Is single source always the best option?
I have spent a lot of time formatting documents lately. Taking information from, say, a Word document and turning training documents, taking information from SharePoint web parts and turning them into documents, converting training courses into procedures, and so on.
“Ahh,” you say. “You should be using single source. You should be using something like DITA to do this.”
And yes I should, but …
- I am the only person in our company who knows what DITA is, let alone knows how to use it
- I am the only person in the company who would ever write/read documentation in XML
- Our company provides Word and SharePoint as our document management tools.
You often hear good reasons for converting to a single source system, but sometimes there are also compelling reasons against it as well. You need to consider these before you race in.
Ask yourself:
- Who is going to manage it when you are gone? If the next person is going to convert it straight back to Word, why bother in the first place?
- Are you changing it just to keep up with trends or can you justify the need for change?
- How much work will it save you? More importantly, how much work will it save the company as a whole?
I know a single source of content will save me a lot of work. But for other people in the company it won’t. It will mean more work for them, not to mention a very steep learning curve, an investment in software and a strong training committment. It will save me lots of time and effort—in the long run—but it’s going to double the work effort of ten other people. Where is the benefit?
Not only that, our company already has a decreed policy—Word and SharePoint are the tools we use. Who am I to go against a company-wide policy (that works, incidentally), without a truly convincing case?
I work with developers. For the developers at my work the only way to share knowledge is via a wiki. It takes a lot of time and effort to convince them that they can’t implement their own open source wiki, that they must use SharePoint as their reference tool. (MOSS is coming, but it’s not at our company yet.)
I would be a hypocrite (not to mention lose all credibility) if I suddenly started doing my own thing documentation-wise.
Comments (5 comments)
[…] This blog post asks whether or not single sourcing is the best option for creating documents. I’m not sure that I fully agree with everything in the post, but something that the author wrote struck a chord: I know a single source of content will save me a lot of work. But for other people in the company it won’t. It will mean more work for them, not to mention a very steep learning curve, an investment in software and a strong training commitment. It will save me lots of time and effort—in the long run—but it’s going to double the work effort of ten other people. Where is the benefit? […]
A different perspective on single sourcing by Communications from DMN / April 9th, 2008, 9:45 pm / #
Not sure I fully understand your issues.
DITA is a standard, not a tool. XML is a format, not an editing application. It’s perfectly possible to have a single source of information that is edited in Word, or via a Wiki… with an engine (in the background) converting the XML to a friendlier, editable format.
Or am I missing something?
No single source isn’t for everyone, but not for the reasons you’ve outlined.
Gordon / April 10th, 2008, 6:11 am / #
Gordon
You are correct, and re-reading the article I was blaming the tools when in reality I was railing at the methods we use in our workplace to manage documentation. That’s blogging for you.
Because of the way our company is structured, we (the company) duplicate a lot of content. One person writes the initial document (and this can be anyone in the company) and then we spend a lot of time either writing the same content for different departments, copying and pasting from the original document, or both. It’s labour intensive and hard to keep up to date, but each department is responsible for their own documents, and each department does that.
Because we reuse so much between departments a single source of content would be ideal. And while the tool we use for this can be anything, including Word, a better solution for us would be the classic database solution where we could combine content to make our documents.
But … if you can’t get company-wide agreement to single sourcing, plus management commitment to making it happen, then trying to implement single sourcing is usually a bad idea. Not only that, while it would benefit those of us who do the cutting and pasting, it would be so much harder for those people who write the original documents.
CabSav / April 10th, 2008, 8:16 am / #
A tricky situation. I tackled similar by approaching the people who were feeling the pain and getting their buy-in, building the business case from the bottom up, getting support so, when you finally go for management commitment you can be assured that everyone else is saying that it would be a good thing.
Not easy though, and that only worked for me because it was a small enough company that I could approach everyone personally.
Re-reading your comment and your post you are right. Often the right solution is unique and not anything generic no matter how good the theory.
Gordon / April 13th, 2008, 8:31 pm / #
[…] Is single source always the best option? Single source, rightly, gets a lot of press and for a lot of companies would be of benefit. However it can be hard to convince others of those, here’s an example: I know a single source of content will save me a lot of work. But for other people in the company it won’t. It will mean more work for them, not to mention a very steep learning curve, an investment in software and a strong training committment. It will save me lots of time and effort—in the long run—but it’s going to double the work effort of ten other people. Where is the benefit? […]
one man writes » Recently Read / April 13th, 2008, 9:26 pm / #
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