Lower cost
- less volume to create
- elimination of repetitive updates
- less volume to translate
Technical documentation: reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction
Concept
Reduce documentation costs, accelerate time to market, and improve quality through industrial technical writing practices, modular content, and structured authoring.
Definition
Section titled “Definition”Technical communicationThe broader discipline that spans the entire product life cycle and reaches general audiences, prospects, and journalists — as distinct from technical writing, which produces user-facing product documentation after a sale.View in glossary → 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.
Reduced time to market
- maximum reuse of content
- zero risk of data loss
Improved quality
- easily optimizable information blocks
- perfect consistency of corporate content
Key principles
Section titled “Key principles”Industrial documentation rests on three foundations:
- a modular document format,
- a structured authoring format,
- a reliable document production and publication chain,
- a tiered approach to documentation maturity.
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.