Have you ever heard of DITA? Outside a small community of specialist technical communicators, most people have never heard of this acronym. Which is a shame because, when applied in the right way, it can save an organisation millions of dollars. How? By significantly improving the way organisational knowledge is captured and communicated. It makes knowledge capture faster and easier, and it produces an end result that is both easier and quicker for people to assimilate and apply. Employees work more effectively, and new appointments get up to speed much faster.
DITA stands for Darwin Information Typing Architecture, which is not exactly self-explanatory, but its cleverness becomes obvious when you consider its output – called a ‘topic’. A topic is “a title and content short enough to be specific to a single subject or answer a single question, but long enough to make sense on its own and be authored as a unit”i. In other words, a compact packet of useful information.
So how will this save millions? The simple answer is by replacing policy, procedure, and instruction documents. These classically rigid and bureaucratic documents, often written more with an eye to lawyers and regulators than employees, can hinder more than they help. Their orientation often tangles the business up unnecessarily in red tape and complicates issues in ways that are counterproductive to their intent. Policies end up as just words on a page with little impact on behaviours and culture, and useful instructions are lost in overblown paragraphs of passive prose.
Topics, on the other hand, orientate policies, procedures, and instructions to the employee’s needs. Short, sharp, and to the point (single subject, answer to a single question), they are not only far more effective but also easier to maintain and keep up to date.
Moreover, topics are created and maintained within an ecosystem called a DITA Map. This is a nested hierarchy of categories that are aligned with the business. They ensure that topics are relevant, comprehensive (i.e., covering all important processes), and easily located. The DITA Map provides an overall framework in which topics are related to each other. It creates a knowledge map that employees can use to explore knowledge resources productively, rather than having to blunder through the usual ad-hoc folksonomies found on file servers and Intranets.
The DITA approach is Darwinian in that units of information (topics) live and die within their use-environment according to their practical value. Topics are also adapted to a particular overall context (your business) and are potentially each related to one another (implemented via contextual hyperlinks).
‘Information Typing’ means that DITA topics can come in various flavours, the key ones being ‘Concept’, ‘Task’, and ‘Reference’. You can think of policies as being ‘concepts’, procedures and instructions as ‘tasks’, and everything else as ‘references’, but there is no need to get too hung up on these distinctions. Being this fine-grained is only useful when working with detailed technical information that is published in multiple formats from a single source. In a general business context, the greatest utility comes from restricting topics to a single subject or answer to a single question.
The A for Architecture in DITA, however, is critical. Architecture means not only a clear structure in which policy, procedure, and instructional information makes sense and supports your value chains, but also a commitment to quickly changing that structure as business needs change. In fact, the A in DITA could quite comfortably stand for Adaptation – and what could be more Darwinian than that.
Onno van Ewyk is a Knowledge Management Consultant and the author of the book Raising an Organisation’s Collective IQ