|
David Schell
Senior Technical Staff Member
The following article summarizes the key point made by David Schell, Senior Technical Staff Member with IBM's Corporate User Technology department, in his CM Strategies videotaped talk about why IBM developed Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and why you should find DITA of interest.
The problem that we confront today: In the world of business, we’re really talking about the Age of Acquisition and the Age of Mergers. What that means is that companies are buying each other up left and right. Certainly we know how we can integrate these companies from an infrastructure point of view. But when you get down to it, how are you also integrating the documentation that goes along with it?
This is the problem IBM wanted to address, not only for themselves, but the industry as a whole. To do that, we developed DITA, which we think lays the foundation for collaboration. This means that, within DITA, we define a topic as a reusable asset which we write to, and then we use those reusable assets in a DITA map, combining topics together not only across products but across hardware and solutions to build a better solution for our customers. Using DITA topics and DITA maps allows us to integrate not only our own information but information we take from Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs).
The key advantage here is that IBM has actually moved DITA to OASIS, and it has become an OASIS standard. In addition, IBM has taken the initiative to take many of the tools we use and develop ourselves around DITA and has moved them to the Open Source world.
We believe that there is a very strong value for you to use DITA. We’ve also focused on the technical documentation for our products. We’re looking at educational material, research material—any structured material—and we’re starting to reach out and ask, where does DITA apply? We think you should do so too!
©2005 by the Center for Information-Development Management. All rights reserved.
Tel. 303-232-7586
Fax. 303-232-0659
| 