Technical documentation: reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction
Technical communication is like a light bulb. An energy-efficient bulb costs more up front, then quickly becomes cheaper to run - and an industrial documentation process behaves the same way. For a comparable, or only slightly higher, initial investment, it lowers costs, shortens time to market, and improves quality.
| Concept | Key points |
|---|---|
| Lower cost | less volume to create elimination of repetitive updates less volume to translate |
| Reduced time to market | maximum reuse of content zero risk of data loss |
| Improved quality | easily optimizable information blocks perfect consistency of corporate content |
Industrial documentation rests on three foundations:
- a modular document format,
- a structured authoring format,
- a reliable document production and publication chain.
When that chain is built on open-source software, the cost of setting it up and training the team can even be offset by the savings on software licenses. Yet too many high-tech companies have industrialized every business process except one, leaving the creation, management, and publication of their own content to go fallow. The hidden costs add up - documentation written by engineers instead of specialists, intangible assets left underused, lower customer satisfaction, higher support costs. None of it is inevitable: the solutions and the skills already exist.