In episode 93 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Sarah O’Keefe talk about how to determine whether DITA XML is a good fit for smaller content requirements.

“Scalability or anticipated scale is actually a good reason to implement DITA for a small team.”

–Sarah O’Keefe

Related links: 

* Localization, scalability, and consistency

Twitter handles: 

* @gretylkinsey

* @sarahokeefe

Transcript:

Gretyl Kinsey:                   Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about how to determine whether DITA XML is a good fit for smaller content requirements. Hello, and welcome. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.

Sarah O’Keefe:                   Hi, I’m Sarah O’Keefe.

GK:                   And we’re going to be talking about small DITA in this podcast. So just to set the scene, what do we mean when we talk about small in this context?

SO:                   So when we talk about small DITA or small DITA requirements, it could be a variety of things, but basically, a smaller company, a limited number of content creators, and or a small content set. So instead of tens of thousands of pages translated into 50 languages, we’re talking about two or 3000 pages in four languages, or 500 pages.

GK:                   Right. And sometimes we’re talking about as far as the actual content production people, maybe it’s just one writer, maybe it’s a small team of two, or three, or five. And maybe it’s also something like you have a fair number of contributors who are part time, but you only have maybe one or two people who actually gather all of that content, and put it together. So the total operation for that content production is pretty small scale.

SO:                   Following up on that, I think we all know what we mean by a big group, a big implementation. So it’s almost helpful to look at small DITA as being not large. Not tens of thousands of pages, not 50 writers, not a ton of languages, not a ton of scale. So it’s one of these environments where you don’t have the slam dunk business requirement, because you have so much stuff.

GK:                   Yeah, absolutely. We know that DITA is typically a good fit for a larger team, like you’ve said, because it really saves a lot of cost from the single-sourcing angle. So for example, the larger content set that you have, the more potential you probably have for reuse across that content set. And that means that you can save a lot more from establishing that single source of truth in DITA, whereas when you’ve got a smaller content set, you may not have that much reuse, or what you have may not justify the cost of that setup.

SO:                   Yeah. I mean, it’s really common, I think, to see organizations that have a small chunk of content with actually zero reuse. So you look at it from the, do you have a business case for DITA point of view, and for reuse? The answer is absolutely not. Because there isn’t any.

GK:                   When we look at some of the other factors that typically work for these larger groups too, another one is localization. And in a lot of ways, that one stems from reuse, because the more languages that you translate into, the more times that you have to pay, and if you are using copies rather than true reuse, that makes your costs go up. But if you have a smaller team, or maybe you’re delivering to a smaller market,