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Subject:Re: Costs and benefits of documentation From:"Mead, Jay" <Jay -dot- Mead -at- DEN -dot- GALILEO -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 18 Dec 1998 14:56:22 -0700
Geoff Hart asks:
> A while back, I asked techwr-l whether anyone else had similar data
> to present on the costs (and therefore revenues) associated with
> documentation. Since Robert has broken the ice, I'll try again: does
> anyone have comparable figures they're willing to provide?
>
>
Geoff:
I'm sorry I missed your earlier inquiry about doc costs and benefits. For a
paper on that subject I found several examples you might be interested in.
Here's one:
"Mary Wise, at a leading supply chain management software company, reports
that her company markets training materials to accompany their software
product (personal correspondence, May 1997). These materials are expensive,
but they sell "like hotcakes"; the materials earn substantial revenue for
the company. The customers who pay thousands of dollars for the product
information understand the importance of that information and put a direct
dollar value on it. The very close kinship between training material and
technical documentation makes this an important case for documenters seeking
to measure the value they add..."
This example is not very concrete, of course, but it shows a good approach
to the value-add problem, as more and more companies are choosing to sell
docs for a direct bottom-line return. Here's another profit-center example,
using a different approach: Ed See at IBM has described how his department
was structured as an entrepreneurial effort within the larger corporation,
and thus was able to "sell" its services, and accumulate lots of cost and
benefit data that otherwise would have been lost or ignored. This is a
great approach, it seems to me.
I would be very interested in further examples (with figures!) of companies
that treat documentation as a profit center, or that use the entrepreneurial
model of Ed See.
If you're interested, that article was published in the August '98 STC
journal Technical Communication. A similar article is available at
members.aol.com/jaymead.
Let me know what you think. I would be very interested in other cost and
benefit data or war stories you know about.
