RE: Real value (was implementing single-source) - demonstrated!

[HALL Bill <bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com>]

Andrew Plato replied to my last posting as follows:

>With all due respect, Bill, you're situation is the exception 
>not the rule for most tech pubs groups. 

>Most organizations (outside of the government and companies like 
>Boeing) do not produce the quantity and extent of the documentation 
>you produce.  Also, many firms must consider profit motive and 
>time to market - which you do not. You're a defense contractor 
>or government body. Sure budgets are an issue, but government 
>budgets are not the same as working in a profit-centric private
>industry. 

>I wholly agree that huge, massive documentation management 
>systems are a necessity when, like your situation, you are dealing 
>with a monstrous amount of information. But places that produce 
>5000 or less pages of documentation per year are not going to get a 
>phenomenal benefit.  They are going to buy a 747 when all they need 
>is a hand-cart. 

We are both talking about a spectrum of requirements here, but Andrew
believes the cutoff point for a cost-effective implementation of a content
management system is considerably higher than we found it to be.

First, some corrections to Andrew's misperceptions about Tenix. Tenix is a
private company (admittedly, one of Australia's largest, but still privately
owned as a family business). The ANZAC Ship Contract was also quite
innovative as far as defense contracts around the world are concerned. Tenix
is working under a strictly fixed price. We get not a brass razoo out of our
client for any investment we make in documentation technologies. The
business case to implement a content management had to succeed purely on the
grounds of hard nosed commercial reality in a time when Australian Defence
spending on new projects has been severely cut back due to the need to cover
a $ BN+ cost blowout in the Collins Class Submarine project and the major
peace-keeping effort in East Timor. That is why the SIM implementation
project took so long!

Secondly, although we have a large volume of data to manage, because the
project has been implemented late in project life cycle, the volume of work
to manage is not that large, as essentially all authoring was complete. Our
costing following the delivery of Ship 4 were based on reductions against a

requirement for 4 maintenance authors and 1-2 data administrators in the old
system. Project costs were amortised over the requirement to deliver data
for the remaining 6 years of the project.

Finally, our long term goal for the system is to implement content
management technology in the bidding and contract negotiation end of the
business cycle, because this is our most chaotic and costly area of
documentation. The only reason this was not done first is that the greatest
benefits will be gained from working against joint Defence/industry data
transfer standards (e.g., DTDs or schemas) for these kinds of documents. I
have been promoting this in the Australian scene, and have been making good
progress towards having a Defence/industry project formally established with
state & federal support, possibly also including some form of association
with the Legal XML contracts group (http://www.legalxml.org/contracts/.

Glenn Emerson asked about 'single sourcing' video clips and other multimedia
in documents. My understanding is that SIM was developed from the start with
this in mind (e.g., the research institute within RMIT which owns the
product is the Multimedia Database Systems: http://www.mds.rmit.edu.au/).
The only reason we are not now considering implementing such systems for
training or maintenance manuals is one of bandwidth and storage capacity.
However, conceptually, it is quite easy to envisage authoring structured
'single source' documents where the user would have the choice between a
step-by-step description of a procedure accompanied by static illustrations,
vs a video clip with a voice over - depending on the bandwidth and storage
capacity of the user system.

Glen also asked under what circumstances it was economic to implement
structured management systems. There is never a simple answer to this, as it
depends on a cost-benefit analysis against a number of parameters relating
to the documentation to be managed:

o  Document longevity (will the documents outlive a proprietary word
processing system)

o  Anticipated number of revisions (no point using structured methods for
something you are going to write once and then forget)

o  Requirements for standardisation (can you produce any format/structure
you want, or are their some kinds of industry standards you are expected to
follow

o  Degree of standardisation amongst documents (how many documents are there
of each type)

o  Potential to re-use content across many documents of the same or
different types (don't reinvent what you already know and can easily find
for reuse)

o  Availability of existing standards for the kinds of documents you produce
(DTD or schemas, FOSI/EDD packages, etc.)

o  Multiple authors working on the same documents (very difficult to avoid
style conflicts and resulting corruption and crashes in a word processing
environment)


o  Review and release cycle time requirements for completing documents
against established document types (processing through a workflow management
environment is far faster and more reliable than the typical paper chase
review cycle). Also, as noted in the previous posting, authoring time can be
substantially reduced in a structured environment where authors have no
formatting concerns and are strictly focussed on logical structure and text.

o  Availability of staff expertise to set up and maintain a system
(difficult to establish a system in the first place, but once implemented
much easier to add new document types).

There are also a range of different levels (and costs) of structured
management that can be implemented.

o  Controlled formats in a word processing environment

o  Controlled formats combined with a file management system

o  Controlled formats, file and workflow management

o  Merge/macro systems developed in a word processing environment

o  Standalone structured authoring (e.g., FrameMaker+SGML, etc.)

o  Structured authoring combined with a script processing tools

o  Structured authoring combined with a content management database

o  Structured authoring, content management and integral web delivery

What combination is going to be appropriate for any particular enterprise
will depend on some understanding of system costs vs productivity benefits.
The fact that such decisions are not easy to make does not mean that they
are not worth making.

Based on our long history of working with different methods for structuring
documents, I was able to build our business case internally. Where internal
knowledge is lacking, there are a number of suppliers or independent
consultants who should be able to help. They won't be free, but they should
be able to help. Here in Australia, we found both Allette Systems and
CSIRO's Text Information Management group in the Management Information
Systems division to be helpful.

I could write more on this subject, but I will be out of the office for the
rest of the week. If anyone wishes to contact me before next week for more
information on this thread, please feel free to email me at home:
mailto:bill -dot- hall -at- hotkey -dot- net -dot- au -dot- 

Bill Hall
Documentation Systems Specialist
Integrated Logistic Support
ANZAC Ship Project
Tenix Defence Systems Pty Ltd
Williamstown, Vic. 3016 AUSTRALIA
Email: bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com <mailto:bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com> 

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