Will DITA bring enough value to your content operations to justify the investment costs? Calculate your DITA ROI to decide.

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML standard widely used for technical, product, and learning content. A move into DITA is a significant effort. Learning the tagset isn’t too difficult, but DITA is designed to support:

• Topic-based authoring
• Structured content
• Extensive reuse
• Text variants
• Automated formatting

Each of these items can be a significant shock to content creators.

This article outlines some of the common business justifications for moving into DITA.

LocalizationThe easiest way to justify a DITA environment is localization costs. A localization workflow for Word, InDesign, or other page-based tools is typically divided into translation and desktop publishing, each accounting for roughly 50% of the overall cost. As text changes, it expands or contracts, which results in formatting problems that are corrected manually.

In a DITA environment, authors do not format content directly. Instead, formatting is added in a separate automated rendering process. Instead of formatting, re-formatting, and re-re-formatting, the DITA environment is set up to support automatic generation of the required formats. A one-time setup cost replaces the ongoing DTP costs, and the desktop publishing charges in localization are eliminated.

Localization costs are easy to quantify because localization is usually handled by an outside vendor.

ReuseDITA provides numerous mechanisms to help manage reuse across a content set at the topic, paragraph, and character level. Additionally, you can combine reuse with variants so that you can reuse content that is almost-but-not-quite identical.

If your content set includes duplicated information, reuse provides DITA ROI. You’ll need to quantify the following factors:

• What percentage of the content could be reused (written once and used in many places)?
• How much does it cost to create and re-create that information in the current workflow?
• How much will reuse improve your use of translation memory?
• Are there other parts of the organization beyond the core content group that could benefit from content reuse, such as tech support, product descriptions, software text and error messages, and the like?

Conditional processingConditional processing in DITA can help you with:

• Multiple condition types, such as platform, customer, audience, and product
• Huge number of possible variations
• Content as a Service

Many of our customers move to DITA and structured content because they simply cannot keep track of the versioned content any other way.

Accelerating time to marketA DITA-based workflow will let you accelerate time to market via more efficient authoring and automated rendering of output formats, especially for downstream localized versions.

Preserve flexibilityDITA provides an efficient way to encode content that is machine-readable and therefore AI-ready. From there, you can push content to a Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) API, or convert it to JSON, or deliver PDF and HTML, or any number of other possibilities. Storing information in DITA XML gives you great flexibility to add new output types or build connectors as needed.

Implementation costImplementation cost varies depending on your circumstances, but here is a list of things to consider:

• Content repository, typically a component content management system (CCMS)
• Content architecture and planning
• Migration of existing content
• Output pipelines
• Connectors and integrations

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