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Research Analyst, Information Design, Nokia Networks
Lately, OEM has become some sort of a curse word in our
information design groups. At Nokia, as at other telecom and datacom companies
and possibly at other industries as well, not all the products that companies
use in their systems and solutions are produced in-house but instead are
produced by other vendors. These vendors seem to be specialising more and more
and supporting standard, open interfaces so that their product can work with
everybody else's products.
Naturally, standard, open interfaces within the product are
good for the customers because they can choose a product that has the best
quality and price to meet their needs without being concerned if that product
will integrate with other products.
However, for those of us in information design, OEM
development brings many challenges or, dare I say, problems. The products may
use standard interfaces to communicate with each other, but the document sets
surely don't use any standard language, terminology, structure, or media. In
other words, the document sets do not have a standard interface, which results
in questions like "Why should we unify our document sets within our company when
we will have so many OEM products that don't follow the same logic?" or "Why are
we moving into modular documentation when the OEM documentation won't be
modular?" The document sets of each OEM product may be well designed, but
without a standard interface, the customers will have problems because they will
have to learn and remember the logic behind each document set before they can
fully utilise the products together.
Therefore, customers would like to have all document sets look
the same and use the same information access methods, and most preferably they
would like to have only one document set with all the information for each OEM
product integrated so they won't have to know that some other company has
actually developed the information rather than the company they bought the
system from. Integrating OEM information is the ultimate single sourcing
challenge. Not only must we reuse information within our own companies but we
also must reuse information across industries. We have the tools to meet this
challenge if we only have the will. We can develop industry standard XML DTDs,
namespaces, and information models and convert our data to these common DTDs and
structures. I'm not talking about only telecom and datacom industries but other
industries as well. In these times of specialising and having a solution-driven
approach, I certainly hope that we will begin to see companies develop documents
sets with a standard, open interface to end our "misery."
This article is the personal opinion of the author and does not necessarily
reflect the opinion or practice of Nokia Networks.
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