CIDM Matters

Stanley Doherty, Ph.D., Oracle Corporation & OASIS DITA Adoption Technical Committee
November 15, 2019

As change initiatives go, DITA is often described as being “highly beneficial and highly disruptive” for the organizations adopting it or making ongoing investments in it. As anyone who has been involved with a DITA migration or upgrade will attest, the “disruptions” always precede the “benefits”. Although a risk analysis should be at the heart of every DITA migration or upgrade initiative, we do not have a shared vocabulary for assessing it. […]

Desiree Livermon, Genesys
November 15, 2019

What do you think of when you hear the word “accessibility”? For many people, it evokes images of wheelchair ramps, automatic doors, and maybe some braille in the elevator. For content developers, it mostly makes us think of screen readers. But there is more to accessibility than a robotic voice parroting the words you have written. […]

Jane Wilson, VMware
November 1, 2019

It’s always frustrating to hear about our deliverables, “The documentation is bad.” Beyond the fact that it’s negative, that simple statement is not actionable. There are no specifics about what part of the documentation is “bad,” much less what’s wrong with it or what “bad” means. Follow-up questions might lead to a little more detail: “I just hear it’s bad,” or “A customer told me it’s bad.” Obviously, this is not helpful in trying to address, much less fix, the problem. […]

Theodore Wolff, Danfoss
October 15, 2019

A few weeks ago, I spent three increasingly frustrating hours assembling a new TV stand with one of those fancy mounting stands on the back of it. I started the evening full of hope that I would soon have a new, safer way to display our TV and reduce the danger to our two-year-old son. Best of all, the conditions were perfect. Our son was away that evening, as well as our two dogs. […]

Mary Dickens, Cengage
October 1, 2019

Technical communicators are often called upon to support multiple development teams; it’s rare for every team to have a dedicated Technical Communicator (TC). To deal with this, writers on a high-functioning TC team need to be able to take on stories for sometimes unfamiliar products and technologies, avoiding silos of expertise in favor of flexibility. Inadequate user story writing leads to confusion and delays work completion. […]

Kathy Madison, Comtech Services
October 1, 2019

All things associated with measurement was the theme of this year’s Best Practices conference last month in Austin, Texas.  Doug Hubbard, the keynote, kicked off the conference by challenging us to rethink our perceptions of the concept of measurement, the object of measurement and the method of measurement.  He started by defining measurement as an expressed reduction in uncertainty based on observation. […]

Sabine Ocker, Comtech Services
September 15, 2019

During last month’s CIDM Round Table, member participants shared some insights and observations on the role and significance of technical writer job descriptions in their organizations. […]

Emily Luijbregts, Siemens DIS
September 15, 2019

Women remain an underrepresented group across all STEM fields and despite attempts to improve the gap that exists in gender numbers and salary, women still remain a minority in STEM fields. The AAUW 2015 Solving the Equation report states: […]

Patti Lutsky, PTC
September 1, 2019

Many companies are looking to repurpose their existing textual repair procedures into an augmented-reality format.  If they have the CAD data for the equipment, then a tool like PTC’s Creo Illustrate can be used to create input sequences that are based on the CAD data.  But what about the textual aspects of the AR?  […]

Rilind Elezaj, Day Translations, Inc.
September 1, 2019

User Experience is a pretty huge deal in design. This is why predicting and anticipating what we can expect is not only popular but also quite smart. Here are 5 predictions of what users will love in UX in 2019, based on existing patterns and market data. […]