Types of Policies

Your purpose in identifying policies is finding any requirement not already covered in your standards. Policies can influence the structure, content, and format of your documents. Sometimes policies are not so clearly expressed as standards, but they can still have an impact on your SGML enterprise. Hopefully, every document requirement you identify in your policies you will already have identified in your standards.

Policies fall into two main categories: internal and external, both of which can affect your documents. Internal policies are like domestic affairs. They tell you how to conduct business inside your organization. External policies are like foreign affairs. They tell you how to conduct business outside your organization. Thinking of policies in this way can help you identify all the policies that affect your documents.

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• See “Adding Features to Documents,” p. 155

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Be aware of unexpected policies that might influence your document structure, content, or format. Some examples of “surprise” policy standards that can affect your document are:

•  Policies that forbid certain people to see certain documents. This causes you to add a security clearance tag to your documents.

•  Policies that tell you to include or exclude information based on content. For example, obscenity policies might cause you to filter your documents for certain words and phrases.

•  Policies that tell you how long information is to be considered valid. If your documents are to be considered obsolete after a certain period of time, a date should be attached to each of your documents, or perhaps even to your structural elements.

•  Policies that specify an order of people who will view documents. For example, if a document must first be submitted to an editor or a quality checker before it’s returned to a customer, some feature to indicate this will have to be added to the SGML structure eventually.

•  Policies that dictate where physical copies of books will be stored and distributed might require you to tag your documents. This involves adding a storage location field to your documents, or perhaps some field that says whether the document exists physically or only electronically.

These policies might already be reflected in your structural standards—hopefully they are. But if not, by examining your policies you have uncovered yet more structures and capabilities to build into your documents beyond what your standards told you.

Because summarizing all your standards is a pretty big chore, you can use another form to help you. When you’ve identified relevant standards and policies for your publishing enterprise, try completing a form like the one shown in figure 6.3.

Identify All Your Document Users and Their Tools

How your customers use the documents you create often suggests structural capabilities that should be built-in to your DTDs. Your documents have internal or external users, too. Internal users are people in your own operation, people who work for you. External users are customers outside your organization. They’re people who pay you. Payments can also help you to focus on the best ways to look at your documents. A document’s worth lies in its use.

External Customers

First stop and ask yourself what it is about your documents that your customers want and need. Then ask yourself how you can better present it to them. Identify aspects of your documents that keep the customers happy, and perhaps aspects that they never liked that you just haven’t gotten rid of yet. If you don’t think about your documents from your customers’ point of view, you’ll miss the opportunity to see your document structures and functions in a new light.

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Note:  
You may not be used to looking at your documents through your customers’ eyes, but doing so can help you break out of your own mold and focus on what keeps your customers happy.

External customers have priorities as far as what they want to get from your documents. Use a form to focus your attention on the aspects of your documents that your customers are willing to pay for (see fig. 6.4).

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Fig. 6.4  Forms like this can help you identify what information in your documents is critical to your external customers. Notice, it focuses on the customer’s product.

Your group discussion about your external customer needs should still involve brainstorming. But your customers are the best authorities on what they like. So please take advantage of some of the following when answering the question of who your external customers are and what they like:

•  Written customer surveys

•  Phone surveys

•  Relationships you already have with long-term customers who will give you honest feedback

•  Talk with different internal departments to see if there are any “sagas” of customer dissatisfaction that relate to your documents in any way

•  Talk with partner companies or publishers to see if they have heard of any complaints your customers have with your documents

•  Practice being a customer for your company’s documents; try to use your documents as if you were an external customer or subscriber

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Tip:  
You can structure this form however you like. If you have many customers, as most large companies do, it helps to replace the Customer field with Categories of Customer or reader instead (for example, home reader, business reader, recreational reader, and so on).

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