DITA Metrics 101: The Business Case for Intelligent Content

You've probably read articles or papers that proclaim the benefits of moving your content to DITA: accuracy, consistency, increased productivity, reduced authoring times, etc. But you need to know by how much. How much savings? How much increased productivity? How much for YOUR project, YOUR content? What is YOUR project going to cost with DITA and content reuse? How do you track the success of the project? Because yours is different from everyone else's. DITA Metrics 101 can help you answer those questions. Follow the steps in this book to create custom models that estimate the cost of your content in DITA and the cost of your new processes that support the DITA content lifecycle. Then, use these models to predict the cost of your documentation project. Compare your current costs to your costs using DITA. That difference is your savings and you'll likely find that this number alone can be used justify to justify switching to DITA and structured content.