Thanks to everyone for your great responses. FYI, I might add that an advantage of my working for a very small company (and having been there many years) is that I don't need to make a formal proposal for this. (Of course, at the same time, there will be no consultants, etc., just me in the role of strucutered app developer, author, etc.) As long as I produce the existing documentation as needed, I can take my time implementing structure and exploring how we can benefit. (Our unstructured templates are, by the way, very well structured so I'm accostumed to thinking this way.) My hope is that with XML import and export, I won't spend as much time as I now do converting text to and from FrameMaker (which our developers don't use). Our documentation includes lots of in-line code snippets which must be manually formatted with character tags. I'm always looking for a way to reduce this part of the job.
Miriam