Write Once for Many Uses

Single-source documentation is a concept that has been around for some time, if mostly championed only by the technology providers and practitioners who already know it's power. I got interested in the concept early in my career, back B.K. (before kids) in the mid 90s; and for the last 12 years as a freelancer, I've applied the principles whenever and where ever I can to improve my own personal productivity and efficiency. 

Write once, publish in different formats for different audiences

​​But with the coming “knowledge tsunami,” the time has come for single-sourcing to be applied to content creation everywhere. Marc Rosenberg reports in his October 17, 2017 article in the Learning Solutions Magazine on an IBM prediction that “by 2020, knowledge will likely be doubling every 11 to 12 hours.” He says: “Establishing processes and priorities for curating and managing knowledge within and outside your organization will help you become more efficient and your knowledge products...become more effective and valued.”

​Single-sourcing is one of the most powerful processes available to prepare you for riding this wave.

“Establishing processes and priorities for curating and managing knowledge within and outside your organization will help you become more efficient and your knowledge products...become more effective and valued.” 
​Marc Rosenberg*​

The existing definitions of single-source publishing are often dry, nerdy and use complicated words. You can get explanations from Wikipedia, MadCap Flare (one of the providers of technology supporting single-sourcing), or this one by the CEO of another technology provider, Paligo. These definitions will probably make your eyes glaze over if you're not a nerdy technical writer type. 

I used this utility to make sure I could explain single-source publishing as simply as possible.
 
To boil it down to the essence, single source publishing is a way of writing once for many uses. It takes a bit of work up front to write in a way to use it again, and another bit of work to store the content in a way to make the pieces easy to find later.

But the payoff for the added set up is an exponential increase in efficiency and productivity. You can maintain the content pieces in an agile way to keep up with your product changes, and assemble deliverables ranging from white papers to knowledge base articles to training materials in minutes.

Single source publishing is a way of writing once for many uses. Writing and storing the content takes a little extra work at the beginning, but pays off in increased productivity, with more efficient updates across multiple outputs and audiences.

Though write once for many uses takes some up-front work, the techniques are not complicated.

A good overview starts with a summary of Anders Svensson's 5 principles*:

• Don't repeat yourself (instead of repeating the same content in multiple places, reuse it)
• Keep it simple and straightforward (the simplest way is usually the best)
• Aim to make topics stand alone
• Each topic has only one job 
• Avoid specifics or use simple strategies for dealing with them (like variables or conditional text), which must be balanced with the “keep it simple” strategy

 
It is possible to over-complicate the design for reusing content. I once had a client who wanted user guides for multiple modules of multiple products with multiple licensees. As I implemented his requests one-by-one over time, the documents I'd inherited ended up getting so complicated that maintaining what amounted to hundreds of pages of content needed to be a full-time job rather than a once-every-update outsourced project. 

However, in the new subscription service landscape, these principles of single-sourcing are vital not only to documentation, but to every aspect of an organization’s content creation, from customer education and success to sales and marketing.

The most successful companies will master these methods of reusing and sharing content across their organizations. 

* Rosenberg, M. (2017, October 17). Marc My Words: The Coming Knowledge Tsunami. Retrieved from Learning Solutions Magazine: https://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/2468/marc-my-words-the-coming-knowledge-tsunami

* Svensson, A. (2016, January 13). The 5 Principles of Single Sourcing in Technical Documentation. Retrieved from LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-principles-single-sourcing-technical-documentation-anders-svensson/