The Case of the Stolen Documentation
January 6th, 2010 | Posted in blog 12 Comments »
Who Owns Your Documentation?
Stolen documentation isn’t a unique experience. It happens to technical writers everywhere. It’s more a question of documentation ownership rather than theft. Ben Minson explains,
One of technical writers’ worst nightmares could be for a non-writer to come along behind and not keep up the level of quality we established in a documentation project. It scares us in a sense to be replaced by non-writers. (Who Will Maintain Your Documentation?)
The fear is two-fold. On the one hand, the non-writer who takes over the documentation can act like a bull in a China closet, copying and pasting from Word, mixing styles, not understanding the setup, basically wrecking the consistency, the bullet levels, the formatting. If you see the documentation later and find that the client has added steps without numbers, included text that breaks every rule in the style guide, won’t that be unnerving? Yes, it will make you want to jump out the window.
Worse, though, is the thought that your work products can be maintained by people with no writing skills at all — just regular people, perhaps secretaries or interns or project managers. This devalues the technical writer’s expertise and talent. If enough projects follow a similar route, won’t you eventually be left without any work?
Advantages of Having a Person on the Inside
Scott Nesbitt also comments on document ownership. He says, “Technical writers can be … well, control freaks. We don’t like other people messing about with our documentation.” Of course anyone who spends hours proofreading the same chunk of text — changing semicolons to commas and then back to semicolons, with an eye for language precision that borders a psychological disorder — is going to feel threatened when someone takes over the content. (I’ve always hated group work.)
But Scott also points out a more important matter. He says,
Something that we need to remember, though, is that it isn’t our documentation. We’re not writing it for ourselves. We’re writing it for the people using the software and hardware that we’re documenting. And, as I keep saying, the insights of users are just as valuable as our own. (Getting Users to Read the Documentation)
When you look at the situation from the vantage point of who has the right information, it isn’t always the technical writer. While the writer may be close to project team, the writer is an outsider to the business processes of a department, to the constantly changing workflows and needs of the users. Having a person on the inside, i.e., in the department that interacts with the users, can be an incredible asset to keeping documentation relevant and up to date.
Reactions from the Twittersphere
I polled the Twittersphere to find out how common this sort of situation is, where you create documentation that is later owned by the client. (And by client, I don’t mean the end users, but rather the sponsoring business department for the project.)
Kirsty Taylor says it’s “very common.” She even creates her documentation to be “highly customizable” so that clients can easily modify it. Pancho Castano says his clients frequently want to own the documentation, “but not only that: they also create it in the first place.” In other words, the clients collaborate in the initial authoring process as well.
Tjrainey says resellers definitely want to own documentation, but not mainstream users. Mike Starr says “multiple clients want to maintain documents” after he finishes. He provides all the information they need to maintain it but frequently need his help.
Joe Sokol says “clients almost always want to own the documentation,” but notes that the users don’t necessarily want ownership. Aaron Toronto says maintaining single control over documentation “is outdated in this collaborative age.”
Shelton Oliver has clients who want to own the documentation, “and several who want to rebrand/respin the doc for their company, usually for training.” Alan Houser says having clients own the documentation is “a very common requirement/request. And challenging to provide.”
Scott Nesbitt says clients want to own the documentation “probably more often than we realize.” Wordtree says the request is “very common when there is no formal documentation team,” and Arroxane agrees. Rahel Bailie says clients want to own the documentation “99% of the time.”
The responses are overwhelmingly positive about clients wanting to own the documentation. Obviously companies who hire consultants to create documentation would want to own the documentation after the consultant finishes. But I’m seeing the trend within companies as well. When the company is sizable enough to have numerous business departments, those departments outside of IT often want ownership of the documentation.
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Tags: Adobe Indesign, clients, documentation, maintenance, ownership, quick reference guides, Technical Writing, twittersphere
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Good post, Tom. I think that’s one of the hardest things that tech writers go through is letting their baby get painted another color. It is pushing us, though, to look for more collaborative ways to create content. I’m with you on the wiki train. I’m looking at a DITA to wiki solution. There’s a tool to help if you use the Confluence wiki. I haven’t tried yet, but I will within the next week. The problem I’m facing is the return trip. I want to have a collaborative environment but don’t know how to get the wiki updates back to their XML home. The conversion tool I mentioned supposedly does a wiki to docbook conversion, but the DITA component hasn’t been completed (supposedly it’s in the works). Also, have you thought about how to handle reusable content that would come from single-sourcing if you use the wiki?
Dan,
There is an open source solution for your use case. The project is called DITA2Wiki and it’s available on SourceForge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita2wiki/
Download the latest DITA2Confluence binary distribution + User Guide PDF.
Installing and importing the demo DITA content to the Confluence wiki should be easy and fast. You’ll find some user reviews here (note that they describe some configurations that have changed, so be sure to follow the instructions in the latest User Guide PDF):
* http://justwriteclick.com/2008/10/16/dita-meets-wiki-output-dita-to-wikitext/
* http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/playing-with-dita2confluence/
BTW, DITA2Confluence also supports conref (reuse in DITA), which I don’t think any other DITA-to-wiki solution does. The source text–the content being reused–is editable in the wiki output, but all reuse instances are read-only.
Other nifty features include transforming metadata to wiki labels (useful for compatibility information and other categorization).
If you have any questions, ping me at lisa dot dyer at gmail dot com. I can advise you on the round-trip aspects as well.
Cheers,
- lisa
Lisa, thanks for adding the comment about the DITA2wiki plugin. I’ve seen you demo the plugin and have always been very impressed. My main hangup in adopting the plugin is that I’m using Mediawiki rather than Confluence, and I don’t have my content structured in DITA. But I can see how this plugin would be incredibly helpful were a few variables in my situation different.
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the kind words:)
Some good news regarding DITA2Wiki support for other wikis; a Maven plugin of the DITA2Confluence tool is under development, to be distributed as part of the Maven plugin of DITA OT.
This work creates the appropriate architecture for supporting any wiki, enabling the DITA community to “plug in” their own import functions. GA is expected end of February.
I’m hoping that someone will be inspired to contribute an import function for MediaWiki:)
Cheers,
- lisa
Interesting post. The documentation department I work in has a policy of never releasing the source files. This ensures quality (I’m thinking back to your previous post http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2009/04/23/can-others-do-your-job/) and prevents unfinished, unchecked and possibly incorrect (yet company branded and therefore liability-carrying) documentation being “leaked” to customers.
We are always being asked for the source files (including by customers!) but the answer is always no.
Haitham, thanks for your comment. Retaining the source files seems like a good strategy for a number of reasons — you protect yourself from brand misrepresentation, you maintain your role as the designated producer of the information, and you can keep a tight hold on style and structure. The only weakness is the lack of collaboration. If the SMEs have info you need, collaboration can be extremely helpful. If you already have the info, collaboration is unnecessary.
Tom,
I have been reading your blog on and off for a few years and this is my first comment. Since I write some manuals myself I have also been stuck at the same situation, both on the stealing side and the stolen side. You are absolutely spot-on about the ownership thing – we should at least be lucky that we are dealing with more background stuff (manuals) than copies on the spotlight (web copies, packages, so on). I think one good thing in those situation is that nobody is trying to make things worse – they all believe they are doing the best for the outcome, even if it is identical with his personal preference. I am thinking open, collaborative editing might be the way thanks to you. We may have InDesign as a web-based app soon, which will make things more easier.
Tom,
Go here and read:
http://www.scottburnham.com/files/Scott-Burnham-Hacking-Design-2009.pdf
Now think about users taking over the information you produce vis-à-vis what Burnham says about hacking as “overcoming the limitations of an existing object, service or system which was set for one purpose, and finding an access point, intellectually or physically, where its original function can be expanded, altered, or improved to serve a new purpose or solve a problem”.
Do you see any of that happening with the documentation you hand over, either now or in future?
Interesting post Tom, keep up the good posts!
I used to get very proprietary about my manuals and as 100% of what I do is for clients I can’t exactly demurely decline when they want their source files. Two things happened in 2009 that changed my opinion on releasing files to clients. The first was a disaster for my client – a large restaurant chain. They had an internal person do their operations guide and then allowed it to get 5 years out of date. When they wanted me to create new material and incorporate the old material the only thing available were pdf copies – they didn’t even have the ability to update their own recipes. This client had to go through the trouble of doing a large search for the long-gone employee to see if they had the files since they did not want to pay to convert the pdf files. The second instance was a new client. I happily turned over their source files and they promptly totally blew them up by trying to change the formatting and not understanding the underlying structure. I now am on a document maintenance retainer with them. Sometimes letting your client make their own mistakes is actually beneficial to their understanding that documentation is not in the category of glorified-typing-pool product. I’ve gone to building in a teaching component into my project prices and I’ll spend time with my clients teaching them how to maintain their own docs.
Our department doesn’t create documentation for external clients, but we have had a couple of online Help systems “hijacked” by well-meaning but poorly trained software engineers. Reading between the lines, I think those engineers were trying to bypass the standard procedure for having TechComm write the online Help (read as: software project manager didn’t budget for it). I’d never seen a well-written online Help system get turned back into an acronym-filled, menu-descriptive specifications document before!
[...] this year, Tom Johnson in his blog “I’d Rather Be Writing” discussed the issue of documentation ownership. He had recently handed over the source files of several manuals he had done to an internal client [...]