Tales from the Field: Technical Information Lifecycle
When using a printed manual, there is no easy way to report errors found in the field back to the authors, and updates are costly and infrequent. Whether through workflow integration, or a simpler, message-based approach, a well-designed system makes it quick and easy for a technician to enter a discrepancy report, automatically including the current context. When properly integrated with authoring tools and an update mechanism, the system supports an entire technical information lifecycle that keeps a technician’s resources up-to-date.
A major automobile manufacturer, for example, must ship a box of CDs to every dealership each month to update their technical manuals. That means that somebody at each dealership must sit down and feed those CDs into a computer one at a time to update the software. Thousands of man hours could be saved by an incremental, automated update system, not to mention the production and shipping costs.
