker to author documents but we are transitioning to an XML-based authoring system”. It is rare that specific DITA CMSes are mentioned by name, but the few I have seen mentioned include the systems by Astoria, Ixiasoft and SDL.

Make no mistake though, there are some employers where DITA knowledge or experience is expected; some typical phrases that come up:

• “Knowledge and experience with DITA important.”
• “Must have: DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture).”
• “Required Experience: Writing in XML DITA.”

I think it is clear at this point that having some knowledge of and especially experience with DITA is becoming an increasingly important job skill for technical writers to have. While we are still clearly at a point in time where DITA knowledge is not an expectation, but for those technical writing jobs where it is being asked for, it may be that “little bit extra” that makes the difference between getting hired or not.

Who is Hiring?
I compared the Technical Writer job listings against my list of Companies using DITA. While there are a number of job placement firms out there who are seeking applicants on behalf of an unnamed client, most of the firms that directly place a job ad looking for tech writers with DITA knowledge are present in the list (and those that are not I am keeping a watch on for future developments). Here’s a short list of companies currently (as of January 2013) looking for Technical Writers with some knowledge or experience with DITA, along with the industry sector they belong to:

• Acme Packet (Telecommunications)
• AGCO (Machinery)
• Allscripts (Computer Software)
• Amazon (Internet)
• Blizzard Entertainment(Computer Games)
• Brocade Communications (Computer Networking)
• Elekta (Medical Devices)
• InfoPros (Information Technology and Services)
• Mentor Graphics (Computer Software)
• MIB (Nonprofit)
• National Instruments (Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing)
• NetApp (Information Technology and Services)
• ngmoco:) (Entertainment)
• Nokia (Telecommunications)
• Oracle (Information Technology and Services)
• Pentaho (Computer Software)
• Riverbed Technology (Computer Networking)
• salesforce.com (Internet)
• Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics (Hospital & Health Care)
• Sonics (Semiconductors)
• Techprose (Management Consulting)
• MathWorks (Machinery)
• TIBCO Software (Computer Software)
• Varian Medical Systems (Medical Devices)

While you can say a lot of these jobs are in the “high tech” sector (software, computer networking, information technology) it is again clear that DITA is not just being used in that sector anymore. DITA is clearly becoming more pervasive in its use over time, spreading to other industries where its advantages (i.e. content reuse, reduced location costs, more consistent messaging, etc.) are seen as a big plus. Again, it is another reason to seriously consider getting some DITA knowledge/experience if you do not already have it.

DITA is Not Just for “Technical Writers”
While my focus was specifically on “Technical Writers” + DITA on Indeed.com—mainly because the term “Technical Writer” is still the most commonly-used term for that profession—if you simply do a search on “DITA” all by itself you will see many more jobs, typically almost twice the number of jobs with “Technical Writer” in them. Here are some other jobs titles that are more or less synonymous with the more popular “Technical Writer” term that appeared on Indeed.com when just doing a search on “DITA”:

• Associate Content Developer
• Information Developer
• Instructional Designer
• NA Editorial Manager
• Technical Author

What I found telling though were the other types of positions advertised where DITA was being asked for that were not typical for Technical Writer position, such as:

• Director, Business Solutions Architect
• Documentation Toolsmith
• Java Developer – Web Services
• Program Manager – Global Vendor Experience
• Senior Engineer, Documentation Tools and Architecture
• Senior Sales Consultant

Several of these (“Business Solutions Architect”, “Documentation Toolsmith”) are clearly for roles designed to support the operations of the Technical Documentation unit, so some knowledge of DITA may well be a requirement. What I find interesting are jobs like the “Program Manager” one, which is looking for “experience with HTML, XHTML, CSS, DITA, and content management systems (CMS)”, or the “Senior Sales Consultant” role which says: “today, our unique global approach is based on an in-depth knowledge of content, data and standards such as XML, SGML, S1000D, DITA, ATA, SCORM and MIL.” It will be interesting to see if this is a trend and there are more jobs like these in the future, where some level of expertise of documentation standards like DITA becomes more and more of a requirement for non-Technical Writing jobs.

Final Thoughts
So where do things finally stand for Technical Writers and DITA? It’s arguably still early days yet for DITA, since its use is increasingly widespread but is not yet pervasive. Having DITA knowledge or experience is not at the point where it is a requirement for any Technical Writing position you are likely to find out there, but it can be safely be said to be an increasingly important skill to add to one’s repertoire along with a knowledge of more traditional tech writing tools and basic communication skills.