Digital Documentation Has Many More Benefits than Just Taking Weight out of Documents

What trends do we see in digital documentation software? Here are some answers to questions I am often asked by consultants and investors.

We are in the unsexy, no-nonsense, but relevant business of electronic documentation.

Awwww, electronic documentation. How exciting.

Well, ever thought of digitizing the cockpit of an aircraft? Or about taking out some of the pains of ISO 9001 / 27001 for small companies? Or about bringing the relevant information to firefighters on the frontline to get their mission done?

Think again. Electronic documentation is quite exciting.

However, often people only see the exciting aspects I mentioned above. Pilots, entrepreneurs, firefighters.

Let’s look soberly at some trends that the digital documentation software industry is currently facing.

Trend 1: Move toward?XML

Paper documents were linear. You could read them from the front page to the back cover, and maybe get a table of contents at the front and an index at the back. That’s about as good as it got.

Digital documentation started some 20 years ago with PDFs, which didn’t add much more value over paper documents other than taking their weight away.

Some 10 years later, fully digital formats have added new features such as linking between different documents, filtering information, and managing multiple variants of the same information. And to manage all of these features, there is just one format that can do it all: XML, which comes in different flavors for different use cases.

For some technical documents, XML is inevitable: There is no way you can manage an aircraft manual for a fleet of 50 planes with different configurations without using XML. Or without copying the aircraft manual 50 times for each plane, and ending up with 90% duplicate content, which will leave you vulnerable to inconsistencies and update errors.

For some other (simpler) documents, XML looks like a massive overkill, and it sometimes really is.

Nevertheless, I would strongly advocate you set up your digital documentation landscape to be able to handle the most complex cases. It’s easier to over-prepare and under-use for simple documents, instead of under-preparing and tweaking for complex documents.

Trend 2: Transform your?Business

Many people still think that the main challenge with digital documentation is technological. I couldn’t disagree more.

Digital documentation led to way more documentation than the paper days?—?because publishing a digital document is much cheaper than publishing a paper document. This fact has led to information overflow, because organizations bombard their employees with cheap, extensive, but only partially relevant digital information.

Add another scent to this vicious circle: Regulation is on the rise, globally. More and more industries and aspects of professional life are regulated. The organizational instinct to react to regulations usually starts with creating internal regulations, manuals, and instructions and bombarding employees with them. Just to be sure that we’ve covered it all. And knowingly or not, we feed that vicious circle of information overload.

So, therefore, we are dealing with a classical business transformation problem: Processes and documents from the analog world persist, and they need to be changed fundamentally for the digital age. That often requires doing things differently and saying “no” to obsolete processes. This involves changing the mindset of all employees, and changing the mindset in large organizations takes lots of time?—?especially in multi-national, multi-regulation environments such as aviation.

Trend 3: Automation over Manual?Work

Once upon a time, there was a trend to outsource editing work. It echoed long-past times when bosses dictated their response letters to their secretaries.

Let’s face it: Telling the editor what to change in a document is inefficient and error-prone. When subject matter experts annotate PDF documents to tell the editors what to do, only to spend additional time later to check the editor’s work, they would much rather spend their time and knowledge editing the documentation themselves.

Of course, this only works when editing systems are highly intuitive and automated, keeping all the relevant information and workflows together in one system.

Because no software tool can do it all, a modern editing system needs to connect to various sources such as compliance databases. Such interfaces make it possible to link regulations and standards directly to internal documentation, thus never missing a regulation update again, thereby reducing that vicious circle of information overload.

Unfortunately, not all manual work in documentation can be completely automated. Speaking from my experience in aviation, it’s a fact that in many countries, airlines are depending on the personal opinion of their inspector at the national aviation authority. This means that an airline has to know the knacks and preferences of their inspector and weave those preferences into their documentation before submitting. Although it might sound obvious, people often forget to read through their entire documentation before submitting it to the authorities. Even with all the technology in the world, it’s impossible to check documentation automatically for the knacks and preferences of a human being.

Trend 4: Self-Inflicted Complexity

Large organizations often have the resources to make complicated things even more complicated than needed. Whilst such ideas might sound compelling in a meeting room, always think from the end-user perspective, which is typically a frontline employee far away from headquarters.

In digital documentation, two examples jump to my mind.

The first one is IT departments’ appetite for so-called super-apps: One piece of software should be able to cover all the needs of the entire company. Covering digital documentation, e-learning, background checks, video calls, and groupware, plus all the business-specific processes such as flight planning, crew rostering, and meal ordering. This will never work, and even if it did, it would be a nightmare to administer, update and replace such super-apps.

Secondly, more specifically for electronic documentation, we see lots of self-inflicted complexity when setting up elaborate approval workflows, funky ways of reusing and linking content, and merging unrelated information in a single XML document just because you can filter it.

Self-inflicted complexity often doesn’t hurt in the headquarter. It hurts on the frontline.

Conclusion: Break the Vicious?Circle

So what can you do, given that digital documentation using XML and the rise of regulations are facts?

My recommendation is to use documentation software that can cover all aspects of digital documentation, also complex ones such as XML or compliance tracking.

At the same time, I would strongly suggest using a commercially available SaaS solution?—?because self-inflicted complexity thrives when using bespoke software rather than standard solutions.

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