What's the point, indeed! (formerly site-license docs)

[Faith Weber <weber -at- EASI -dot- ENET -dot- DEC -dot- COM>]

John Sanders writes:

>And the overall question, is of course, what's the point of anyone doing
>the documentation if it isn't even being USED?

If you want to get good and depressed, this is a good topic to think
about for a while (I've tried it)!

I don't know the answer to your question about site licenses, but
we have similar problems with our own documentation.
The documentation we write doesn't always get distributed to the
people who need it. It sometimes ends up in a closet or corner
somewhere, or the lead person reads and keeps it and is supposed to
inform the other users what's in the latest version, but doesn't
always (in our case that's a big task for one person to take on).

Another problem is Murphy's Law. The old, outdated, low-quality
documents seem to get around better than the new, updated, high-
quality documents. So some users, after experiencing the old, yucko
docs, give up on the documentation altogether. Once a user decides
he hates your documentation, you can give him a flawless manual
with dancing girls and a box of chocolates, and he still won't
touch it.

On the other hand, this might make you feel better: I did a survey
of our users, which included questions about when and how people
look for information. One of the options was "I ask a coworker"
(I think most of us do this before consulting the manual). Some users
at a large company, for reasons I don't understand, named the
coworker they get their information from. Interestingly, everyone
seemed to be asking the same person. When I looked at the Answer Grape's
survey, guess what? Turns out this person is looking for information
in the documentation *all the time*! I wonder why!!

Faith
weber -at- easi -dot- enet -dot- dec -dot- com