Case Study: Heavy Lifting Upfront Gives FICO Strong Score In Translation

Globalization and the desire to serve new markets require the translation of a businesses' content. From marketing materials to product information, translation traditionally takes place downstream in the authoring process. For technical publications, documents may require frequent updates as product information changes. FICO (formerly Fair Isaac), which developed the FICO credit scoring system used by major consumer reporting agencies, faced the challenge of increasing localization needs for its technical publications coupled with new pressures to share content across product lines. Its strategic decision to invest in building out Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) capabilities to support content component translation is expected to save more than $1 million by the third year while providing much greater business agility for the technical publications organization — but it took a lot of heavy lifting upfront.