Timo Happonen and Vesa Purho from the Finnish Telecommunications giant, Nokia , told about their efforts to convert Nokia's enormous documentation to a single-sourcing system. There are handouts from both of them on the STC site.
Nokia is not just innovative cellphones, it is also a global mobile network provider with hundreds of products. The customers and users for this documentation are:
who need documentation of from 100-30,000 pages (requiring several cartons of binders to transport.), which are now published mainly as html, pdf or even paper. They started to get away from paper documentation after finding the binders in a corner still in the shipping cartons. Nokia is transitioning from SGML to XML, and uses mostly Adept and Epic as authoring tools.
Nokia was motivated by several dimensions to use single sourcing:
| Improvement | Area |
|---|---|
| Reduction of costs | Content creation, maintenance, management, publishing |
| Shortened cycles | Content creation, maintenance |
| Increased responsiveness and flexibility | Changing product and customer needs |
| Increased consistency and accuracy | Quality, usability, look&feel |
Nokia bases its information model for single sourcing on the overall Telecom Operations Map (TOM), which was developed by the TeleManagement Forum. The TOM defines the core business processes for a telecom operator. Nokia has further refined this as the Nokia Operations Model (NOM), which consists of managing:
Each of these areas requires documentation, which is further defined in the Information Model. The Information Model is necessary to plan the documentation structure, but Nokia has learned a number of lessons along the way in this connection:
One thing they found was that there is a great need for standardization of the information structure in the telecom industry, because of the horizontal nature of networking. Therefore, Nokia has invited interested companies to participate in this process.
Nokia is implementing single sourcing by using modul documentation, as described in the following table..
| Abbreviation | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| MC | Media Configuration | A list of DUs and MUs belonging to a certain information product. |
| MD | Media Distribution | A frozen media configuration, used for publishng purposes. |
| DU | Description Unit | Collects a set of MUs into a paper document, with cover page, disclaimer, TOC, etc. |
| MU | Manageable Unit | Independent piece of information that is listed in a TOC. Can include SUs. |
| SU | Storage Unit | Reusable piece of information (graphic, text, etc.) that only has meaning as embedded in an MU. |
Be sure to download the handouts for this presentation from the STC website, as there are some excellent diagrams to further clarify the system they developed, as well as more discussion of the lessons learned so far in their implementation of single sourcing.
