Productivity Gains from Structured Authoring

[Daniel Emory]

--- John Sgammato <jsgammato at IMPRIVATA.com> wrote:
> I am thinking of something along the lines of output
> pages per writer. I appreciate any help.
===================================
Using an ROI estimate to justify changing over to a
structured approach is definitely the right way to go.
But coming up with a number is complex. The
fundamental purpose of structure is to greatly improve
the management of your legacy documents, as well as
improving the productivy of writers creating new
content.

Although output pages per writer (in the case where
completely new content is being created) definitely
shows gains in productivity (after writers have become
familiarized with structured authoring) it's only part
of the ROI number.

Here are some other, equally important, factors needed
to come up with a realistic ROI:

* The structure view, the element catalog and metadata
(attributes) provide powerful new tools for
systematically managing information. For instance, you
can quickly locate chunks of information needing
updates, as well as facilitating information re-use,
using more systematic Find or Find/Change operations.
For instance, you can use Find to locate all instances
of a particular attribute value within all instances
of a particular element name.

* By reimporting a document's EDD into itself with
Remove Format Overrides turned on, all format
overrides of the EDD-specified formats are removed.
This capability eliminates any necessity for editors
to tediiously find and fix such overrides. Also, both
authors and edictors can quickly use the Validate
command to find and correct all anomalies in the
structure.

* A validated structured document with all illegal
format overrides removed assures that conversions of
FrameMaker structured document to other output forms
can be accomplished successfully.

* The ultimate ROI value is the certainty that, at
some future date, you can successfully store your
legacy documents in a content management system (CMS),
which, I believe, will become the gold standard even
for small companies. If you continue to produce
unstructured documents, you assuredly will incur huge
conversion costs, and thus an estimate of what that
cost will be should legitimately should be included in
the ROI.