I'm on an Internet--oh oh--Radio:
Today started out differently for some of us. Due to some scheduling issues, I ended up being the first guest on the "Live from DITA 2006" MyTechnologyLawyer.com radio show with Scott Draughon.  A picture below shows Dave Schell on his stint, with Scott Abel in the foreground directing the remote studio activities here.  What a trip!  I think we did a good job, and Abel says that the connections were filled right from the start. If you were unable to tune in live, remember that these shows are recorded and you can listen to them later.

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Scroll down to the bottom if you're wondering what the post title means. First comes my reaction to the sessions I attended.

The day kicked off with Dave Schell sharing some reuse statistics and case studies from IBM, showing DITA reuse at ca.70-80% in sharing content across similar products, with substantial savings being invested back into documentation improvements, such as more tutorials and sample development. In addition he talked about some projects using DITA in IBM outside of the traditional tech doc realm, including e-learning, and on-demand publishing for business partners of customized configuration guides using generated DITA maps.

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The DITA 2006 conference has started its regular program. Dave Schell, the keynote speasker, presented some IBM experiences with publishing, outlining the costs of some of the previous ways of publishing product documentation, how those experiences informed on the design of DITA, and how the DITA model has brought about specific savings on several projects that have had one or more publishing cycles by now.

Cost avoidance is one of the key issues that Dave discussed. With traditional publishing, the cut/copy/paste penchant of writers was identified as one of the main causes for increasing the amount of review and update as various information sets "forked" from some original version.  In moving to a topic-oriented architecture, one team was able to relegate up to 80% of its information as "common", now completely out of the picture for ongoing review and translation and other handling. Another team working on a completely different product got up to 77% common reuse at the topic level (including some conref reuse as well--phrase-level reuse by reference).

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