To make the business case for DITA, you must align its many powerful features with specific needs in your business or organization.

DITA has many features based on decades of research in methods for technical documentation - like modularity, structured writing, information typing, minimalism, inheritance, specialization, simplified XML, single-source, topic-based, ready-made metadata, conditional processing, component publishing, task-orientation, content reuse, multi-channel, and translation-friendly. See History of DITA.

Few organizations are likely to use all the features of DITA, but you should go through our checklist to determine which features could provide a significant return on investment in your particular business case. Use those features with positive returns in building your arguments for DITA.

• Translation Savings - the top ROI factor for global firms
• Single-source - keeps marketing message consistent
• Content Reuse - don't write the same sentence twice
• Structured Writing - reduces authoring time, increases analysis time
• Task orientation - reduces customer service calls
• Minimalism - improves the end-user experience
• Specialization - customize topics to fit existing formats
• Multiple Output Formats - web (HTML), print (PDF), and online Help
• Multi-channel Delivery - add Mobile with minimum extra development
• Simplified XML - greatly reduces development cost of Schemas/DTDs
• Metadata - supports semantic guided search and conditional processing
• Conditional Processing - rapid creation of content variations for special needs
• Modularity - assemble documents from manageable chunks
• Component Content Management and Publishing

We are developing a ten-question DITA Quotient to help organizations get a quantitative measure of the importance of DITA for their current content.