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?

What once seemed at least debatable has now become irrefutable: If it’s not online, it’s invisible.

Full article here

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:

1. The reduction in sales.
2. The need for cash retention and challenges surrounding raising debt or capital.
3. The continuing difficulties in recruiting good talent.
4. A high focus on customers and their needs:
   - developing incremental services to existing customers
   - developing more customer business focused services
   - enabling software to connect to other applications
5. The importance of improving the user experience, such as that adopted by Apple with the iPhone and iPhone Application store.
6. The move to SaaS (software as a service) and the Cloud.
7. The emergence of semantic data, collaboration and ontologies.
8. The move to “mass personalisation” and the emergence of software artisan companies that will personalise mainstream applications.
9. The growth in mobile phone applications.
10. The ability to carry out greatly improved analysis of data, leading to greater customer insights.

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:

• It gives the software companies the ability to develop a range of user assistance documents, each focusing on a particular type of customer and their needs (Points 3 and 7).
• It means the content can be merged with other content to provide the support information in the right context (Points 3, 5 and 6).
• With DITA, it helps ensure the support information can written isn a way that clearly enable users to complete tasks (Point 3 again - more business focused services - and Point 4).
• With DITA, it means semantic data is included in the documentation (Point 7).
• Content can be published in different media (Points 5, 6 and 8).

Lee Dryburgh, organiser of the Emerging Communications Conference, has been interviewed by Skype Journal.com  about how he see the future of telecommunication. The key points in this interview are:

• Widespread deployment of a method of communicating, long cultural embedment, extreme ease of use and very low barriers to usage, means it’s not going away in a big way, at any time least soon.
• We are seeing software offer a new stronger “Relationships” between people. Distribution is relatively zero-cost and it achieves unprecedented scale.

He’s talking about telephony and Skype, but couldn’t that also be true for paper and Web-based online Help?

Dryburgh sees a new phase emerging that will have deeper impact yet.  He said:

“Phase two is built around an economic model that puts human time and attention at a premium. It’s the opposite of what we experience today with telephony, where human time and attention is wasted.”

“Phase two is about intention-based economics. It’s focused on fulfilling intentions and desires … I’m not saying we need to become psychologists and anthropologists. But what we need to build for is access to ever more personal information, i.e. about the human behind the endpoint. Privacy does not exist looking long-term. Ever more personal information is the new currency, which underlies intention-based economics, and people will increasingly trade it for free access to services. “

“If any of this seems abstract at the moment, think about what makes Google money, Ad Words. Google provides search free to the consumer in order to gain eyeballs (mass attention) and takes the search parameter to try and deduce intention. It then sells that attention and intention data upstream to advertisers.”

Could this also happen in the technical documentation arena? Would seeing technical documentation in the context of new economic ideas, such as  intention-based economics  and the economics of attention, affect how and what was created?  Would it change the nature of conversations with management and marketing?

Questions such as:

• Would it know how many customers it had?
• Would it know who its competitors were?
• Would it know its competitive advantage was?
• Would it know what its customer thought of its products?
• Would it know how well its products addressed its customers’ needs?
• How well does it manage its suppliers, so it can produce its products efficiently?

How would you answer these?

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.

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.

The video is here

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.

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.