DITA For Business Documents: Where Are All The Software Vendors?

By Michael Boses on January 11, 2008 -- 3:56pm

As always, a compelling message delivered in a humorous way!

We would welcome the participation of the vendors you mention as well as any other interested parties. We recognize that it is still “early days” for the subcommittee and people are still learning about it.

The subcommittee is a response to interest expressed by commercial and government organizations that want to use DITA for narrative business documents enterprise-wide. Several global organizations have already started working with DITA for business documents and we wanted to provide standards and guidance as early in the adoption curve as possible. Anyone who sees the value of structured XML authoring across the enterprise is invited to join us.

You may not see their name on the list, but IBM has been extremely helpful in supporting the subcommittee. It frankly would not exist without the contributions that they have made to the effort so far. We suspect that as our workload increases that IBM will become visibly involved, but they could not be more supportive at this time.

Thanks for your efforts to get the word out!

Michael Boses
Co-chair DITA for Enterprise Business Documents Subcommittee

By Michael Priestley on January 11, 2008 -- 3:57pm

IBM’s definitely on board - I’ll be the rep at least initially, just haven’t done my homework and officially signed up yet.

By Ann Rockley on January 11, 2008 -- 4:36pm

I second Michael Boses’ comments. We are just getting started and interest is growing. We definitely need vendors as they will be responsible for making the standard a reality and they can bring insight into how they have helped organizations to manage their narrative documents already.

We also need practitioners, consultants, and academia to assist in the process. Our first task is to build a model for how DITA could support narrative business documents. We have identified easily over 1000 types of narrative business documents and need to begin to classify these documents. We are researching academic literature to determine how others have analyzed the structure of these types of documents. Without a clear understanding of how it could be used and how to make it most useful we will never be successful in implementing it.

So come one, come all, we welcome your input and participation in the subcommittee.

By Seraphim Larsen on January 14, 2008 -- 1:55am

Same issue on the OASIS DITA Semiconductor Subcommittee (and we’ve been around since June!). 

We do have one or two consultants, but nearly all the discussion and work is being done by people in the semiconductor industry who are very close to the content. 

We don’t have anywhere near the scope of the Business Documents subcommittee, but since XML-based product information is widely used in the semiconductor industry, I thought this subcommittee would get more interest from tool vendors and consultants.

Seraphim Larsen
Secretary, OASIS DITA Semiconductor Subcommittee

By Gary Schaffer on February 7, 2008 -- 4:56am

Hi Scott:

Real live software vendor here.

Let me give you the other side of the argument. If we had to spend time on every committee that was announced, we would be out of business. Part of running a software business is choosing what to spend time and when to pass. Some companies have full-time staff that can sit on committees and “donate time” to industry causes. Of course, we all know this is not truly altruistic.

We are 100% behind DITA with DITAStorm and new products that will be released shortly. However, we will wait for a little more momentum before jumping into every new initiative on DITA. I realize this is a chicken and egg problem, but our experience tells us that new committees do not necessarily turn into new sales. After all, without sales, we cannot sit on committees nor employ staff to make new products.

I hope I have given you and your readers some insight into the fragile eco-system of a software vendor. When a software vendor is dealing in the “long-tail” of software standards, it’s important to make the right choices, the first time around. Most software companies don’t get a second chance.

Best Regards

Gary L. Schaffer
President and CEO
Inmedius