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DITA

The hidden costs of DITA

Originally published in STC Intercom, April 2008

DITA is a free, pre-made XML document structure. That statement can lead to a few erroneous assumptions: if it’s free, then it will cut down on costs, and if it’s pre-made, it will cut down on labor. There are several things to consider when choosing a DITA solution. Does your staff have the skills to author in a DITA environment? Will additional training be required? Does DITA even match your content model, and if it doesn’t, is it worth the effort to change?

Sarah’s conclusion? “DITA may be free, but it’s not cheap.”

Sarah O'Keefe
April 19, 2008
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DITA

Somebody does NOT like DITA

From Jon Bosak’s closing keynote at XML 2006:

Another ancient subject that seems to be popping up again is the idea of modular document creation. This is one of those concepts that comes through about once a decade, seduces all the writing managers with the prospect of greater efficiency, takes over entire writing departments for a couple of years, and then falls out of favor as people finally realize that document reuse is not a solvable problem in document delivery but rather an intractable problem in document writing — which is, how to retain any sense of logical connection between pieces of information while writing as if your target audience consisted entirely of people afflicted with ADD.

I don’t think I agree completely, but he does have a point.

I could go on at length about this, but instead I’ll simply leave you with the observation that my personal love affair with modular documentation occurred in 1978 and that I haven’t seen a thing since then that would change the conclusions I reached about it almost thirty years ago. This is not to say that I’m trying to discourage the technical writing community whence I came from their enthusiasm for the modular authoring technology du jour, since engagement in such efforts is virtually guaranteed to buy tech writers a few years in which they can act like software engineers and present themselves as engaged in cutting-edge informational technology development rather than plain old technical writing. That strategy has worked great for some of us.

I think perhaps the arguments for and against single-source publishing are a better place to look. There is a school of thought that argues that single sourcing results in inferior deliverables, both in print and online. But the cost savings from single sourcing are so compelling that nobody really argues for hand-crafting printed and online materials separately any more. (Based on my experience, I think that the quality difference between material that is single sourced (well) and material that is hand-crafted (well) is quite small; perhaps around 10 percent. But that last ten percent is extremely expensive.)

With XML/DITA/modular documentation, there is a similar cost argument. Document reuse and especially localization workflows benefit from modular documentation. For localization teams, getting content in topics rather than monolithic books can result in incremental localization and thus the ability to “sim-ship”; to ship the product in the source language and target languages simultaneously. This, in turn, means a global product launch and a shorter wait for revenue from the markets for which localization is required.

Thus, requirement to accelerate product deliverables and save money on localization (because of more efficient reuse) are going to drive implementation of modular documentation. The argument that non-modular documentation is better documentation will become irrelevant.

Sarah O'Keefe
January 11, 2007
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LavaCon 2026

Join our team in Charlotte, NC, for LavaCon 2026! You’ll hear us speak in the following sessions:

The barbarians are at the gate (keynote)

The arc of publishing is the slow destruction of gatekeepers. The invention of writing took away the voice of the author or storyteller. The printing press separated formatting and copying. And today, content consumers have broken through the last gate with AI. Instead of gratefully accepting a document from a benevolent publisher, the content consumer can repackage content into a different format and a different language. They can ask for more or less detail, additional examples, or targeted information.

In this session, Sarah O’Keefe (Scriptorium) answers critical content ops questions. How do we respond to this new development in our role as content experts? What does it mean to lose control over content delivery?

Session details:

  • Monday, October 26th
  • 4 pm EDT

From chaos to clarity: Streamlining regulated global content (case study)

By early 2026, Insulet expanded sales of its Omnipod insulin pumps to over 20 countries and almost as many languages. The rapidly growing customer base, continually expanding product lines, and increasing number of regulatory requirements significantly outpaced the inefficient desktop publishing processes left over from the early days of medical device manufacturing.

Insulet made a strategic move to DITA in late 2025 to centralize content, eliminate manual work, and streamline production through intelligent content reuse, rich metadata, release management, and automated publishing.

In this session, Leah Catania (Insulet) and Bill Swallow (Scriptorium) discuss the factors that led to the transition to DITA and explore the benefits of such a move in a highly regulated industry. Leah and Bill break down the challenges faced, efficiencies gained, and lessons learned along the way, including:

  • Navigating the maze of Good “X” Practice (GxP) requirements – for the content itself and the tools involved.
  • Mapping completely unstructured content and inconsistent formatting to structured content with templatized outputs.
  • Consolidating dozens of different baseline guides into a handful of “global” English baselines through content reuse and conditional filtering.
  • Adapting content written for printed guides to be used in a mobile-first HTML output for in-app help, while still maintaining as much content reuse as possible.

Session details:

  • Wednesday, October 28th
  • 9:30 am EDT

Don’t miss these live sessions!

Register for LavaCon 2026 on the conference website.

Christine Cuellar
June 10, 2026
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AI Content management Podcasts QA

Tool selection and the unpredictable variable

How do you really choose the right documentation tool? In this podcast episode, Sarah O’Keefe (Scriptorium) talks with Paweł Kowaluk and Michał Skowron (Guidewire Software) about building a successful tool selection process, the realities of docs as code, and what happens when the technology becomes the unpredictable variable.

Paweł Kowaluk: It’s funny how programming used to be deterministic, and it was the people who were messy. We always knew that people are going to be whimsical and maybe harder to rein in, but the technology is going to be predictable. Whereas now, technology is not predictable anymore, and you give it a prompt and you hope it’s going to do what you want. You adjust the system prompts and change the weight of things which are retrieved versus metadata, et cetera, and it doesn’t always work the way you expect it to.

Sarah O’Keefe: And now the people are being asked to be the deterministic layer, right? To be the QA on top of the AI.

Paweł Kowaluk: That’s actually very insightful. I like that. That is true. The human in the loop or whatever you call it, that’s supposed to be the voice of reason.

Sarah O'Keefe
June 1, 2026
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