Writing documentation in an Industry 4.0 world

Industry 4.0 must be one of the “words of 2016′. We’re seeing a number of discussions on how this will impact on instructional design and User Assistance.

Ray Gallon has blogged on the question, what role should you have in machine-machine information?, exploring the differences between automatic, programmed dialogues, and non-programmed ones. Sarah O’Keefe has also blogged on the German initiative called iiRDS, the Intelligent Information Request and Delivery Standard.

It’s probably too early to form any firm conclusions on the impact Industry 4.0 will make, but it seems like some of the other trends we’ve highlighted this year are following a similar direction – documentation chatbots (docsbots), content as an API and treating documentation as code. There are similarities with iiRDS and APIs in looking at methods for content interchange, although it’s fair to ask, does the technical communication community need yet another standard?

Standards are like toothbrushes - we all know they're a good idea but we don't want to use somebody else's

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