How a DITA CCMS Solves Content Workflow Chaos

It’s a bit ironic to write an international standard on content management best practices using a workflow that breaks every rule. But that’s exactly what happened. As a Co-Founder of Heretto, I’ve been involved with the DITA standard since it was open-sourced by IBM in 2005 under OASIS. The process of creating that standard was a masterclass in how not to manage content—a mess of emails and Word documents. This story details that painful process and shows why a structured approach, powered by a DITA CCMS (or Component Content Management System), is essential for any team serious about efficiency.

After several years, with multiple CCMSs entering the market, it became apparent that there was a need for an international standard for a CCMS to define best practices, ensure compatibility among systems, and encourage adherence to accepted open information architecture standards. I became involved in the process of proposing the standard to ISO/IEC/IEEE (three of the largest standards developing organizations in the world) and eventually became one of three primary authors.

This piece is an anecdotal description of that process and how it (and most standards development processes) could be greatly improved by actually writing and reviewing the standards in a DITA CCMS.Since writing the standard, I wanted to take some time to do a retrospective on the process, and offer some ideas to other standards developers that could help make the process far more efficient and far less stressful.

The Irony of Building a Standard

As you read on, you will find that many of my observations come from the fact that we weren’t using any Content Management System or topic-based authoring tools when developing the standard, other than at the very beginning of the process.It’s ironic that we were authoring a standard on best practices for content management, without using any structured content management tools, beyond our initial planning stage…and throughout the process we were losing hundreds of hours to problems/bottlenecks that using a CCMS would have eliminated.

‍However, this was intentional. Let me clarify. Since Heretto (my company’s product) is a CCMS, I felt it would be very important that the standard authors were not using it during the process– to avoid unintentionally created bias. Additionally, the use of CCMS and topic-based authoring tools is currently not part of ISO’s workflow, though, as you will find out, there are significant reasons why it should be.

Phase 1: Drafting Starts in DITA

The draft version of the standard was written collaboratively with Dr. JoAnn Hackos, Bob Boiko and myself. Dr. Hackos and I actually began writing the standard in DITA during the draft phase. Both I and Dr. Hackos were familiar with DITA while Bob was not, however he was able to come up to speed in just a few days. By collaborating in DITA, we found the process was very streamlined:The first step was designing the high level structure of the standard and dividing up work:

• We used DITA maps and stub topics (placeholders, content TBD) to create a high level Table of Contents (TOC) for the entire standard
• Work was easily divided between authors because all the sections were componentized. Individual topics were assigned to each author, and changes incorporated over time without any merging problems.

Using DITA meant tracking work was a simple process without version control issues:

• It was easier to track progress than when using MS Word because we could look at the state of each topic and the comments on them. The simple fact that we could look at the last time a specific topic was modified meant that we could see progress at a very granular level. If this process had been done in a DITA CCMS like Heretto, we could have used its commenting, metadata, document statuses and Assignments system to even further improve this. It would have significantly streamlined the ability to see the total project status at a quick glance and collaborate on moving the content through its workflow.

DITA eliminates common issues with styling or versions of MS Word:

• Using DITA also meant that we didn’t have to worry about the styling of the content, or dealing with differences between versions of MS Word that authors were using (more on this later as it turned out to be a huge problem once we were forced to move into using MS Word)
• Besides differences in the voice used by different authors, the content was automatically created consistently because the structure had to adhere to the DITA spec. Because DITA is an XML-based standard, there was no styling or structure cleanup needed to ensure consistency even though there were 3 different authors. Over the course of the draft phase, this likely amounted to weeks worth of saved time between all the authors.

The Unexpected Switch to MS Word

After the draft phase we were forced to move into MS Word because this is what ISO used at the time. We easily converted our DITA content to an MS Word document with the push of a button. Going forward, we quickly hit some large bottlenecks because of workflow around MS Word.

Phase 2: The Working Draft Challenges

Review hell...An ISO standard under development goes through many rounds of review from members around the world. During this phase, Word documents were passed around via email to different groups for review and comments. Reviewers would leave feedback using MS Word track changes and commenting features.

Merging Feedback Became a Nightmare

There were roughly 10 reviewers during this phase and it lasted about 8 months. This process was excruciatingly painful since each round of review meant getting 5+ new Word documents with comments, that had to all be merged into a single document. Furthermore, there was no standardized version of MS Word that was used. The differences between versions for users in different countries (Japan, Germany, US) were significant.

Oftentimes, when comments came back, the styling of the documents was mangled. Then, someone on the team had to manually go through and merge all these documents. This also created confusion because the original author attribution of the comment may be lost, making it difficult to determine who to address when reviewing specific comments.In addition, there were issues around duplicate comments being created because lots of reviewers were working in parallel and would often find the same issues– but could not see each others comments or know they had already been resolved.

Based on these issues alone, I estimate that the process of sending out documents, getting review feedback and then manually merging them, cost many hundreds of hours throughout the project that could have been better utilized.

We Wasted Time on Formatting, Not Content

Since there was no consistent styling, and styling was often broken across different versions of MS Word being used, reviewers spent a lot of time discussing and commenting about style changes. Reviewers would complain about things like bullet styling, bullet numbering and other inconsistencies. Since not everyone saw these issues in their version, it was even more confusing when trying to address them.ISO also has specific guidelines for how documents must be formatted, however without DITA there is nothing clarifying or enforcing them. Authors would break the styling because they didn’t know the guidelines, and then later on they would need to be manually fixed.

Too Many Meetings, Not Enough Progress

During weekly meetings to discuss comments, it was really hard to keep everyone on track since at least a quarter of the time was spent addressing confusion related to styling and versioning. The meetings would be filled with dialog like:

A: “What page are you on again? You said that was on page 25, but for me it is on page 26.”

B: “Mr. Z, you changed the numbering style on these bullets but ISO guidelines say they should be the way they were before.”

X: “The graphic is going off the page, we need to fix that.”

Y: “It looks fine in my version.”

With 10 or so people on a call, many of whom were not native English speakers, we frequently ran through a two hour meeting without really digging into anything significant. Some weeks we had 6 hours of meetings just to get through 20-50 comments.

What Version is Correct?

During this phase, most of the collaboration was done via email. Versions of the standard were emailed back and forth, merged, and then redistributed. Sometimes comments would not be incorporated correctly and no one would notice until several weeks later. At that point there would be more new versions and the documents changed significantly enough that determining where those comments belonged was very difficult. Doing a quick search through my inbox I see that I have more than 200+ emails with different versions of the standard which were sent back and forth during the development process. 200 different versions of a doc in my inbox alone. Now multiply that by ten to twelve other people and you can understand the problem.

Phase 3: Managing Comments in MS Excel

During this phase the standard is circulated to ISO members to vote and comment on it. Since there are many more reviewers during this phase, capturing comments and changes directly in Word was unsustainable. Instead, comments are captured in Excel spreadsheets and submitted back to the working committee, instead of actually modifying the documents.

Where Does This Comment Belong?

The spreadsheet doesn’t match the Word doc...Users were still reviewing the document in MS Word, but comments were aggregated in a spreadsheet with a reference to the section in Word where the comment applied. Because of differences in Word versions, the section numbers referenced in the spreadsheet didn’t always line up with what authors would see in their versions. In addition, in many instances reviewers were not even reviewing the right version of the document because they accidentally downloaded the wrong version, or used an old version they had in an email by mistake. Frequently, comments were not even relevant anymore, or couldn’t be tracked back to the correct part of the document.

This resulted in many extra meetings just for the purpose of asking the original commenter to show us where the section was that they were referencing.As an author, my job was to review comments and respond with recommendations for changes or explain why changes are not appropriate. Roughly 50% of the time I spent reviewing comments was actually spent reconciling the notes in the spreadsheet to what content they were suppose to reference in the standard.

Who’s Responsible for Addressing This Comment?

Since there was no way to track who wrote what parts of the standard, and comments were detached in a spreadsheet, we would often have meetings just to determine who was responsible for addressing a specific comment. I would often have to go through all the comments even though only a sub-set of them applied to the content I had developed. This was troublesome even with just a few authors; for larger standards with many authors I imagine this would be extremely difficult to handle.

Phase 4: When Translation Stops All Progress

I wasn’t part of the translation process, but during this process we had to stop all work while the documents were processed and were not allowed to make any significant changes afterwards, because the translation process was time-consuming and expensive. If a problem was found, and it was not critical, it wouldn’t be fixed.

How a DITA CCMS Prevents This Chaos

There are three important takeaways from this hypothesis:

1. First, we would likely have developed a higher quality standard, produced in less time using less resources.
2. Second, the time from initial proposal to final approved standard could have been greatly reduced. Using the current tools (Word, Excel) to create the standard and get it approved took about 3 years. This affected the relevance of the standard even as we completed it. We could have gotten the whole process done in 1-2 years and the standard would have had higher value to ISO members. In addition, updates could be made, reviewed and approved much faster, making the standards much more relevant in a rapidly changing world.
3. Finally, standards are often written and reviewed by unpaid volunteers (sometimes subsidized by their employers) with limited time and bandwidth. Saving them time and eliminating frustrating processes would attract more talent to the worldwide standards development field.

Let’s look at the alternative to the process that we could have used.

Branching and Merging for Version Control

Instead of emailing hundreds of document versions back and forth, a DITA CCMS provides a single source of truth. All content lives in one central repository, and every change is tracked. This eliminates the confusion of figuring out which version is the "correct" one. When multiple authors need to work on content simultaneously, the system manages different versions through branching and merging. This means collaborators can work on their assigned sections without overwriting each other's progress. When it’s time to combine the work, the system facilitates a structured merge, preventing the manual, error-prone process of copying and pasting from multiple Word documents. This approach provides a clear audit trail and ensures everyone is always managing content from the most up-to-date information.

Conditional Content for Personalized Outputs

Standards documents, like many forms of technical content, often have variations for different audiences, regions, or use cases. Instead of creating and maintaining separate documents for each variation, DITA allows you to use conditional content. You can flag certain pieces of information—a paragraph, a sentence, or even a single word—to only appear in specific outputs. This means you create the content once and reuse it across many different publications, ensuring consistency while reducing errors and maintenance overhead. For the standards development process, this could mean generating a version for one committee and another for a different regional body, all from the same master source files, without any manual duplication of effort.

Flexible Styling by Separating Content from Format

One of the biggest time sinks in the Word-based process was the constant struggle with formatting. A DITA CCMS solves this by separating content from its presentation. Authors focus entirely on writing clear, accurate, and well-structured information without worrying about fonts, bullet styles, or page breaks. Because DITA is a structured XML standard, consistency is built-in. The styling is applied automatically during the publishing process based on predefined templates. This completely removes formatting from the review conversation, allowing teams to focus on what truly matters: the quality and accuracy of the content itself. This shift saves countless hours in meetings and manual rework.

Centralized Security and Permissions

The confusion over who was responsible for addressing specific comments highlights a critical need for clear ownership and workflow management. A CCMS provides robust content governance through centralized security and permissions. You can control exactly who can view, edit, review, and approve specific pieces of content. Work can be assigned to individual authors or reviewers, creating a clear and accountable workflow. This ensures that feedback is directed to the right person and that changes are made only by authorized users. It eliminates the chaos of an open-ended review process and replaces it with a structured, trackable system where everyone knows their role and responsibilities.

Authoring Content In A DITA CCMS

A DITA CCMS is a structured content repository that consists of a single source database accessed remotely by writers, reviewers, editors and approvers. The content exists only in one central version and the application tracks all interactions with the content on multiple levels. The file formats are XML, which means formatting is not handled by the authors- it is set at a system level, ensuring consistent adherence to the requirements of the Standards Developing Organization (SDO).As a result, authoring and reviewing in a DITA CCMS removes nearly all the pain points and bottlenecks described above:

• Stubbing out content and topics/sections during the planning process is very easy and creates a high level roadmap of what is to be developed that everyone can collaborate on
• Participants log into the system from any location globally, rather sending emails back and forth with attachments
• Status can be assigned at the topic level so it’s very easy to see what content is still being drafted
• Content formatting is automatically made consistent because of rules imposed by DITA and separation of content and style/formatting. The ISO formatting guidelines would be enforced via DITA.
• One version (one source of the truth) of content completely removes all of the problems associated with emailing multiple versions of Word documents back and forth
• There is the ability to compare content with past versions, and rollback content if needed
• Comments are captured in a centralized system, instead of a spreadsheet, and are maintained directly in the context of the specific content they relate to:
• Prevents losing comments and ensures the authorship of the comment is known
• Allows replying to comments directly, instead of via email, and allows notifications to automatically be sent to users when new comments are added on their content or replies to their comments are created
• Prevents duplicate comments being created by different reviewers (this was a big problem)
• Permissions can be applied to various users to prevent reviewers from changing content they shouldn’t be able to. Permissions can be applied to content in various stages of the lifecycle so that content which has already been approved is automatically frozen, and no users can modify it. This allows some portions of the document to be frozen while others are still being worked on vs. in MS Word, where it is all or nothing.

These are just a few of the advantages inherent in using a DITA CCMS to author and review standards. Finally, let’s look at the significant potential Return On Investment (ROI) for all the stakeholders in the standards development process.

### What is DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture)? DITA, which stands for Darwin Information Typing Architecture, is an XML-based standard for structuring technical information. Instead of treating a document as one long file, DITA breaks content down into small, self-contained, and reusable chunks called "topics." Each topic is "typed" based on its purpose, with common types including Concept (explaining what something is), Task (explaining how to do something), and Reference (providing detailed data like specifications). This structured approach ensures every piece of content has a clear purpose and a consistent format. It’s a world away from the free-form nature of a Word document and is the foundation of why DITA is so effective for technical teams that require clarity and consistency. #### Core Components: Topics and Maps Topics on their own are just building blocks. To create a complete document, you use a DITA map. A map is essentially a table of contents that organizes topics in a specific sequence to form a deliverable like a user guide or an installation manual. This is where the real power of reuse comes into play. You can write a single topic—like a safety warning or a setup procedure—and include it across dozens of different documents just by referencing it in different maps. This completely eliminates the need to copy and paste, ensuring that when you update the source topic, the change is automatically reflected everywhere it's used, making the process of creating structured content incredibly efficient. ### What is a Component Content Management System (CCMS)? A Component Content Management System, or CCMS, is the engine that powers a DITA workflow. Unlike a traditional CMS that manages entire pages or articles, a CCMS is specifically designed to manage content at the component level—those individual topics we just discussed. It provides a centralized repository where teams can write, review, translate, and manage these granular pieces of content. A system like the Heretto CCMS acts as the single source of truth for all content, solving the version control chaos and collaboration bottlenecks that come from emailing documents back and forth. It gives teams a structured environment to work together, track changes, and publish content with confidence. #### Leveraging Metadata Management A CCMS also allows you to add powerful metadata, or extra information, to each content component. Think of it like tagging your content with labels for a specific audience, product version, or language. This makes content easy to find, filter, and assemble into personalized documents for different users. Instead of managing review feedback in a disconnected spreadsheet, comments are attached directly to the relevant topic within the system. This provides clear context and streamlines the entire content management and review cycle, ensuring feedback is tracked and resolved in one place without confusion.

The Substantial Payoff of a DITA CCMS

With multiple authors, reviewers and dozens of others spending considerable time and effort on standards development, often on a volunteer basis, any improvement in the technology used to create standards can mean significant and measurable savings and other benefits:

• Time Savings. A standard created in a DITA CCMS could be brought to completion in a much shorter timeframe.  The resulting time savings imply a faster time to market and earlier realization of revenues for the SDO.
• Updates. Any required updates could me made at the topic level and the standard easily republished in days rather than years.
• Reuse and Translation Management. Structured content lends itself to flexible reuse of ‘chunks’ of content and enables translation to be managed at the updated topic-level.
• Publishing. Because the standard exists as XML, publishing to a variety of emerging media (web, mobile, tablet, wiki, PDF, Word, etc.) can be accomplished, with consistent formatting, with a few clicks.
• Monetization. Because standards authored in this model exist as data, they can easily be bundled into relevant sets and sold as subscriptions that include regular updates.

These benefits and the substantial savings they represent, present a compelling case for SDOs the world over to consider reevaluating the way standards are created, managed, and distributed.

‍Casey Jordan is co-founder of Heretto. He is a co-author of the ISO/IEC/IEEE 26531 Standard: Systems and Software Engineering- Content Management for Product Lifecycle, User and Service Management Documentation.

Scalability and Agility for Growing Teams

As teams grow and product lines expand, the manual processes of copying, pasting, and emailing documents become unsustainable. A DITA CCMS is designed to solve this exact problem. It acts as a specialized system for managing content built on the DITA XML standard. This architecture allows teams to create modular content components that can be reused, versioned, and published across many different formats and channels, all from a single, central source. This approach dramatically improves consistency and efficiency, ensuring that every customer sees the correct, approved information, no matter where they find it. It also significantly reduces the costs and complexities of translation, as only new or updated components need to be translated, not entire documents.

This shift from document-based workflows to a component-based strategy is what gives growing teams their agility back. Instead of getting bogged down in version control issues and endless review cycles, teams can focus on creating high-quality content. When a product feature is updated, writers only need to edit a single topic, and that change automatically populates everywhere it's used. This single-source-of-truth model means documentation can keep pace with development, and teams can scale their output without scaling their headcount at the same rate. It moves content from being a bottleneck to being a flexible, strategic asset that supports the entire organization's growth.

Preparing Your Content for Artificial Intelligence

The highly structured nature of DITA does more than just streamline human workflows; it also prepares your content for the future of information delivery, which is increasingly driven by artificial intelligence. AI tools like chatbots, virtual assistants, and advanced search engines don't read content like humans do. They rely on structured, machine-readable data to understand context and deliver accurate answers. DITA’s XML foundation, with its semantic tags and clear information hierarchy, provides exactly the kind of well-organized data that AI systems need to function effectively. By authoring in DITA, you are essentially creating a content repository that is ready to power intelligent applications from day one.

Think of your content as the fuel for an AI engine. If you feed it unstructured, inconsistent documents, the engine will sputter and produce unreliable results. But if you feed it clean, semantically-rich DITA components, it can process the information efficiently and deliver precise, contextually relevant answers to user queries. This readiness allows organizations to adopt new technologies faster, improving customer self-service and internal knowledge discovery. Structuring your content in a DITA CCMS isn't just about solving today's problems; it's a strategic investment in making your content valuable for the AI-powered tools of tomorrow.

Benefits Across Different Team Roles

A DITA CCMS isn't just a tool for technical writers. It provides distinct advantages for everyone involved in the content lifecycle, from managers and architects to administrators and reviewers. By centralizing content and standardizing workflows, it creates a more collaborative and efficient environment for the entire team.

For Content Managers and Information Architects

For those overseeing content strategy, a CCMS offers unparalleled control and visibility. Because all content is organized with semantic XML tags, it becomes machine-readable and primed for reuse. This structure allows managers to enforce standards and maintain consistency across thousands of topics. Instead of guessing at project status, you can see exactly where each component is in its workflow, from draft to final approval. This level of content governance ensures that the right information is delivered to the right audience every time, turning content operations into a predictable and measurable process.

For System Administrators and Reviewers

A DITA CCMS transforms the review process from a chaotic mess of emails and conflicting documents into a streamlined, collaborative workflow. Administrators can set granular permissions, ensuring reviewers can comment on content without accidentally changing something they shouldn't. The system can also lock down approved content, allowing some parts of a document to be finalized while others are still in progress. For reviewers, this means all feedback is captured in one central place, directly linked to the relevant content. This eliminates duplicate comments and the confusion of reconciling feedback from multiple spreadsheets, making the entire cycle faster and far less frustrating.

Navigating the DITA CCMS Market

Choosing the right CCMS is a significant decision, and the market offers a variety of options. As you evaluate different systems, it's helpful to understand the key features that will impact your team's workflow and the overall trends shaping the industry.

Key Comparison Points for Systems

When comparing different DITA CCMS platforms, focus on a few critical features. Consider the database type, whether the system is a native XML database or built on another technology. Examine the workflow management capabilities to see how well they align with your review and approval processes. Look closely at the localization and translation management features, as this is a major area for potential ROI. Finally, determine whether a SaaS or on-premise solution is a better fit for your IT infrastructure and resources. Evaluating these core aspects will help you find a system that meets your specific needs.

Understanding Interoperability and Market Trends

The DITA CCMS market is maturing, with a trend toward consolidation as established companies acquire smaller players. This is good news for buyers, as it indicates the market is stabilizing around proven, successful systems. This maturity also highlights the importance of interoperability. By choosing a system built on an open standard like DITA, you ensure that your content remains portable and avoids vendor lock-in. The ability to migrate your content is crucial for long-term flexibility, which is a core reason why DITA remains a cornerstone of enterprise content strategy.

A Balanced View: Is DITA Outdated?

It’s fair to ask if a standard developed in the early 2000s is still relevant. Some critics argue that DITA has become a dated approach, promising capabilities it can't fully deliver in a world moving toward more flexible, headless content models. This perspective often arises when DITA is misapplied to content problems it wasn't designed to solve, like marketing copy or blog posts. However, for its intended purpose—managing complex, structured technical documentation at scale—DITA's principles are more relevant than ever. The need for precision, consistency, reuse, and multi-channel publishing in technical content hasn't gone away; it has only intensified.

The key is understanding that DITA is not a silver bullet for all content, but it is the best-in-class solution for a specific and critical domain. Modern DITA CCMS platforms have evolved far beyond the standard's original implementation, incorporating headless delivery, sophisticated integrations, and user-friendly authoring interfaces. They combine the rigor of DITA's structured architecture with the flexibility needed for modern content delivery. The question isn't whether DITA is outdated, but whether you are using the right tool for the job. For teams managing vast libraries of technical information where accuracy and scalability are non-negotiable, DITA remains the most robust and reliable foundation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why was using Word and email such a disaster for this standards project? The main issue was the complete lack of a single source of truth. Every time the document was emailed for review, multiple new versions were created. This meant the authors had to manually merge feedback from several different files, a process that was not only time-consuming but also introduced errors. It created constant confusion about which version was the most current, leading to wasted time in meetings just trying to get everyone on the same page.

How does a DITA CCMS prevent the nightmare of merging feedback from multiple documents? A DITA CCMS provides one central repository for all content. Instead of emailing files, reviewers log into the system and add comments directly to the relevant topics. All feedback is captured in one place, in context, and is visible to the entire team. This eliminates the need to manually combine changes from different documents and spreadsheets, creating a clear, trackable, and much more efficient review cycle.

You mention separating content from formatting. What does that mean and why is it important? Separating content from formatting means that writers focus only on writing clear and accurate information, not on how it looks. The styling—like fonts, colors, and layout—is handled automatically by templates during the publishing process. This is important because it enforces consistency across all your documents and removes subjective arguments about style from the review process. Teams can focus their energy on the quality of the content itself, not on whether a bullet point is correctly indented.

Is switching to a DITA CCMS a huge undertaking for a team used to traditional tools? While there is an initial learning period, the long-term benefits far outweigh the setup effort. Moving to a structured system like a DITA CCMS is an investment in a more scalable and efficient way of working. It solves the persistent problems of version control, inconsistent formatting, and difficult content reuse that plague traditional workflows. Once teams adapt, they find that the structure actually makes their work faster and far less frustrating.

The post mentions preparing content for AI. How does using DITA actually help with that? Artificial intelligence systems thrive on structured, predictable data. DITA uses XML to wrap content in semantic tags that describe what the content is—a title, a step in a procedure, a safety warning. This creates a highly organized content source that is machine-readable. When a chatbot or search tool queries this content, it can understand the context and relationships between topics, allowing it to deliver much more precise and relevant answers than it could by parsing an unstructured document.

Key Takeaways

• Move Beyond Manual Workflows: Relying on Word documents and email for complex, collaborative projects creates version control chaos and wastes valuable time on formatting issues. A DITA CCMS provides a single source of truth, eliminating these bottlenecks so your team can work more efficiently.
• Focus on Content Quality, Not Presentation: A structured authoring environment separates the substance of your content from its final styling. This allows writers and reviewers to concentrate on accuracy and clarity, making the entire review cycle more productive and less frustrating.
• Build a Future-Ready Content Asset: Adopting a structured content strategy is more than an efficiency fix; it turns your documentation into a modular, reusable, and machine-readable asset. This approach supports scalability and prepares your content to power future AI-driven tools and delivery channels.

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