Will the "Crossing the Chasm" approach work for us?

["mathew varghese" <mathew.techwriter@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Steffen's e-mail on Dimensions of DITA Adoption just set me thinking about the right approach to boost DITA adoption. Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm approach might actually be highly applicable to us at this point. What that essentially means is that we need to select a niche area (beachhead) and focus all our energies on driving up DITA adoption in that area. To start with, we could focus on technical documentation this year and boost adoption rates by:
1. Increasing awareness
2. Simplifying the DITA OT
3. Providing better documentation (I am working on reorganizing the DITA OT docs)
4. etc.

For example, DITA is the hottest buzzword in the Indian technical writing community. However, awareness is a bit low and most DITA workshops end up becoming DITA OT sessions. Few associate DITA with content reuse and single sourcing. We can change this. We could focus our collective energies on helping these technical writers realize higher levels of productivity and quality by shifting to topic-based authoring (using DITA). The Indian writing community is very young and might adopt DITA very quickly.

Best regards,

Matt