.avif)
Your technical writing team is expert at creating clear, accurate documentation. They know your products and your audience inside and out. However, successfully implementing DITA requires a different, highly specialized skill set. Expertise in information architecture, XML, content strategy, and large-scale change management isn't typically part of a writer's day-to-day job. Instead of asking your team to learn these complex disciplines on the fly, bringing in a DITA consultant fills that knowledge gap. They provide the specialized guidance needed to build the right foundation, allowing your writers to focus on what they do best: creating excellent content within a new, more powerful system.
## What is DITA? DITA is a framework for creating and publishing technical documentation. Think of it not as a single tool, but as a set of rules and best practices for writing modular, structured content. Instead of creating long, monolithic documents, DITA encourages you to break down information into small, self-contained chunks that can be mixed, matched, and reused in countless combinations. This approach is built on XML, a markup language that gives your content a predictable and flexible structure. By separating content from formatting, DITA allows your team to focus on writing clear and accurate information, knowing it can be published to any format—from a PDF manual to a knowledge base or a mobile app—without rewriting a single word. This structure is the key to making your content more manageable, consistent, and scalable. ### What Does DITA Stand For? DITA stands for Darwin Information Typing Architecture. Let's break that down. "Architecture" refers to the fact that it's a complete framework for your content. "Information Typing" means that content is categorized by its purpose—like a concept, a task, or a reference. This typing helps ensure every piece of content is structured correctly for its job. The "Darwin" part alludes to the principles of adaptation and inheritance; content can be specialized and adapted for different needs, much like species evolve. It’s an XML standard designed specifically to help teams create, organize, and manage technical information efficiently. ### Core Concepts: Topics and Maps The two foundational concepts in DITA are topics and maps. Instead of writing a document from start to finish, you create individual "topics." A topic is a small, self-contained piece of information that covers a single subject, like a specific task, concept, or reference item. Because each topic stands on its own, it can be easily understood and, more importantly, reused. To assemble these topics into a complete document, you use a "DITA map." The map is essentially a table of contents that organizes and connects your topics in a specific order. You can create multiple maps using the same set of topics, allowing you to build different documents for various audiences or products without duplicating any content. ### Common Uses and Industries DITA is particularly valuable for organizations that manage large volumes of complex documentation. Industries like manufacturing, life sciences, software, and finance rely on it to keep their technical and legal content consistent, accurate, and up-to-date. For example, a software company can use the same set of instructional topics to generate user guides for both its standard and pro-level products, simply by using different DITA maps. In regulated fields like life sciences, DITA helps ensure that documentation is compliant and that translations are managed quickly and accurately across global markets. Any business that needs to maintain a high degree of control over its information benefits from this structured approach. ## Key Benefits of Using DITA Adopting DITA is about more than just organizing content; it’s about transforming your entire content operation into a more efficient and scalable system. The primary advantage comes from moving away from a document-centric model to a topic-based one. This shift allows your team to work faster, reduce errors, and deliver more personalized information to your users. By treating content as a collection of reusable assets rather than static documents, you create a single source of truth that can be managed and updated with far less effort. This structured foundation makes it easier to maintain quality and consistency, even as your product lines and documentation requirements grow in complexity. ### Improved Efficiency with Content Reuse Content reuse is the cornerstone of DITA's efficiency. With a topic-based approach, you write a piece of information once and can then use it in dozens or even hundreds of different documents. When a product detail or a procedure needs to be updated, you only have to edit the source topic, and the change automatically populates everywhere that topic is used. This eliminates the tedious and error-prone process of hunting down every instance of copied-and-pasted content to make a change. As our data shows, teams that adopt DITA can become two to three times faster at content production, freeing them up to focus on creating new content rather than maintaining old versions. ### Better Accuracy and Consistency When content is copied and pasted across multiple documents, inconsistencies are inevitable. A writer might rephrase a sentence in one guide but forget to update it in another, leading to confusing or contradictory information for the user. DITA solves this by establishing a single source of truth. Because content is reused from a central repository, you can be confident that the information presented to users is identical everywhere. This level of consistency is critical for building trust and ensuring clarity. It also simplifies the review process, as stakeholders only need to approve a single topic, not every document it appears in, which is a key part of effective content governance. ### Scalability for Large Information Sets As a company grows, so does its library of documentation. Managing thousands of pages in traditional formats can quickly become chaotic. DITA is designed to handle this complexity with ease. The modular, topic-based structure makes it simple to manage massive sets of information without losing control. A Component Content Management System (CCMS) built for DITA provides the tools to organize, track, and publish this content at scale. This means you can add new products, support more languages, and expand your documentation library without your processes breaking down. It provides a future-proof foundation for your content strategy. ### Simplified Audits and Content Governance For companies in regulated industries, maintaining a clear audit trail is non-negotiable. DITA's structured nature makes this process much simpler. Because every topic is a distinct component, it’s easy to track its version history, see who made changes, and manage its review and approval status. This granular control is essential for compliance and quality assurance. When an audit is required, you can quickly pull reports on specific pieces of content rather than sifting through entire documents. This simplifies the process of proving that your documentation meets legal or industry standards, making governance less of a burden and more of an integrated part of your workflow. ## Is Learning DITA Necessary? For many technical writers, the question of whether to learn DITA comes up frequently. The short answer is that while it's a valuable skill, it’s not always a mandatory one, especially for those just starting their careers. Many successful technical writers have built long careers without ever touching DITA. The more important skill is understanding the principles behind it: structured authoring, content reuse, and modularity. DITA is simply one of the most popular and powerful standards for implementing those principles. Think of it this way: knowing how to cook is more important than knowing how to use one specific brand of oven. If you grasp the core concepts of structured content, you can adapt to any tool or standard, including DITA. ### Structured Authoring Principles vs. DITA Specifics The real value lies in understanding structured authoring, not just memorizing DITA tags. Structured authoring is the practice of writing content in a consistent, predictable format that a machine can understand. It’s about breaking information into logical pieces, tagging it with metadata, and focusing on reuse. DITA is a specific XML-based application of these principles. If you can think in a modular way and understand how to write for reuse, you have the most important skill. Many companies that use DITA are more interested in hiring writers who grasp these foundational concepts than those who only have a surface-level knowledge of the DITA specification. ### How Difficult is DITA to Learn? The good news is that DITA is not considered exceptionally difficult to learn, especially for someone already in the technical writing field. If you land a job that requires DITA, you can likely get up to speed quickly through on-the-job training and available resources. The learning curve is often less about the technical syntax of XML and more about shifting your mindset from a linear, document-based approach to a modular, topic-based one. Once you embrace the idea of creating small, reusable content chunks, the specific rules of DITA become much more intuitive. The key is to focus on the "why" behind the structure, and the "how" will follow. ## Advice for DITA Professionals and Learners Whether you're just starting to explore DITA or looking to deepen your expertise, there are clear paths for growth. For beginners, the focus should be on building a solid understanding of the core principles through self-study and hands-on practice. The DITA community is rich with resources, and taking the initiative to learn can set you apart in the job market. For experienced professionals, the opportunity lies in specialization. Moving beyond authoring into areas like information architecture or content strategy can open doors to consulting roles and leadership positions where you can guide organizations through their transition to structured content, as shown in various successful implementations. ### How to Learn DITA on Your Own You don't need a formal course to start learning DITA. A great first step is to watch introductory videos, such as the "DITA Quick Start for Authors" series, to get a visual sense of the workflow. Next, download the DITA Open Toolkit, which is the open-source engine used to publish DITA content. Experimenting with it will help you understand how topics and maps are transformed into final documents. There are also numerous books available that provide a comprehensive introduction to the standard. By combining theoretical knowledge from reading with practical experience from the toolkit, you can build a strong foundational understanding of how DITA works and see examples of it in action on sites like Heretto's own documentation portal. ### Developing Specialized Skills for DITA Consulting For those looking to advance their careers, specializing in DITA can lead to high-value consulting opportunities. Consultants often play a critical role in helping companies adopt structured content. This can involve guiding them in selecting the right Component Content Management System (CCMS) for their needs or designing their entire content model from scratch in an Information Architect role. These positions require a deep understanding of not just DITA, but also content strategy, taxonomy, and change management. By developing these skills, you can position yourself as an expert who helps organizations leverage DITA to solve complex business challenges, transforming their content from a cost center into a strategic asset.When Should You Hire a DITA Consultant?
We work with a spectrum of businesses to find better ways to deliver the right content in the right format at the right time using the DITA XML standard.
Content strategy initiatives we get involved in are often guided and managed by one or more of our consulting partners. Sometimes a consultant will bring us into one of their engagements when it’s time to implement a tool for DITA authoring and content management. At other times we steer a customer to a consultant because they need help with content strategy, training, conversion, or some other aspect of a DITA implementation.
Preparing Your Team for a New Way of Working
Moving to structured authoring with DITA XML involves a lot of change; changing the way documentation is written, the tools you use to do your job, and the workflows around authoring, review, and approval. Your team might not have the experience to successfully navigate the transition. A consultant can help you define where you want to go, then recommend the right people, processes, and technologies to ensure you reach your destination.
Hiring a DITA consultant can help you avoid extra costs by guiding you down the right path from the get-go and then helping you maneuver around any obstacles along the way. We're going to explore some of these potential trouble spots: content strategy, information modeling, technical writing training, tool selection, legacy content conversion, localization, and stylesheet development.
In all of this, we'll attempt to answer two questions: When is it safe to try to do this by yourself? If you hire a consultant, what should they deliver?
Creating Your Content Strategy
A content strategy outlines what information you need to develop, who will develop it, and how it will be delivered to the customer. Before you get to the what, who, and how, you need to answer the question Why?
Why are you changing your content strategy? What's the business case, what's the expected ROI, and what are the key milestones and metrics you will use to measure your progress along the way?
An experienced consultant can help with this. They’ve been down this road before, they see the big picture and can communicate the vision to others across your enterprise, keeping everything moving forward.
That doesn't mean a consultant will come in and immediately tell you what direction you should go. While this article assumes you have already decided to move to DITA XML, that doesn’t mean that structured content is the right strategy for every situation.
Having trouble deciding whether DITA is the right choice for your organization? Take our brief quiz 'Which type of structured content is right for you?' to determine the best solution for you and your team.
Every client is different and there are no cookie-cutter solutions. The solution that works best for your organization is one that takes your corporate culture and risk tolerance into account. A successful DITA implementation begins with a period of discovery, and while they won’t have all the answers right away, consultants certainly know the right questions to ask.
It begins with the consultant meeting with information developers, architects, managers, and consumers to gain a good understanding of how content components are being used, reused, localized, managed, and delivered. What types of information are you developing? Why is it being created? Who will access it? How will they use it? Through these discussions, a consultant will begin to understand current pain points and have some semblance of your vision for the future.
TIP: Form a cross-functional task force that will meet regularly throughout the strategy, design, and implementation phases, working closely with the consulting organization to ensure the solution fits your environment and accomplishes the objectives you set out.
Can Your Team Create a Content Strategy Alone?
The answer to this question depends on the complexity of your desired future state and the skill sets, experience level, and availability of your core team and other internal resources. Does your task force include senior information architects, technologists, and strategy experts? Has anyone developed a complete content strategy or implemented DITA before? If not, your chances of success will rise by hiring some professional help. Consider hiring a consultant if your plans include:
- Highly customized or dynamic publishing outputs
- Legacy content conversion
- Streamlined translation process
- Complex taxonomy
What Should a DITA Consultant Deliver for Your Content Strategy?
At the end of the discovery phase of the engagement, a consultant should deliver a detailed strategy that includes timelines, roles and responsibilities, and success metrics. Insufficient planning, unrealistic expectations, and overly aggressive deadlines are some of the major reasons why business transformation efforts fail. A consultant will mitigate those risks and ensure that all your goals are achieved.
Designing Your Information Model
If your content strategy includes a move to topic-based authoring in DITA XML, you'll need to build a structure, or information model, for your content. The model is a set of rules that define how content will be developed and organized, and how the information will be tagged, linked, and reused. The information model is the map that will guide the activities of each member of the team - writers, information architects, managers, etc. -- and keep your content usable and consistent.
The process begins with a review of your current content, including how it is being used and by whom. What types of information do you have? How are your documents typically structured? How are all the individual files organized, by product, user, geography? Then you build an information model around your unique content environment, defining how your information will be shared and reused, what metadata and tags will be applied, and how to consistently author and organize content.
Sometimes your information model will require extending DITA with a specialization or by defining a subset of DITA that meets more particular needs for your content.
Can Your Team Build an Information Model In-House?
While everyone will need an information model to take full advantage of DITA, some will require a more complex model than others. Is your information well organized? Is it consistently written, named, labeled, and formatted? Does your team include information architects with a command of the relationships inside your content? If so, you may already have some structure and rules in place that can form the basis of your Information Model. If not, you might need a consultant to help you gather your bearings.
What Should a Consultant Deliver for Your Information Model?
A consultant will perform the role of an information architect. They'll help you analyze your content and define the right DITA types and metadata to use for your purposes. It depends on what your business goals are, but some typical outputs from information modeling are:
- Reuse strategy guidelines
- Taxonomy and metadata
- Tagging guidelines
- Style sheet specifications
Going forward, your writers will need to work within your information model when they develop any new content. While a consultant can help with that ongoing work, hiring an information architect, or training a writer to be the keeper of the architecture is a good practice.
Defining Your Technology Requirements
Identifying the right DITA CCMS and authoring tool is critical to the success of your project. However, you should wait and buy tools after you've developed a strategy and have a plan for moving to DITA. Your content strategy and information model will define your requirements for things like usability, metadata and taxonomy support, conditionalization, translation management, etc.
Your consultant should be very familiar with the different tool vendors, understand the strengths and limitations of each product, and help you identify a shortlist of solutions that will meet your needs. While you may require on-going support from your consultant as you migrate your content in phases, refine your information model or add new types of output, make sure your consultant trains and guides your staff so that ownership of the solution always stays within the company.
Can Your Team Choose Tech without a Consultant?
Regardless of whether you have some guidance from a consultant during the tool-buying phase, you should take ownership of each step of the process and be careful to not implement a system that you don't fully understand. Get to know the technology vendors during the sales and implementation process. You’ll need to have a good on-going relationship with them long after the consultant is gone.
DITA XML is an open standard with a large Community of Practice, including lots of interoperable tools for authoring, managing, publishing, and translating content. Because of its architecture, you can often import and export content from one tool to another. Make sure the solution you choose does not include anything proprietary that will lock you into a single vendor, consultant, or way of thinking. Attend some conferences, be informed, and make your own independent choices.
Vendor lock-in is fairly common in the content development space. Check out this short list of things to be on the lookout to avoid vendor lock-in.
What Should an XML Consultant Deliver for Tech Selection?
At the end of the design and planning phases, a consultant should sit in and validate the solution as the tool vendor walks you through a simple demo of the proposed technology. All the processes necessary to implement your content strategy should be demonstrated in a proof of concept, including things like using the tools to import structured content at the front end and transform it into your required outputs at the back end.
What Kind of DITA Training Will You Need?
Product documentation has many contributors, each with different responsibilities. Structuring your content will change everyone’s work processes, and some people may assume greater responsibilities. Your writers, reviewers, and managers will have to be trained to use new tools for creating, managing, and sharing their work.
At a minimum, a consultant should offer sufficient training to ensure everyone understands the capabilities of the new system. Individual contributors need to understand how their role fits into the whole, and why they are being asked to change the way they do things. Writers will need to understand the new information model in order to use the correct information types and properly apply metadata.
Beyond that, some general training in topic-based writing, minimalism, and the DITA standard can be helpful, because the concept of structured authoring is new to many people.
Don't fret, you're not in this alone. We happen to know a thing or two about migrating to structured content, which is why we've prepared a handy guide: Preparing for Structured Content.
What Are the Risks of a DIY Approach?
Like any business transformation, your ROI depends on how well the new processes and systems are adopted by end-users, and that largely comes down to how well you manage people and change. An experienced consultant will help you implement a change management plan that will make the transition easier for everyone affected by it. That means not only developing the right training but rolling it out to the right people at the right time.
A DITA implementation is no small project and will benefit from a Project Manager who sees the end from the beginning and makes sure all your i's are dotted and t's are crossed. In many cases, a full-time DITA consultant is the best person to play this role. However, if your organization already has a lot of PMPs and a robust practice around change management, DIY doesn't have to mean that your DITA initiative is Dead On Arrival.
Project Management can be intimidating. You'll want to kick things off by getting all your plans in order. How? It starts with solid project documentation: Product Requirements Document: The PRD Is the Word.
TIP: DITA naturally leads to hyphenated job descriptions. A technical writer becomes a DITA Information Designer-Technical Writer or Content Engineer-DITA Specialist. This is a good thing. One of the goals of the training should be to encourage your team to embrace the move to DITA as an opportunity for professional development as they broaden their skill sets and move up the food chain.
Handling Your Legacy Content
Whether to convert your existing content to DITA and how to do are complicated questions. Conversion can be expensive and time-consuming, so you'll want to think hard about what content to convert (you might be surprised how many DITA topics you can generate from your existing content).
Before converting, your content strategy should be in place. Only then can you determine the best way to turn a legacy document into a series of DITA topics with the right structure and markup. For example, will you require that every topic has a Short Description? You will need to know that before you start.
You should also have a good understanding of how complex your content is and how consistently it is written and organized. Do your teams have their own formatting guidelines? Their own styles and tone of voice? That will have a big impact on the difficulty of the conversion process.
There are a number of consultants and service providers that specialize in content conversion, and many different approaches to take.
Can Your Team Handle Content Conversion Alone?
Companies with smaller document sets can consider doing the conversion in-house. Others will find that outsourcing this activity to a consultant or conversion service is more cost-efficient and produces the highest quality output. Hiring a consultant to help you define what content to convert and then coordinate the entire process can potentially save you a lot of money. But it doesn't have to be an all or nothing approach. Many organizations prefer to use both internal and external resources.
What Should a Consultant Deliver for Content Conversion?
A consultant will help you identify content for conversion, then develop a process and rules for converting it to your specifications. After conversion scripts are written, test content is converted and sent to your team for review. The consultant will give you insights that will help you judge the results of the conversion process.
As with other steps of a DITA implementation, doing a pilot test of the proposed conversion process with real content will help you analyze the results and validate your budget and timelines.
Planning Your DITA Implementation
Planning and organization are critical for a successful DITA implementation. You'll need the entire team to agree to their roles and responsibilities and commit to getting their tasks done on time.
Do You Need a Consultant for Implementation?
As we said before, a DITA implementation will benefit from having a Project Manager, whether an internal resource or external consultant. A Project Manager facilitates regular meetings of your cross-functional task force, tracks and communicates the project status, enforces the project timetable, and manages the project deliverables on an on-going basis. A DITA consultant will bring specialized skills and knowledge to the role and can use their experience to keep the project on track.
What Should an Implementation Consultant Deliver?
When building a business case and planning your DITA implementation, a consultant will help you set measurable, realistic goals. Quantitative metrics will be critical to gauging the success of the project. For example, you may have goals that look like this:
- Reduce calls to our support desk by 30%
- Reduce the total number of pages sent for translation by 500
- Increase percentage of content reuse by 75%
- Reduce time to market by 1 month
As the implementation rolls out, your consultant will track your progress against these metrics and communicate them to all stakeholders. Senior management will want to see some concrete results quickly, and a consultant can keep the team focused on getting measurable results. Most implementations start with a pilot proof of concept; a consultant will help you choose a project that will result in a quick ROI.
Setting Up Your Publishing Pipeline
One of the main reasons that companies embark on a DITA implementation is to give them more ways to deliver content to their customers. By separating content from formatting, DITA makes it easy to create the right deliverable in the right language, automatically optimizing it for desktops and smartphones. Using style sheets, you can create high-quality PDFs and HTML5 web portals, or export to your ECM, LMS, or online help system.
Getting the publishing output you want often involves considerable time and consulting. Even organizations that are going it alone sometimes hire a specialist to configure and deploy a publishing pipeline to create the various formats of output they need. This process begins with a review of your existing publications and templates and results in a streamlined, standard set of styles for each content element and information type.
An experienced consultant understands what it takes to publish DITA content and can make sure your published outputs have the look you want. They will create the conversion code that transforms your XML content into PDF, or Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and HTML5 for web, mobile, and online help.
Get into the nitty gritty about publishing here: How to Nail Single-Source Publishing.
Preparing Your Content for Localization
For many organizations, expansion into global markets is limited by the ability to quickly and accurately translate product content. DITA XML can make the translation process 30-50% more efficient than traditional publishing. Separating content from formatting enables automation which can positively impact your translation time and cost.
A full-service DITA consultant can guide you through the transition to a more efficient localization process. They know how to take advantage of DITA XML to get the most accurate translations in the least amount of time.
Similar to content conversion, translation is a service that you can outsource to a localization service provider (LSP). Consultants are familiar with the LSPs, they know how localization works in your chosen CCMS, and they can put the pieces together so everything works smoothly.
A consultant will help you communicate your expectations to the LSP and ensure that the unique requirements of your structured content are understood. Finally, they can train you on how to inspect the files that the translator sends back to make sure they are valid and preserve your structural markup.
In addition, consultants can train your writers on how to write localization-friendly content and steer you towards markup conventions that work best for translation providers.
For a more on content translation and localization, this is a good place to start: Translating Your Documentation: A Start-To-Finish Guide for Fast, Accurate, and Affordable Translation.
Whether or not you choose to hire a consultant for all or part of a DITA XML implementation comes down to your budget, timelines, and how much expertise you have in-house. When you are considering this question, ask yourself how much content do you have, how complex is it, and how quickly does it need to be transitioned to DITA?
When choosing a consultant, ask around, and get referrals. Hearing other people’s true-life stories is the only way to truly evaluate whether a particular consultant or professional service is a good fit for your situation.
How much will a consultant cost? It depends on their experience level and the amount of work that needs to be done. Consultants charge by the hour or on a project basis. Either way, the biggest variable is the amount of time it will take to get the job done right. Organizations with lots of complex legacy content who require a consultant at every stage of the DITA adoption process can expect to pay more than those with less..
The calculations you will have to make are:
- How much will it cost to do the work yourself?
- What is the cost of failing to get everything you want out of the project?
Moving to DITA XML can improve the quality and reach of your product documentation and support content while saving you a bundle in the process. Plan wisely, get help where you need it, and the journey will lead you somewhere wonderful.
This article was originally published in 2014 by Stephen Morse. It's been updated to include additional resources and helpful musings.
Frequently Asked Questions
My technical writers are experts. Why can't they just learn DITA and lead this project? Your writers are absolutely experts in your products and audience, and that's invaluable. However, a successful DITA implementation relies on a different set of skills, like information architecture, content strategy, and large-scale project management. A consultant brings that specialized experience, building the technical foundation so your writers can focus on what they do best—creating great content within the new system—instead of trying to learn a new discipline on the fly.
What's the biggest risk of trying to implement DITA without a consultant? The most common pitfall is building a weak foundation. Without an expert guiding the process, teams often create a flawed information model or choose the wrong tools for their specific needs. This can lead to inconsistent content, a chaotic content library, and a failed project that costs more to fix than it would have to set up correctly from the start.
What does a consultant actually do in the first few weeks? A consultant's first step is always discovery. They meet with your writers, managers, and other stakeholders to understand your current content, workflows, and business goals. They ask targeted questions to identify pain points and map out your vision for the future. This initial phase is all about gathering the information needed to create a detailed, customized strategy that fits your organization's unique needs.
If we hire a consultant, will our team become dependent on them forever? Not at all. A good consultant's goal is to make themselves obsolete. They are there to build the system, establish best practices, and train your team to take full ownership. They guide your staff through the transition, ensuring they have the skills and knowledge to manage the new workflows independently long after the engagement ends.
We're a smaller team. Is hiring a DITA consultant still a worthwhile investment? Yes, it can be even more critical for smaller teams. With fewer resources, you can't afford the costly mistakes that come from a trial-and-error approach. A consultant helps you get it right the first time, ensuring your investment in structured content pays off quickly. They can tailor a strategy that fits your scale, helping you avoid over-engineering a solution and focusing on the changes that will have the biggest impact.
Key Takeaways
- Define Your Strategy Before Choosing Tools: A DITA consultant's primary role is to help you build a solid content strategy and information model. This foundational work ensures you select the right technology and processes, rather than letting a tool dictate your strategy.
- Guide Your Team Through the Transition: Moving to DITA changes how everyone works, from writing to review. A consultant manages this transition by providing training, establishing new workflows, and ensuring your team adopts the new system successfully.
- Outsource Complex, One-Time Hurdles: Your team excels at content creation, not DITA conversion or stylesheet development. Use a consultant for specialized, high-effort tasks like migrating legacy content and setting up publishing pipelines to keep your project on track and your writers focused.
