Are you spending too much time managing changes within your documentation?
If your organisation includes people who create technical, financial or statutory documentation, then chances are they are spending a disproportionate amount of time managing change within their documents and ensuring they don’t miss anything critical in the review and editing process.
Identifying change — time-consuming and error-prone
In the past it has been hard to avoid the risk of error and high cost of manually identifying differences between versions of documents and merging them together into another version. Doing it by eye, the stare-and-compare method, is error prone and very time-consuming. The alternative, line-by-line comparison tools, are ill-equipped for working with rich documents and it can be almost as tricky interpreting the results that they generate.
In sectors where accuracy of information is particularly important, such as aerospace, healthcare or financial reporting, documentation teams have had little choice but to review everything meticulously and just accept the delays and high costs.
The transformational effect of structured document formats
Now, however, as most organisations are using modern, structured document formats such as DocBook, DITA and S1000D, the situation is rather different. When you create and manage documents in these formats, the file isn’t just a flat representation of the document, it captures the structure and content of the document separately from how it is presented.
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This means that a computer algorithm can analyse the differences between two or more documents and highlight just those changes that are important to you. It can tell the difference between content that has been added, deleted or just moved. It can work out what has changed within a complex table and whether an illustration has been updated. Most importantly, it can present the differences in a way that another system can act upon — such as triggering a task in a workflow — or that can be viewed easily in an editing tool or a redline report.
Finding opportunities from change
You cannot take away the need for a human to review and act upon their colleagues’ edits, but you can ensure that every relevant difference is clearly identified. You can also use the same approach to compare previous and subsequent versions of the document, clearly demonstrating that all the required changes have been made.
Furthermore, once you are able to systematically identify the changes within a structured document format, you can start to create new derivative products which focus on the value of the change itself. For example, an architect may be willing to pay a lot more for a summary of what has changed in the building regulations than for the huge standards document itself. Similarly, an aircraft maintenance specialist needs to know what to do differently with an updated system, not waste time revisiting everything that they already know.
Solving the technical challenges
When you start to work with differences and changes in documents you quickly realise that there are many subtleties and edge cases that can make a substantial difference in how easy or difficult the results will be to work with. For example, where large parts of a paragraph have been changed, it may be more useful to see it as one substitution rather than a series of small, confusing edits. Similarly, if changes are made to punctuation this may be considered irrelevant in some contexts, while in others a decimal point and a comma mean very different things.
The algorithms need to be smart enough to interpret numbers, separators, and texts within sentences. But you also need configurability, so that no matter what your language or industry context, you can choose to see what is important to you, while suppressing irrelevant noise.
Proven solutions from DeltaXML
At DeltaXML we have been focused on solutions for managing differences and change in documentation for over 20 years. Our software is used by businesses of all sizes, including some of the largest and most respected organisations in aerospace, healthcare, financial services and government.
You can read more about the subjects that have been introduced here in our paper XML for Publishers.
