Technical Writer

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.