The idea behind the DITA Quotient is a rough but quantitative numerical estimate of the applicabilty of DITA to your content. You simply answer ten questions and get an estimate of the value of DITA for your organization.

DITA News will publish the average numbers for everyone filling in the questionnaire, so you will be able to compare yourself to others. And we will track the average answers for the ten questions over time, to see how DITA is being adopted and how its various capabilities are being utilized.

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Do you want to use practices that are shared in your industry/profession?

If you have invested in an XML publishing solution, you will know the many months of development required to get approval on content models and precise document type definitions (DTDs and Schemas). These are then followed by as many or more months working with designers to turn the allowed elements into deliverable content (XSLTs).

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Do you follow these documentation best practices?

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Do you serve different content to different audiences?

Conditional processing and dynamic variables allow you to tailor your message for different audiences, for different products, and for other properties that you can create yourself.

ROI metrics for conditional processing are tricky and somewhat expensive. You must  monitor each separate condition. A customer satisfaction survey before and after more granular processing conditions will generally indicate the value.

Up to Making the Business Case for DITA. 

Is your content created in small chunks/topics?

Modularity encourages you to think of your content creation as an assembly line operation. Large content structures are built from modular components.

XML content management systems have enabled modularity for years. Individual elements can be pulled from the XML by XQuery and XPath and then deployed in highly specific publishing instances.

Personalization of content, for example, requires a modular design.

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