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Here are some snips from the the aricle "Zeroing
in on the Bottom Line" by Paula R. Berger in the
January 2002 issue of Intercom (monthly
publication of the STC, www.stc.org). The entire
article can be found under Publicaitons > Search
on the STC site.
< begin snips >
In her article on trends in the January 2000
Intercom, JoAnn T. Hackos laid out her compelling,
and extremely accurate, vision for moving technical
communication from a cottage industry to a mature
business process. A large component of that move
was the implementation of single-sourcing solutions
for information reusability and repurposing. Well,
it's two years later and we're not there yet. What
happened?
< snip >
For one thing, large-scale corporate single sourcing
costs a lot of money to implement.
< snip >
Right now, building custom solutions is the only way
to go.
< snip >
The single-sourcing tools have not yet caught up to
the need.
< snip >
We still have the promise of XML, but at this point
most XML tools do not have a documentation focus.
< snip >
In addition, single sourcing may never be worthwhile
for small and mid-size companies. If these companies'
products change rapidly and don't generate a huge
number of documentation pages, the up-front cost
reductions single sourcing promises may never be
great enough to yield sufficient ROI.
< end snips >
> I would appreciate your thoughts about the direction
> of technical writing departments and practices in the
> near future. Specifically, I invite your comments
> about my growing conviction that we will see a growing
> methodology shift driven by increased understanding of
> the benefits of creating documentation that is easy to
> re-use and maintain. It appears clear that this will
> in most cases be through employment of XML and
> repository tools based upon this technology.
>
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