RE: Your opinion, please!

["Mark Baker" <mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com>]

Brian Das wrote:

> But the clients are completely baffled and frustrated by the whole
> regulatory environment, and how the software works in it. They
> don't get the
> concepts, including the underlying technology (XML). So they can't even
> begin to understand how those concepts function "on the ground"
> (i.e. in the
> software).

I think you have captured the essence of your problem in that last sentence.
If people do not understand the task, they will never understand the tool.
There is not going to be a successful information strategy for the tool
until you address the problem that people do not understand the task.

It seems to me that many of the companies the supply software to regulated
industries make themselves experts on the regulatory environment and supply
help and consulting on that environment as part of their offering. A lot of
our customers are consultants who create specific document processing
software for industries that must use specific SGML and XML DTDs, and our
customers base their business on their knowledge of those DTDs and the
regulations that accompany them. A lot of our own business is based on first
helping people to understand the issues involved in content engineering,
markup, reuse, and single sourcing, and then teaching them to use our tools.

Whether or not your company wants to change its business model in this way
is, of course, beyond your control. But don't get carried away with the idea
that there is some documentation design or packaging trick that is going to
help here. If you want people to understand your software, you, or somebody
else, will have to first get them to understand  their task.

Perfectly ordinary documentation and training methods will probably suffice
to teach them their task, and perfectly ordinary documentation and training
methods will probably suffice to teach them your software. You just have to
apply them in the right order.

---
Mark Baker
Stilo Corporation
1900 City Park Drive, Suite 504 , Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1J 1A3
Phone: 613-745-4242, Fax: 613-745-5560
Email mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com
Web: http://www.stilo.com

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