Talking tech pubs with JM

11Nov08

I had the first of what I hope will be a series of discussions with people in the tech pubs community about ROI, monetization, and changing roles of technical writers and groups a couple of weeks ago with JM, who manages tech pubs within one of the larger software companies on the planet. J’s group supports an IDE, so they are concerned mainly with a developer audience.

JM and I worked together over 10 years ago at a couple of different software companies, but we had been out of touch for a number of years until we connected on Scott Abel’s Content Wrangler site. We talked for over an hour, and I really enjoyed getting J’s thoughts and perspectives, which I’ll try to summarize here from the notes I took while we talked…

At a high level, we both feel strongly that the current web-based information landscape presents technical communicators with great opportunities to increase tech pubs relevance and effectiveness within organizations, and to customers and partners. This blog is one initial step in identifying and sorting through those opportunities; since tech pubs groups are pretty diverse in terms of industries, organizational structure, audiences, etc., the more voices in the mix, the better. If we ultimately want a new tech pubs model, we’ll need to build it up and generalize it from our specific experiences.

We also agreed that while the opportunities to transform tech pubs are real and readily apparent, stakeholders are looking to us not to do cool stuff for its own sake, but to respond to market forces as they apply to our discipline and deliver greater value from our efforts.

The next few posts will be a breakdown of our discussion, beginning with some of the important drivers for tech pubs that exist within organizations today…

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