Fred Ridder wrote:
Marcus, Marcus, Marcus.
In the abstract, I completely agree with what you say. My
postings in this thread, though, have been written to address
the specific context of the original poster, who is a sole writer
at a company which has a significant body of unstructured
documentation, and who is thinking about experimenting
with structure. As you say, the kind of far-reaching information
integration you are talking about requires disciplines and
resources that span the entire company, and that simly didn't
seem like a possibility in the context of the OP's query.
It's a bit chicken and egg though, don't you think? If we don't tell
tech writers that what they're interested in doing for their own
purposes might also potentially be very valuable for the organisation
for entirely other reasons, they don't know how to make a business case
for it. Their superior may recognise the wider value of structured
documents, but then again if they did, they might already have started
moving down that path.
It's no good just telling tech writers that "structure makes for better,
more consistent documents" - it blatantly ignores both existing benefits
and a reasonable prediction about the future direction of information.
On top of all that, it could be detrimental if the right information
isn't being structured the right way - it might just mean that it all
gets thrown out in another year. No matter what, flagging the
possibilities to management is never going to be a bad idea.
Marcus Carr
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