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CIDM Invitation to Participate in a Customer Quality Project
Importance of High Quality Technical Information
The Center for Information-Development Management (CIDM) and IBM are proposing a project survey titled, "Importance of High Quality Technical Information". This survey was inspired by the 2008 CIDM presentation that Microsoft shared called "Content and the Bottom Line: Defining the business value of your publications" and was created to measure the value of technical content from the clients' perspective and to understand how providing quality technical information affects purchase decisions. IBM has already posted a survey on the Web. We would like to invite you to do the same and share the data you accumulate to provide a broader industry view on the subject.
Read more about
this quality project.
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Rare Bird Applications Now Open
The Rare Bird Award recognizes outstanding managers and their teams. The applications should describe thoroughly an innovative practice in which your organization has been engaged. The members of the judging panel look for detailed descriptions of the practice and concrete evidence that the innovation has led to organizational change.
Click here to submit your Best Practice for consideration. The submission deadline is July 14. |
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DITA Europe Call for Speakers
The Center for Information-Development Management and Dr. JoAnn Hackos announce a call for participation in the upcoming DITA Europe conference to take place 15–16 November 2010, in Vienna, Austria. If you are interested in presenting at the conference, please complete the form and submit to Lisa Lambert before 24 August 2010. |
Part 2 of 6: Ad-Hoc Organizations and Content Management
JoAnn Hackos, Comtech Services, Inc.
Dr. Q, the leader of our content-management consulting team, has been asked to work with Checko Systems, a huge manufacturing company with a wide range of products. When it was a fledgling start-up, Checko had a central technical publications organization.
Read
the article.
More articles
Letter to the Editor
Response to Level 0—Oblivious Organization from the June 2010 eNewsletter
Author Annonymous
I read the first installment of "Oblivious Organizations and Content Management" this morning and was so impressed. I'm in an oblivious organization, but we are moving towards standards, kicking and screaming all the way. My tech writing department has standards and processes and we use them, but we are atypical.
Read
the article.
Collaboration Gone Feral
Kathryn Showers, Symitar, a Jack Henry Company
Members of our Implementations group came to us with a request: will you please rewrite the Computer Operator’s Guide?
What? Write technical documentation? That’s the job of the Technical Publications department… er… us, right. Sure, well, we would love to do it, except we don’t have any resources [read: people] to migrate, review, test, and edit the materials. I wish we did, because the project is interesting, and an excellent poster project for showing off single-sourced, format-neutral, structured writing. If we wrote it well, we could replace a huge section in that pesky monolithic system documentation (that is our current deliverable) with concise, user-friendly DITA topics. If only I could see outside the confines of this resource box.
Read
the article.
Managing Careers in the Wild World of DITA
Cindy Frakes, Oracle Corporation
Moving to a structured authoring model requires a massive amount of work and a 360-degree approach. As a member of an Information Development Management team, I have found that the planning phase seems to take forever because there are business plans to write, authoring and content management tools to review and select, presentation after presentation to get buy-in from peers and upper management, and collaboration with other teams to integrate the new authoring model into the overall product development lifecycle.
Read
the article.
Dan Tonkery on the iPad and the Future of Technical Publications
DCLNews Editorial April 2010
Republished with permission from Data Conversion Laboratory, Inc.
The iPad has finally arrived. This magical and revolutionary next-gen tablet computer with its online library of books and magazines, music store, and theater from Apple is now available. Industry pundits claim this device will change the future in publishing and may be the transformational product for our society, equivalent to the introduction of the television or print itself.
Read
the article.
| Welcome new CIDM member!
 Tweddle was founded in 1954 by Edmund Tweddle, who believed in the power of ideas and innovation. Early adoption of publishing technologies, such as computerized photocomposition and typesetting in the early 60’s, set the founding philosophy that strategic investment in people and technology would yield long term growth.
The Tweddle Group remains committed to its founding principles of continuous innovation. Today, the service areas encompass the full spectrum of owner communications and technical publishing—
Information Development, Management, and Delivery.
Learn more about CIDM (Center for Information-Development Management) here. |
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