Presented by Jeff Deskins at Documentation and Training West, May 6-9, 2008 in Vancouver, BC XML and DITA for documentation and publishing boast extreme productivity and cost-savings, as well as revenue opportunities. But how can you build your case to executives to get the green light and show them that DITA is the path for future content? Come to this session to discover your potential financial returns. Learn how to calculate the cost of your current processes, and calculate the potential savings with new technology for authoring, re-use automation, localization, review, and publishing. You can then use these ROI calculations for budget requests and business cases to senior executives, to set expectations with the team and stakeholders for future XML adoption, and track project success. You’ll learn how to: * Quantify and calculate savings in authoring, localization, reviewing, and publishing * Build your business case for DITA including sample scenarios and calculations * Communicate your proposed savings to senior executives * Save 20 - 40% on authoring, 25-50% on localization costs, and over 50% on your existing publishing costs * Explain how DITA adoption supports enterprise initiatives

1. Understanding and Communicating
the Financial Impact of XML DITA
Jeff Deskins
May 7th, 2008
© 2008 JustSystems Inc.

2. Introduction
• Jeff Deskins
– Principal Consultant, JustSystems, Inc.
– 20+ years of experience in the industry at multiple
companies of varying sizes and industries
– Contributed international standards including DITA,
S1000D ATA working groups, and OASIS PLCS
– Author of numerous papers/presentations on
information development and information architecture
© 2007 JustSystems Inc.