You’ve read all the papers (and attended all the webinars) on return on investment (ROI) for XML and you get it. You’ve already concluded that moving to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) will likely save you tons of time and money. But management says, “Prove it!”.

This paper helps you determine the cost portion of the ROI calculation. What are my costs now? What will my new costs be with DITA? And what is the difference—my savings?

This white paper is the first in the DITA Metrics series. The series will discuss cost metrics, reuse metrics, and a reuse strategy. This paper is the first in the DITA Metrics series. It describes one model for calculating the cost of a DITA project. After doing some content analysis on your own documentation set, you can customize this cost model to suit your documentation project needs. In the end, you should be able to speak the financial language of managers and prove to them in dollar signs the value of moving to DITA.

To benefit from this article, you should have at least an intermediate level understanding of DITA including topic structure, elements, conrefs, child maps, and filtering/conditional processing.

The whitepaper was produced by Mark Lewis and is available from The Content Wrangler.