Information Development

I've just finished reading JoAnn Hackos's book, "Information Development". It's very good - probably the first book that a technical author should buy. Indeed, we're making sure all our in-house authors have access to a copy of it.

At 624 pages, it covers a lot. However, I felt it could have done with covering in depth: (a) the behaviours and motivations of team members, and (b) real-life advice when you're faced with a organisations that are at Capability Maturity Model levels 0 (Oblivious), 1 (Ad hoc) and 2 (Rudimentary).

Whilst we'd all like to deal with stable, well organised organisations, it's a fact of life that there are many start-ups who are at levels 0-2.

There's mention of XML, but little of Web 2.0, which is in some ways understandable.