Cherryleaf Technical Authors Blog
Trust is the new critical currency in the connected age.”
This is a Twitter post by Scott Berg, Director of HP Global Digital Strategy.
Assuming technical communicators produce highly trustworthy material, is their content becoming more valuable?
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At Intellect (the trade association for UK technology companies) yesterday, there was a meeting looking at how UK software companies are faring in this current economic climate. At this event, a panel of software companies CEOs and directors discussed the key issues they are currently facing and the future economic climate for this industry sector.
What struck me was the changes that are happening in Technical Publications complement the changes going on in the overall business.
The ten main issues were:
The big trend in technical communication at the moment is the move towards (XML) single sourcing systems. These break the information into small units of information that can be re-used and repurposed for different circumstances.
This offers a number of benefits, consistent with many of the points listed above:
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Sometimes it’s good for managers to look at a department in a slightly different way from normal. What, for example, if the Technical Publications department was a business? If a business troubleshooter were to come in and ask key commercial questions, could they be answered?
Questions such as:
How would you answer these?
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There are a number of posts on various Blogs, at the moment, concerning documents as conversation and moving beyond the traditional manual. Some of the comments suggest implicitly that technical authors (aka technical writers) could end up having to resolve two conflicting views regarding communicating with users.
The problem is that many technical communicators work in hierarchical organisations where “authority” is key. Staff (and users asking for support) are expected to follow.
However, many parts of Web-based content are not based on authority or hierarchy. It’s a network, collaborative in nature.
For an organisation with a “behind the firewall” culture – protect your intellectual property, no access to Facebook etc – that’s a really alien way of thinking.
So many technical communicators – particularly those working in large traditional companies – might, in the near future, have to deal with two different and opposing “Weltanschauungen” (viewpoints).
It may be a tension that will never go away. I hope a compromise can be reached. I think it’s possible there will be mediated/edited comments and conversations of certain topics within an overall user assistance solution.
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About 44 minutes into his presentation, Michael Wesch talked about network size and the effect it traditionally has on the ways teachers communicate information to students. He said as the audience size increases, teachers have found they’ve had to get their students to participate less and follow more.
He argued educators should and could move back to the more interactive and effective “network model”, by using Web 2.0 technologies.
Technical Communicators - people producing online Help and user manuals - use the Hierarchy or Mass models. We get users to follow, and to return to the Support Desk or Help file, in order to be told what to do next.
A change to a participative approach could be a major cultural shift for them and their employers, so it’s unclear whether this shift will occur in technical communication. Do we want users to do more than follow?
The truth is, in the future, it’s likely all three models will be employed by technical communicators at different times. This means technical writers need to create content that can be used in all three models. This is easiest with re-usable chunks of content, often using the DITA XML schema. Whether the the DITA schema suffciently accomodates participative content, remains to be seen.
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I stumbled across another great video of Michael Wesch talking about the issues facing educationalists. Many of the problems they face are the same as those faced by people involved in producing user assistance.
Dubbed “the explainer” by popular geek publication Wired because of his viral YouTube video that summarizes Web 2.0 in under five minutes, cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch brought his Web 2.0 wisdom to the University of Manitoba on June 17 (see video above).
During his presentation, the Kansas State University professor breaks down his attempts to integrate Facebook, Netvibes, Diigo, Google Apps, Jott, Twitter, and other emerging technologies to create an education portal of the future.
I particularly liked these slides:
He argued these beliefs were no longer correct,(apart from the first statement).
It’s possible the solutions for the future of education will also be relevant for the future of user assistance. Whether it answers all the questions remains to be seen.
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We’ve just posted up a vacancy for a lead technical author in Switzerland with a salary of circa £64,000 ($105,744) - around two and a half times the average salary in the UK. So why would someone pay this amount for a technical author? After all, don’t they just write manuals that no-one reads?
The answer probably lies in the nature of the work. They will be responsible for creating and updating documentation relating to the building and commissioning of gas turbines. If the turbines don’t work or if they go wrong, then the consequences could be explosive.
In fact, technical writing is a lot to do with communicating change and ensuring conformance. Change is fundamental to a business - it’s often closely tied to management and leadership.
As a leader of a business, you need to have a vision or goal and you need to be able to communicate that to the rest of the organisation. In the UK we have a Prime Minister, who admitted this weekend he is a poor communicator. Overseas, he is seen as a great leader through the current economic crisis. Here, his party is suffering its lowest poll ratings in modern history.
Communication matters, so perhaps that’s why it’s worth paying to hire a good communicator.
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