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There is an interesting discussion happening on the blog of Larry Kunz about follow-up training and business goals after DITA implementations. I’ll add my comment to Larry’s thread, but it might be interesting for some followers to have it here, also:

Larry, thank you for highlighting the need to involve the writers team and to provide as much training as they need to accomplish their goals. We just don’t hear this message often enough, although it’s one of the top causes of implementation failure, regardless of system type: CCMS, WCMS, CRM, ERP, you name it…

I can see Mark’s point about being ready for future developments we can’t even imagine today, but in my opinion, that vision just doesn’t fit with advocating for hiding the complexity of techcomms tasks. Let’s not reduce a technical author’s expertise to storytelling (check that one on my Bingo ticket, Larry).

If we’re serious about their role, we have to encourage writers to finally step out of their comfort zone and polish up their content modeling and authoring skills. Markup or markdown… that shouldn’t even be an issue in the near future, right? Ideally, authors should be able to apply both on the same content structure interchangeably, if the business so requires…

So back to Larry’s article: thumbs up for team involvement and training.

Link to Larry’s article: We’re in DITA – now what?