DITA offers a wide variety of topic types, element names, nesting structures, and reuse techniques. In order to get the most from their DITA implementations, organizations need to figure out which of these structures and techniques will be most suitable for their particular needs. The decisions they make should be recorded in a formal information model — the internal standard they have established for all information developers to follow. Standardizing in this way has the following benefits:

• It establishes sustainable content management and reuse practices. Teams who don’t have a consistent information model often find themselves struggling to manage content effectively after just a year or two using DITA. Duplicate topics, ad-hoc reuse and complex conditions greatly impair efficiency, and result from a lack of standard practices.
• Team collaboration becomes much easier, as all members are clear about what structures to use where. This speeds up reviews and reduces rework. Content interchange with external teams is also more straightforward, as the standards can be shared along with the content.
• Current and future output transformations become easier and cheaper to develop. Because the source structures are consistent, intelligent inferencing can be made about formatting options, eliminating the need for authors to spend time adding and checking extra presentation-oriented markup.

Our consultants have real-world experience of working in and managing collaborative structured authoring teams. We take a coaching approach to helping you with your information model, running workshops and gathering input throughout the internal standards development process. We document the resulting standards in a clear, easily referenced, and updatable way so that your information model becomes the centre of your DITA content development practice.