In episode 69 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Stephani Clark of Jorsek talk about using a scaled approach with DITA projects.
“The desktop publishing and single user tools are always going to have a much lower price tag than a DITA CCMS will, but there’s a trade off for what you’re getting.”
—Stephani Clark

Related links:

* Managing DITA projects: Five keys to success

Twitter handles:

* @billswallow
* @easyDITA

Transcript:
Bill Swallow:     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 this episode we talk with Stephani Clark of Jorsek about using a scaled approach with DITA projects.
BS:     Hi, everyone, I’m Bill Swallow.
Stephani Clark:     And hi, I’m Stephani Clark
BS:     And we’re going to talk a bit about a scaled approach to DITA projects. So Stephani, what would you say is the best way to get started with a DITA project without a huge investment upfront?
SC:     Well, I think there are lots of ways that you can get started with a DITA project without a huge investment up front. And I think there’s kind of a misconception that DITA is for these large enterprises. And if you’re anything smaller than that, then you probably can’t benefit from it. But the benefits are there regardless of what size organization, it’s just deciding how you’re going to invest if you wanted to move into a DITA environment. And so I think one thing to understand is that there’s always some investment, but I think that there is an opportunity to decide if that investment is going to be purely monetary or if you want to invest some time.
SC:     And there’s a lot of ways now to get started with DITA without the monetary investment that you can use best practices, reasonable tools, approaches to content conversion or publishing, self-education. There’s a lot of resources out there. And so I think that’s something that I want to kind of explore a little more in our conversation today is what can an organization do if they don’t want to go lay out a lot of money to implement DITA? So we can kind of look at each of these items I guess. But what are your thoughts on the best way to overall get started?
BS:     You mentioned that right off the bat that regardless of what your approach is going to be, there’s still going to be a cost associated with it. Do you want to speak a little bit to that?
SC:     Yeah. So let’s look at maybe an example which would be looking at content conversion. So oftentimes when you’re implementing DITA, one of the first steps that you have to take is looking at how are you going to move your content into the DITA structure and get it into a DITA environment. And a lot of companies will do like an engineered conversion and that’s great. I mean those come out really well typically, it’s engineered to your needs and your information model and that’s all fantastic. However, doing an engineered conversion can cost quite a bit of money. And some organizations look at that and see that as an immediate barrier to moving into DITA. But I think if you look at kind of that trade off, it’s going to cost something, it’s either time or money. You can look at easier, do it yourself approaches, whether that’s using a more generic conversion and doing the cleanup or even, I’ve seen companies with smaller sets of content do a lot of copying and pasting to move into a DITA environment.