How can a unified content platform improve documentation operations?

One afternoon I saw someone trying to find an approved safety notice. She looked for it in a Word document (presumably to open up the edited version), as a PDF in the appropriate SharePoint repository, in the appropriate email. But within those 3 emails – sent at different points in time – were different safety notices, each created to solve a problem. There was no problem here for her to solve – she was merely working in a system in which one person created all of the documentation and in which it is not consistent or easy to make changes as required. That’s not documentation.

The average documentation team spends a majority of their time trying to work within the confines of a poorly implemented document management system. Many of their Tuesdays are spent chasing down

What “unified” actually means (and what it doesn’t)

Many tools are marketed as “unified content platforms” but actually attempt to do everything poorly. However, in reality, a unified content platform is something much simpler. A unified content platform is your single source of truth for all of the content in your organization. All of the content in the organization is stored in one place. That is where the content is created. That is where the content is managed. That is where the content is reused. That is where the content is published. The platform is like a library with a proper cataloging system. The author has seen many storage units filled with boxes of content. Each box of content is like a separate library. But, in a storage unit, it is difficult to find what you are looking for. A unified content platform is like a library with a proper cataloging system. All of the content is stored in one place and can be found easily.

With a unified content platform, all information resides in one place or library. Information is properly cataloged and made searchable. The author of information can find needed information before coffee has been sipped. A library with a proper cataloging system is far superior to a storage room full of boxes with all sorts of information.

Unified does not have to equal Rigid. There is a world of difference between a system that will not bend to meet the needs of a team and one that will

The Actual Workflow Problem Most Documentation Teams Never Name Out Loud.

Most of the problems that documentation suffers from today stems from the hand-overs between writers and the rest of the team. Most of those problems are created by the issue of versioning – and the question of which output is the correct one to refer to.

This information comes from another technical writer I spoke with a long time ago. He was responsible for maintaining the documentation for a couple of products. The documentation for these products existed in a couple of formats: a desktop help system, a web portal on the web, and a printed field guide. So there were three different outputs for three different sources of information for all of the topics about the couple of products. A change in terminology for example, would take him two days to update as he manually went through and updated all of the places where he used the word in the three different help systems and the portal. Two days to update a word. I still find that number pretty unbelievable for a technical writer that is very computer savvy.

This is an infrastructure problem dressed up as a writing problem.

A Unified Content Platform supports Single-Source Authoring. In Single-Source Authoring, you can write one version of content and then use that content in other formats as needed. For example, say you wrote a series of topics. Each topic includes a standard disclaimer that appears at the bottom of the topic. In a Unified Content Platform, you would write the disclaimer once and then include the disclaimer in each of the topics where you need the disclaimer. Later, when you make changes to the disclaimer, you would make the change to the single source of the disclaimer and the change would appear in all of the topics where you used the disclaimer. MadCap Software supports documentation teams that use Single-Source Authoring.

Where content reuse actually pays off

By structured content, I mean content that is organized in a particular way to make it easier to manage. To illustrate this, let’s say you have 200 topics of documentation for a product, and each topic of documentation has a disclaimer. One day, someone in Legal decides to change two words in the disclaimer. As the writer of the documentation, you would then change the disclaimer once, and all 200 topics would contain the new version of the disclaimer. This is an example of content reuse.

Also important to note is the reuse of content for later translation into other languages. In these cases, the potential for cost savings is substantial. A large tech documentation group that we work with writes documentation for a product that is sold in many countries around the world. They have more than 200 topics of documentation and, prior to using a unified content platform, spent a great deal of time trying to make sure that updated information that had been added to other translated products were up to date on later translated products. We showed this group how to use MadCap Software for translation of their documentation and they now save a great deal of time and money in ensuring that later updated information is correctly incorporated into later translations.

For the kind of content reuse described above to be managed for you in a single unified platform there is a specific tool offered by MadCap Software that can help manage this content for you. Reused components also save money when the content is to be translated and distributed in many countries around the world. Because the components only need to be translated to languages once, all other parts of the content can then be reused as required and therefore save a lot of money for large documentation sets.

Key Process Changes when Using Unified Platforms for Content Management

Making this kind of contrast visible is much better than waffling on about the changes.

Efficient working is at the core of using a unified platform. Teams can move forward quickly, without time-consuming to and fro’s around updating separate parts of a system. A lot of a writer’s time will be spent improving the content that they have written. This is the very reason that a writer was brought into a company in the first place.

Is Your Team Ready for a Unified Authoring Environment?

• You’re maintaining the same content in more than two places and they regularly drift out of sync
• Version confusion has caused a real mistake, not just an inconvenience, an actual mistake with consequences
• Writers are spending meaningful hours on formatting and output wrangling rather than writing
• Localization costs keep climbing because translators are seeing repeated content as if it’s new content every time

If any of these scenarios sound familiar to you, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure, and that there’s something wrong with you and your team. No, it means the opposite: there is a problem with the system that you’re working in, and that your team has been working around to complete their tasks as best they can. This is not sustainable.

The conclusion nobody particularly wants to write

Switching to a unified content platform is not a project that can be completed in a weekend. It forces a complete re-think of how an organization structures, stores and owns content. It forces some very uncomfortable organizational conversations prior to the ‘ah ha’ moment when everyone realizes the amount of time that your team has been expounded in work that is now handled by the platform in the background.

My colleague’s agony searching for the safety warning of a particular part previously had been scattered throughout 4 locations would have never existed in the first place if he was using a unified content platform.

So here is a final thought: that which takes a long time to build looks obvious the moment it has been built.