Reducing Costs Drives Competitive Advantage for Savvy Companies

Executive Summary

Technical writing teams face complex challenges as they struggle to help their companies get products to market faster. Increasingly sophisticated technical products and the need to deliver clearly written documentation in multiple media formats and languages are forcing them to work under intense pressure. Add to that ongoing demands to reduce costs, and it’s clear that technical writers face a tough task in today’s global economy.

On top of that, managers of technical writing teams have to contend with the widely held perception that the documentation team itself is a cost center and needs to be constrained. Technical writing is often a prime target during corporate down-sizing activities, leaving engineers, software designers and project managers to struggle with the documentation themselves.

But as formidable as they may be, these challenges can and must be the foundation of a new strategy for technical writing teams. By adopting an approach that combines single-source technologies, information reuse standards such as DITA and innovative sourcing strategies that include offshoring and outsourcing certain tasks, technical writing teams can leapfrog the perception that they are merely cost centers and prove themselves a source of competitive advantage for their organization...