The State of Structured Authoring in Technical Communication

I recently participated in a survey about technical communication and structured authoring tools.

The company performing the survey (Scriptorium) have just sent me the results in the form of a very nicely done 56 page report.To quote their introduction:

In early 2009, Scriptorium Publishing conducted a survey to measure how and why technical communicators are adopting structured authoring. The survey received 616 responses. 29 percent of respondents indicated that they had already implemented structured authoring. Only 16 percent indicated that they do not plan to implement structured authoring. The remaining respondents were either in the process of implementing structured authoring (14 percent), planning to do so (20 percent), or were considering it (21 percent).

I was particularly surprised by the numbers relating to DITA and DocBook adoption, where the former grows steadily above 50% while DocBook plummets below 5% for future adoption. This is a good indication about which direction our CMS Calenco should take.

All the numbers are very interesting, though they should be taken with a pinch of salt as usual: even though there were a lot of responses, some answers gathered only 2 or 3 votes. Also almost 80% of respondents were located in North America, which limits the global reach of the report.

The full report is available for purchase at Sciptorium Store.