In episode 60 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Gretyl Kinsey discuss content reuse, how it specifically applies to DITA,  and how it can benefit your organization.
“So often we see companies wasting a lot of time copying and pasting. This idea of reuse saves time and money, and then it also helps to maintain that consistency across your organization.”
— Elizabeth Patterson

Related links:

* LearningDITA course: Introduction to reuse in DITA
* LearningDITA course: Advanced reuse in DITA

Twitter handles:

* @PattersonScript
* @gretylkinsey

Transcript: 
Elizabeth Patterson:     Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In Episode 60 we look at content reuse and how it can benefit your organization.
EP:     Hi, I’m Elizabeth Patterson.
Gretyl Kinsey:     And I’m Gretyl Kinsey.
EP:     I think we should start by defining reuse. We bring it up a lot as a benefit for structured offering and for migrating your content to DITA. What does reuse really mean, Gretyl?
GK:     At its core, reuse is all about writing content one time and then reusing it in multiple places. That’s opposed to something like keeping a bunch of different copies of the same exact information or even similar information. What that does by having just one piece of reusable content is it establishes a single source of truth. That means that your content is going to be more consistent if you just have it in that one place and it lets you do things like take your existing content and use parts of that to create new documentation. You can kind of create multiple documents that reference or reuse the same piece of content over and over.
GK:     An example that we can touch on a little bit, one common one, is something like safety warnings, and cautions, and things like that. You see that very commonly in technical documentation. Just kind of right off the bat is one very quick and easy way that you can see something that’s reusable. But it also might be things like a how to guide, a getting started guide, things like that that you see the same content over and over. That means that it’s probably something you should be reusing instead of copying, pasting, that sort of thing.
EP:     Right. And so often I think that we see companies wasting a lot of time copying and pasting. This idea of reuse saves time and money, and then it also helps to maintain that consistency across organizations because you might have content in different locations, and it might be from different times, and you might be pulling from different times. If you don’t have all of that together and you’re not reusing it efficiently, you might have inconsistent information.
GK:     Absolutely. We’ve seen lots of cases where two different writers are basically writing the same content because there’s not that communication and they’ve kind of written the same information in two slightly different ways. That introduces that inconsistency. And as you said, if there’s not really a good method of version control in place then if you go to reference some information, you just copy it out of an older version of your documentation. Then you’ve gotten something incorrect in your documents now.
EP:     Right.
GK:     It’s really important to have that single source of reusable truth.
EP:     So we’ve defined reusable content.