Content reuse works well in an environment when it is written once and used whenever and wherever it can be used. Industry experts and specialist who are in favour of content reuse, speculate and visualize that it enhances consistency and usability with reduce costs to write and review contents.
The major benefit of content reuse is saving by reduced cost for producing contents. But how much would the content reuse work for your environment and how much would it reduce the cost, is what you need to decide while implementing the content reuse strategy. If you are looking to analyze how much you will save then you will also need to know how much it will cost. Simple way out is to assess the situation by simple calculation with cost consideration and forecasting the possible benefits.
In technical communication, the utmost priority is to serve your users and user satisfaction always impacts the documentation decisions. Practically, the goal of technical communication is to increase user satisfaction by improving content quality. But, sadly, it is difficult to measure the quality.
Following are some of the points, you can consider to measure if you want the content reuse strategy at place:
• Identifying tasks and time spent to complete them – Simple way would be to consider creation of 30 pages of technical documentation with hours spent on creation of a page, multiplied by the total number of the pages and an additional cost on review, editing and translation.
• Estimation of percentage of content reuse – Estimation by analyzing the document would give you an idea as to how much percentage of the contents you can reuse and how much you can save.
• Time require to analyze the content for reuse
• Time require to create your content specially for reuse
• Investment on Content Management System (CMS), authoring tools or file server to store the reusable content
• Training for authors on tools, technology and process for content reuse
However, if your reuse strategy improves content, reducing calls to support, then you can calculate savings. To be able to accurately quantify user satisfaction, you will need to link the reduced support calls to the improved documentation.
