1. The Elusive Promise
of Reuse
Leigh White
DITA Specialist
Presented at CMS/DITA North America
Conference April 2014

2. Typical obstacles to effective reuse
• Content is too “owned”
• Content is too siloed
• Content is too big or too contextual
• Content is too unknown
• Reuse is too random
• Reuse is too untracked
• Time is too paradoxical

3. Content is too “owned”
• Natural result of traditional authoring environment
 Each writer is responsible for “his/her”
documents/books/files/projects
 These items live in folders that only the “owner” touches

4. Content is too siloed
• Content for different products developed by
different writers on same team or even different
teams
• Different voice, different style, different approaches
• Each silo believes it has the best approach

5. Content is too big or contextual
• Content is written in large, hierarchical chunks that
cannot be easily manipulated or recombined
• Content pieces are written too contextually
 “In the previous section…”
 “In the next topic…”

6. Content is too unknown
• Deliverables might be inventoried but very rarely
any content level below that
• Even if you’re using a CMS, do you really know
what you have?
• You have to know what you have before you can
develop a reuse strategy.
• After analysis, you might find that you don’t have
as many opportunities for reuse as you thought.

7. Reuse is too random
• “Reuse” as you go approach
• “Writing yourself into a corner,” creating content
that’s difficult or impossible to reuse as-is
• Ad hoc planning that only fits an immediate need
with no idea how it fits into a bigger picture
 Developing a strategy takes time
 Work goes on; new content must be created before the
strategy is complete
 You might have to revisit content after the strategy is
developed

8. Reuse is too untracked
• What’s been reused? Where?
• If I change this topic, what else is affected?
• A CMS helps (immensely), but it’s not the
complete answer
 A CMS is not a reuse strategy! It is a tool that helps you
implement a reuse strategy.

9. Time is too paradoxical
• We need to reuse to save time. We need to plan
our reuse. Planning takes time. We don’t have
enough time. We need to reuse to save time.

10. Reuse strategy!!!
• You will not succeed in effectively reusing content
without one
• A reuse strategy defines:
 How granular your reuse will be: topic-level, element-level,
phrase-level
 The metadata you’ll use to create categories that enable
you to find applicable reusable content
 The criteria that determine when pieces of content
should combine or diverge

11. Reuse strategy con’d
 Who can edit reusable content and what review/approval
process will be
 Communication/notification methods for helping writers
coordinate reuse***
 How/where to store and find
reusable content***

12. Content inventory
• Essential first step to effective reuse
• Use representative but manageable subset of
content
 A self-contained current project
 Most-frequently-used content
• Create spreadsheet of topics and where they are
used
• Compare titles to find topics that are likely the
same or very similar
• Decide when similar topics can be combined or
need to remain separate

13. Content inventory con’d
• Develop criteria for determining when different is
"too different"
• Determine what conditions you'll need to
distinguish content and how/when to apply them
• If you have a glossary, search for variations on
those terms to find inconsistent usages
• Review indices to
 Look for inconsistencies
 Develop a keyword list as a first step towards common
vocabulary

14. Content inventory con’d
• Review and classify topics beyond concept,
reference, task
 You probably have several different types of concepts,
references, and tasks.
 Determine the way each of these types should be
organized and patterned

15. Opportunities for reuse
• From within
 Reuse topics in multiple outputs with conditions
 Reuse notes, warnings, legal verbiage, support
information, steps, sub-maps
• From without
 Tech support information
 Training material
 Error messages from the software code
 Product specifications from R&D
 Marcom (product descriptions, etc.)

16. Don’t go overboard
• Individual words and phrases are not good
candidates for reuse.
• It can be more trouble to insert and track a “Click
Save” type conref than simply to type the phrase.
• Evaluate the effort against the return

17. Apples to apples, dogs to ducks
• Sometimes two presentations of the same content
are so different that reuse is not practical
 Consider information that appears in a huge table in a
reference guide but also needs to appear in bulleted lists
or paragraphs in another output.
 Setting this content up in a neutral way to apply “the
usual” reuse mechanisms to it could be tricky.
 In such a case, you’re probably looking more at some
specialized processing than simple reuse.

18. Communication is key
• While some CMSs will track and notify of reuse,
they are not the complete solution
• All writers must understand and follow the strategy
• No more silos!
• No more ownership!

19. Tracking reuse
• Very challenging to do manually
• A CMS is almost mandatory
 Track each reusable component and where it is used
 Some CMSs can notify all authors of topics that
reference changed shared content
• But you’re still going to have to talk to each other!

20. Questions?

21. Resources
• Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content
Strategy, Ann Rockley, Charles Cooper
• DITA Best Practices, Laura Bellamy, Michelle Carey,
Jennifer Schlotfeldt
• Content Strategy 101, Sarah O’Keefe, Alan Pringle
• “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Developing a Reuse
Strategy for DITA,” DITA Chicks blog (
http://ditachicks.com)
• “Designing Your Information Architecture for Content
Reuse: Five Best Practices” (Amber Swope, The
Content Wrangler blog, http://thecontentwrangler.com)

22. Contact me
• leigh.white@ixiasoft.com