Managing DITA – How to Get the Most from What DITA has to Offer
DITA has a lot to offer organizations that need to find a better way to create, manage, and deliver high quality documentation. The question is not so much about whether to adopt DITA as it is how best to do so. This presentation will look at DITA from the perspective of management and consider what best practices can be applied to leveraging DITA to maximum effect while minimizing the cost of doing so. After more than a decade of experience behind the DITA community, with projects undertaken of every possible size and shape, there is a reasonably clear picture of what works and what does not. Although this presentation sounds high level, it will in fact proceed by example and use case studies to illustrate a set of managerial best practices that have emerged from prior DITA implementation experiences. The goal is to provide a concrete list of suggested actions that can be invoked as part of the project planning effort or applied as review criteria for projects already underway or in production.
What can attendees expect to learn?
Attendees will come away from this session with a set of best practices for managing the introduction of DITA into organizations. They can use these best practices on their next project or they can compare them to their own experiences to see how they compare. Specific effort will be made to tie the best practices being presented not only to particular implementation case studies but also to general principles and models of management. This can help DITA advocates to communicate more effectively with organizational management who often try to correlate claims about DITA with the way other aspects of their business are discussed and managed.
Meet the Presenter
Joe Gollner is the Director of Gnostyx Research Inc. (http://www.gnostyx.com) where he leads an interdisciplinary team in providing lean content solutions to organizations around the world. He has been active in the content management industry for over twenty-five years and has managed a wide variety of DITA projects over the last ten years. He is a graduate of Queens University (Mathematics and Literature) and the University of Oxford (Masters of Philosophy). He has also completed additional post-graduate programs in Knowledge Management, Business Analysis, and Project Management. He blogs on the nature of content as the Content Philosopher (www.gollner.ca) and, yes, he is still working on his book about “engineering content”. In 2014, he received the Matthew Arnold faculty award from the University of Oxford for his recent contributions to Digital Humanities.