Presentation: DITA: You’re doing it wrong

DITA can enable operational efficiency, reuse, improve data integrity, and extensive savings on translation costs. But so what? If DITA is seen only as a way to save, while doing what we were supposed to be doing anyway then migrating to it will never be seen as a strategic move for an organisation. We were never supposed to be inefficient, and never supposed to let data integrity drop. If all we’re doing is creating our old outputs with less errors, faster and for less cost, we’ve not really done anything except fix something that never should have been allowed to get so broken in the first place. Managers who aren’t directly responsible for documentation or service departments (unless those departments depend heavily on documentation) may sign off on a CCMS and content migration off the back of reuse or data integrity, but the message “same thing: cheaper & faster”, will not re-position content within an organisation, it will not get you the engagement you need from SMEs and definitely not from end users. We need to do DITA projects that go further. With silos finally starting to come down in the wider digital arena and Lightweight DITA on the way, we have an opportunity to form cross-functional teams who are really affecting customer experience. But we have to approach DITA solutions differently. Attend this presentation for an illumination of what you could do better in your DITA initiative.

What can attendees expect to learn?

This presentation will re-position DITA for the average technical communicator and give them some perspective from the wider digital space as to how to communicate with their colleagues. Noz Urbina offers some tips for how to break down silos and participate in conversations outside the manuals-and-help world of DITA.