Reuse Considered Harmful

A place for everything and everything in its place
– Isabella Mary Beeton The Book of Household Management, 1861

For a number of years it has been a matter of faith that the more content a technical documentation team reuses, the more efficient they are presumed to be. Vasont Systems, a Content Management System (CMS) vendor, proudly claims its users average 71% content reuse. That’s a bold claim, but I suspect that if you could show that even 30% or 40% of your content is reused in more than one deliverable, you’d earn bonus brownie points with pretty much any manager. But, are you really more efficient? Let’s take a deeper look.