Changing technology, evolving documentation

The title of this paper is Documentation Techniques for the 21st Century. Since technology changes constantly, readers may wonder how we can claim to address techniques that will be in use for the next few decades.

The answer is that technology does change constantly, but the underlying principles are likely to remain the same for generations.

Because preparing documents takes time, effort and money, the techniques we propose in this paper are designed to ensure that your documentation will be usable and reusable for as long as possible—not a hundred years, perhaps, but you won't have to wait that long. The technology you're using today will be obsolete in five years or less. One of the central goals of this paper is to help you prepare for the day when you must convert scores of important documents to another platform.

Organizations that fail to prepare for mass conversion of documents often end up hiring a document conversion service (which explains why document conversion is a multibillion-dollar industry), or paying their own employees to convert documents (manually, more often than not) or mothballing documentation that represents a wealth of accumulated knowledge.

This happens because we expect the next version of the software we use to convert documents from the previous version automatically. Indeed, this is a reasonable expectation. Most software does convert documents from previous versions with no loss of data or formatting. The problem is that today's documents assume a variety of forms. They are stored in databases, converted to web pages and e-books, even displayed in cell phones. In other words, not all conversions are vertical. The most important conversions in modern organizations are from one type of document to another: horizontal conversions.

By the time you finish the first part of this paper, you should have a general understanding of the options that are available to your organization for document management. These options range from implementing a fully automated content management system to having no policy for content management at all. The second part of this paper describes ways to estimate the return on investment (ROI) of the system (or non-system) that you institute in your organization.