The Content Wrangler 2016 Technical Communication Industry Benchmarking Survey Summary1

The web is the dominant delivery channel, but print is far from deadUp from 59% in 2012, 91% of firms surveyed publish their content to the web, making it the most common delivery channel — by far — for product content.

While nearly every kind of product content is being pushed to the web, the mobile web is still a challenge for many technical communication departments. Only 24% of respondents publish product content to mobile-ready formats and/or mobile device apps.

Despite what some may believe, print is not dead. While print may seem obsolete in many ways, today it’s still the second most common delivery channel for product content; 49% of companies surveyed craft print deliverables. By comparison, only 11% create content on CD-ROM and 12% on DVD, a 50% drop in the four years since we ran our last benchmarking survey.

VIDEOWHAT’S NEXT?

of respondents use video to create training materials & learning aids44%

Video is the new black. It’s the most sought-after type of product content on the web. As companies begin to craft video deliverables, challenges emerge. Lack of experience, equipment, and talent are minor stumbling blocks. Add localization, multilingual voiceover, and transcription to the mix and things get a bit messy. Advice: If you’re not creating video content now, get busy. Your customers will thank you!

Technical CommunicationBENCHMARKINGSURVEY20

16

We surveyed 700 tech comm pros from around the globe to learn as much as possible about the state of industry. The data we collectedpaints a picture of the current state of technical communication as it relates to the creation, management, and delivery of product content. It provides us a snapshot of what the best-of-breed firms are doing today — and plan to do tomorrow. It also provides us anecdotal evidence of emerging trends, as well as a way to benchmark our efforts against the best efforts of others.

A lot. In the four years since our last survey, significant changes have taken place. New content types — like video documentation — are being produced more often by more companies. Adoption of advanced information development management technologies like component content management systems, XML authoring tools, and machine translation are planned innovations for firms hoping to lower costs and connect content to customers.

of respondents are creating product marketing materials35%of respondents are creating video documentation28%of respondents are creating quizzes and other assessments21%of respondents are creating quick-start guides16%

of respondents are creating product overview videos43%

What did we learn?

The Content Wrangler 2016 Technical Communication Industry Benchmarking Survey Summary2

Just for fun, we took a look at the most common first names amongst survey respondents. Although our survey was completed by technical communicators in 16 countries, the bulk of the respondents came from English-speaking countries, which helps to explain why these names are most common amongst survey respondents.

Technical communicators craft content for a wide variety of audiences. While it’s not surprising to learn that 90% of those surveyed say it’s their job to create content for existing customers, it’s interesting to note that 51% say it’s also their job to craft content for prospective customers. That’s a big jump from 2012, when only 11% considered prospects part of their audience. And, it’s evidence that some organizations believe that technical content impacts sales.

More than 50% of survey respondents create content for companies that make hardware and software. Of course, technical communication professionals serve organizations in nearly every industry sector imaginable. Here’s a snapshot of the biggest industry sectors represented in the survey.

WORK?

hardware and software51%insurance and financial services7%manufacturing7%life sciences and healthcare6%business consulting4%enterprise telecommunication4%education and training3%defense and government3%

AUDIENCE?

51% of technical communicators say it’s their job to create content for prospects, not just customers

The remaining 15% of the respondents work in sectors including: hospitality, entertainment, fitness, construction, transportation, consumers services, energy, mining, retail, aerospace, media, agriculture, food processing and distribution.

Technical communicators serve more than prospective and current customers. They also create content for other audiences including:

• Internal audiences / employees (75%) • Partners (50%) • Regulators (15%) • Affiliates (15%) • Shareholders (8%)

JOHNMICHAEL DAVIDSTEVEMARK

SARAHSUSANJENNIFERBARBARA CATHERINE

MALE NAMES FEMALE NAMES

Who is our

Where do we

Who are we? The most common first names in technical communication

The Content Wrangler 2016 Technical Communication Industry Benchmarking Survey Summary 3

Keeping Support Content Up To Date51% of companies surveyed do not have a formal process for ensuring content is consistent across channels

Companies that make hardware and software, and those in highly regulated industries (life sciences, healthcare, insurance and finance, aerospace) seems to take the production of consistent content more seriously than others. They tend to invest in the tools designed to provide granular content control, content management functionality (access control, version control, and terminology, translation, and reuse management) and provide meaningful metrics to management upon which informed business decisions about content can be made. These same firms tend to be risk-adverse and innovation-driven, which may add to the many reasons they tend to avoid building patchwork solutions.

Of the 49% of companies that say they have a process for ensuring content consistency across channels, 78% are companies that make software and hardware, 9% are medical device or pharmaceutical firms, and 9% are manufacturers. What’s not clear is exactly what consistency means to each of these firms, and what channels are—and aren’t—included.

When asked to describe the process for ensuring customer-facing content is consistent across channels, it becomes clear that many companies still rely on manual, outdated methods for controlling content consistency from delivery channel to delivery channel.

Single-sourcing is the number one approach mentioned by those we surveyed, but, ironically, many of the companies that claim to leverage a write-it-once, use-it-often system of content production don’t have a component content management system in place to manage granular content. Others utilize a patchwork of authoring, management, and delivery tools designed for other purposes (think email, wikis, spreadsheets, Dropbox, GitHub, and JIRA) combined with manual processes and hard-coded work-arounds (macros, scripts, etc.) Copy-and-paste is often mentioned, indicating a lack of an automated content reuse strategy and the tools to support it.

What is clear is that many companies are attempting to manage content across multiple channels without purpose-built tools, perhaps because of cost, or lack of management support for necessary improvements and technology upgrades.

Those who rely on the right tools for the job are able to prove consistency, control, and return on investment (ROI)

THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES

Keeping content in-sync can be challenging in the best of situations. But, when content is prepared for multiple audiences, in multiple languages, to be delivered across multiple channels, things can get tricky.

Primary obstacles preventing technical content development teams from ensuring content consistency across channels is a lack of a unified content strategy (42%) and software tools designed to do the job (41%).

Departmental silos were mentioned as a major obstacle for 34% of the technical communication teams surveyed. Others blamed content consistency challenges on a lack of governance (39%) and an absence of collaboration (38%).

Anecdotally, there appears to be a lack of awareness of what’s possible. 23% of those surveyed complained that advances in technical communication content development are invisible to others across the enterprise, indicating a need to share our success stories, metrics, best practices, and approaches with others.

The Content Wrangler 2016 Technical Communication Industry Benchmarking Survey Summary 4

Extensible Markup LanguageCONTENTREUSE

83%

of companies reuse content across

related sets of technical communication

products

19% of companies that

reuse content have done so either to

“innovate” or “respond” to

threats or opportunities

quickly

Drawbacks of Content Reuse

Upfront investment 34%

Writing challenges 30%

Quality assurance 26%

Sharing conflicts 23%

Difficulty finding content 18%

Change management 12%

Nearly half of all technical communication departments in our survey say they create structured XML content, up just one percent from 2012.

Darwin Information Typing Architecture

81% of technical communication departments that create structured XML content do so using the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). This is the exact same percentage we recorded during our 2012 technical communication industry benchmarking survey.

Amongst firms that use DITA to create structured content, 12% of them also use custom Document Type Definitions (DTDs). Nearly half of the companies that use both custom DTDs and DITA to create technical content come from the hardware and software industry (48%); 9% hail from enterprise telecommunication companies; and 9% from the manufacturing sector. The remainder is a mixed bag of firms from nearly every industry sector.

DocBook, S1000D, SPL, oManual and Custom DTDs

11% of technical communication departments that create structured XML content do so using DocBook, down 5% from 2012.

26% write structured XML content to a custom DTD, down 4% from 2012.2% of those surveyed use S1000D (aerospace firms) and 2% leverage SPL (life sciences). Surprisingly, there were no companies that responded to our survey that use the oManual specification to craft documentation deliverables.

Percentage of Content Reused26% of companies surveyed say they reuse 20-25% of their content across multiple deliverables. 20% say they reuse 30-50%, while 15% say they reuse 50% or more of their content.

Companies that make hardware and software are far more likely to have higher content reuse rates than technical communication departments in other industry sectors, followed closely by manufacturing, insurance and financial, and life sciences and healthcare firms.

The Content Wrangler 2016 Technical Communication Industry Benchmarking Survey Summary 5

70%of those surveyed say they are confident (33%), very confident (26%), or extremely confident (11%) that their customer-facing content is error-free, consistent in tone and voice, and clear and easy to read.

Content Quality

23%of those surveyed say they are somewhat confident in the quality of their customer-facing content.

7%of those surveyed say they are not at all confident in the quality of their customer-facing content.

Just How Confident Are We?We believe our content to be of high

quality, but there’s scant proof that’s true

An overwhelming number of technical communicators (70%) say they are confident that their customer-facing content is error-free, consistent in tone and voice, and clear and easy to read, without any real evidence to back up their claims. 65% of those surveyed rely on style guides and human editors to prevent errors from slipping in to customer content and to ensure consistency in tone and voice. Half of those respondents say a team of editors is responsible for ensuring content quality across all of their content, while the other half admitted that editors can only attempt to ensure content quality in some of their content.

23% of those surveyed say they don’t attempt to measure or enforce quality at all.

But, there’s light at the end of the quality tunnel. 13% of those surveyed say their organization leverages software designed to score content upfront, while it’s being created. Organizations that create hardware and software (48%) are most likely to leverage content quality systems, followed by life sciences (11%) firms, manufacturers (7%), enterprise telecommunications (7%) insurance and financial services (7%), and universities and education (7%).

Terminology Management

Terminology management enables correct and consistent use of terms. Despite the importance of managing the words we create, most organizations have yet to attempt to control the words technical communicators use. Of those organizations that claim to do so, most use human editors to ensure proper terminology usage.

This isn’t true universally, however. Organizations that manufacture complex, highly configurable products, as well those involved in highly

43% of those surveyed say they leverage a controlled vocabulary to limit variations in terminology, yet 71% of those don’t have a terminology management system

regulated industries, are more likely to enforce terminology by leveraging a software system designed for that purpose.

Only 21% of survey respondents have such a system in place. Of those companies that rely on software to manage terminology in technical communication products, 58% are hardware and software firms, 8% are life sciences and healthcare companies, 7% are manufacturers, 4% are insurance and financial services organizations.

The Content Wrangler 2016 Technical Communication Industry Benchmarking Survey Summary 6

Multilingual Content Creation

While 44% of survey respondents say they produce technical communication products in only one language, the majority of companies (56%) produce content in two or more languages. Not surprisingly, companies that produce content in multiple languages also report much bigger content challenges than companies that focus on producing content in a single language. Hardware and software companies are far more likely to translate content into 11 or more languages, followed by manufacturers, and life science and healthcare firms.

56% of companies surveyed create technical communication deliverables in multiple languages

60% of companies surveyed translate their text-based technical communication deliverables, while 56% translate product interfaces, 21% translate video documentation, and 17% translate audio files.

Number of languages

2-5 languages 25%

6-10 languages 13%

11-20 languages 8%

21-50 languages 9%

51+ languages 1%

Translation Memory SystemsTranslation memory (TM) systems are repositories that contain translated source and destination language pairs. They are designed to speed up translation, improve content quality and consistency, and reduce translation cost. They do this by reusing translated content from the repository instead of translating the same words each time they appear in a new document.

34% of companies surveyed that produce technical communication content in 2 or more languages utilize TM.

Machine Translation SystemsMachine translation (MT) is a software-based process that automatically translates content from one language to another. Linguistic quality and accuracy levels vary depending on how well the software is tuned and whether the content is post-edited by humans. 16% of companies surveyed use MT for some of their customer-facing content; 6% use MT to translate all of their content.

What content types do we translate?

The Content Wrangler 2016 Technical Communication Industry Benchmarking Survey Summary 7

Creating video documentation is the most common innovation planned for the future in technical communication departments.

The adoption of a component content management system is the second most common innovation planned for the future—cited by 19% of companies.

Moving to structured content using the Darwin Information Typing Architecture is planned by 18% of companies surveyed.

VIDEO CCMS DITA

INNOVATIONS PLANNED FOR THE FUTURE

39% 19% 18%

Agile content development in technical communication

The type of agile approach differs from organization to organization, with some companies following a formal “scrum” methodology, while others claim they borrow from scrum the elements they find useful (the iterative approach, or sprints, for instance) and avoid the elements they find less valuable, or problematic to adopt.

51% of those surveyed say their documentation teams leverage an agile development approach when creating technical communication content

Makers of Configurable Products Are More Likely to Adopt Advanced Information Management Practices and Tools

As we discovered in 2012—and again this year—technical communication departments responsible for solving complex content challenges are far more likely to adopt advanced information management practices, standards, and supporting software technologies. For example, companies that document complex products that are configurable are three times more likely to adopt an XML standard like DITA.

70% of technical communication departments surveyed are responsible for creating content for configurable products. 49% of those firms leverage advanced information management techniques and tools to help them create customized content for those who need it. Software and hardware companies are twice as likely to adopt these methods and tools than are firms in other industry sectors.

The Content Wrangler 2016 Technical Communication Industry Benchmarking Survey Summary 8

As it turns out, technical communication professionals use a wide variety of tools to get the job done. Software varies based on the type of work performed and the industry sector served.

Aside from Microsoft Word, which we assume is on the desktops of most Windows-based technical communicators, the top ten most common tools used by technical communicators are manufactured by four companies (see list at right). Adobe leads the pack with six of the top ten tools. TechSmith has two tools each on the list; Madcap and SyncRO Soft (makers of Oxygen XML Editor) each have one.

TechSmith Snagit proves to be the most mentioned tool in use by technical communication pros. 25% of companies that produce technical documentation have it in available in their tool chest.

Adobe FrameMaker is in use in 22% of the companies surveyed,

making it the second most mentioned tool used by technical communicators in our survey. As far as authoring tools go, FrameMaker is used slightly more often than MadCap Flare (20%) and Oxygen XML Editor (13%).

Adobe is the dominant force20% of companies surveyed use Acrobat to create PDF renditions of documentation deliverables, making it the third most commonly used tool.

Adobe also holds the fifth spot with Captivate—the most often used screen recording tool (13%)—and the seventh, ninth and tenth spots with Illustrator (12%), Photoshop (11%), and InDesign (11%), respectively.

XML Authoring with OxygenSyncRO Soft Oxygen XML Editor has made the biggest leap in usage moving from 29th most common tool in 2012 to number six today.

TechSmith Snagit Is Most Used Product Amongst Technical Communicators

TOP 10 MOST USED SOFTWARE PRODUCTS1. TechSmith Snagit 25%

2. Adobe FrameMaker 22%

3. Adobe Acrobat 20%

4. MadCap Flare 20%

5. Adobe Captivate 13%

6. Oxygen XML Editor 13%

7. Adobe Illustrator 12%

8. TechSmith Camtasia 11%

9. Adobe Photoshop 11%

10. Adobe InDesign 11%

Top 5 Most UsedComponent Content Management Systems 1 SDL Live Content 2 Vasont CMS 3 Astoria CMS 4 IXIASOFT DITA CMS 5 Schema ST4

This is a summary of the 2016 Technical Communication Industry Benchmarking Survey (conducted by The Content Wrangler, Inc.) an informal, web-based survey that compares responses from over 700 companies from countries around the globe. The results are not

The Content Wrangler

2016 Technical Communication IndustryBenchmarking Survey Summary

Questions? Email: scott@thecontentwrangler.com Office: 415.857.2235The Content Wrangler 4153 24th Street Suite 4, San Francisco CA 94114

scientific, but do provide us with meaningful data points and help us spot trends. The majority of survey respondents work for firms in the computer software and hardware sector (50%), followed by the financial services sector (7%), manufacturing (6%), life sciences and healthcare (6%), business services (4%), enterprise telecommunications (4%), universities and education (3%), defense and government (3%), mobile communication (2%), publishing and media (1%) and others. This summary is provided for informational purposes only. The Content Wrangler, Inc. is not providing advice, nor do we warrant the accuracy or completeness of this information. The results of the survey do not in any way constitute an endorsement or recommendation of any of the brands, methods, products or approaches mentioned. Use due diligence whenever deciding whether or not to adopt new information management tools, techniques or processes.

DISCLAIMER AND ADDITIONAL INFORMATION