Documentation project

The Documentation Project

spamerdespam www.linuz.nl

Documentation in ICT projects is a tough cookie (maybe outside of ICT as well, but that's no concern of ours at this moment). What the ICT profession seems to lack is

• a thorough understanding of the fundamental problems that surround ICT documentation
• taxonomies of the different documentation purposes, target audiences (with their experience levels), and document types
• a methodology to create, review and maintain ICT documentation of sufficient quality, against reasonable cost
• templates, guidelines and best practices to assist such a methodology
• some sort of overview of the different documentation management solutions that exist, ranging from the venerable binders with photocopies and printouts, through fileshares full of text documents, through the anarchistic wiki system, all the way to Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems with integrated document scanners, archivers, ILM-components and what have you not
• an appreciation for the specific skills that are needed in the so-called "technical writers"
• an embedded process for documentation in the business processes; if not in projects, then most surely in day-to-day system administration.

What we'll attempt to do here is to systematically address all issues surrounding ICT documentation, and develop the lacking taxonomies, methodologies etcetera.