What are Documentation Services worth?

Move Networks invested a huge sum of money to upgrade hardware and software to scale up support for live video streaming, earlier this year. Move streamed HD live content for Channel Bee, a London-based Internet television station and for the broadcast of NFL football games for NeuLion to thousands of simultaneous users. Move announced that it was restructuring and changing its corporate strategy.

It was explained to us that the end-to-end service was going to be phased out. The new strategy is to license the technology to partner resellers such as iStreamPlanet. These partners would then resell Move’s technology. I was a little surprised when I and another writer were told we didn’t have a role in the under the new strategy. I asked the question, “If you are going to license out the technology, won’t your partners need some API documentation?” All I got in response was, “good question”. I believe someone thinks that developers are going to create the documentation.

However, in my experience, developers are always under tremendous pressure to develop new features and fix bugs without having to answer customer questions. This happens because there isn’t any documentation! So a cycle begins where developers are pulled away from their development efforts. The same questions are asked and someone says, “why doesn’t someone write this down?”

In addition, when no one is focused on maintaining documentation information becomes tribal knowledge. The information inevitably becomes corrupted and confusion ensues. A few may create documents but this usually leads to conflicting document versions. In a crisis, a customer wants to trust that the documentation received can be relied upon but it is usually too late. The customer ends up feeling frustrated and considers other vendors. 

A customer service manager (CSM) is working to resolve a customer’s problem. The aspect ratio is being rendered incorrectly. Sometimes a developer is contacted. This interrupts his coding and makes it harder for him to fix bugs and add a feature. It turns out that the answer to that question is in a user manual that was published and made available for customer use. It contains an easy to follow procedure that enables Publishers to submit their content that is correctly ingested and rendered for viewing. Developers can focus on their work and customers are not left feeling frustrated. 

I have written naming scheme specifications,  Network Operations architecture that explains how video content is ingested and delivered to millions of simulataneous users and developer guides.