DocOps: documentation goes Agile

I'm watching the Acrolinx webinar recording, Learn How CA Technologies Broke the Rules - their DocOps Approach to Agile, with great interest, as it explores the "DocOps" concept in a tangible case study. The presenter is Jim Turcotte, SVP, Business Unit Executive, CA Technologies.

DocOps (the merging of documentation into organizational operations) has these future-facing goals:

• agility — respond and deliver changes right away (minutes, not weeks)
• continuous updates — make fixes available immediately, trigger translation when needed
• collaborative authoring — invite the crowd: let every team member add and fix content
• customer integration — involve customer support and feedback; analyze usage and statistics
• content aggregation — pull together all content, from marketing through support

In a nutshell, the CA case study describes a platform that is a "wiki++", where powerful tools extend a friendly wiki to cover all standardization, publication, and translation needs, and beyond:

1. Collaborative authoring and aggregation: Atlassian Confluence (cloud-based, AWS)
2. Documentation production: k15t Scroll, for Acrolinx integration, product version control, and product-specific output deliverables (be they wikis, HTML, Help, or Office/print formats)
3. Automated editing: Acrolinx, for simplified technical English and standardization
4. Translation management: Lingotek, for workflow in and out of the wiki
5. UI integration: Product-specific landing pages integrate with web app, using single-sign-on
6. Communication integration: Jive communities, Google Analytics, Salesforce support, LinkedIn marketing, etc.

CA already has some numbers that show measurable results, such as 25% word count savings (via consolidation), 55% faster translation turnaround, and close to 25% efficiency gains (from trimming doc activities now obsolete). But to my mind, such results are just icing on the cake of meeting the DocOps goals, which is the key to agile content that truly pays — up, down, across, and beyond the organization.