Talking tech pubs with JM – external drivers

20Nov08

This post summarizes the points that JM and I discussed regarding external factors driving tech pubs transformation. By external, we meant factors arising from changes in how consumers want and need to interact with technical content.

• Reduced demand for traditional ‘book’ format and formal deliverables
• Need for speed

I’m lumping these together because to me they seem very closely related. Audiences, whether end-users, developers, administrators, professional service engineers, support engineers, etc. don’t have time, and don’t expect to thread their way through a narrative structure and a paginated document to get at the information they need.

J’s team is using minimalist techniques as espoused by JoAnne Hackos, which have an overall impact on content architecture, workflow, and lifecycle; she readily admits that even at this late date, getting writers out of ‘book-thinking’ is difficult.

J and I agree that this is a significant and crucial challenge; if we leave our content locked in ‘books’ or other massive compilations that can’t be easily searched and navigated to answer specific questions and complete discrete tasks, our target audiences will increasingly abandon the product doc and solve their problems without our involvement.

What’s worse, we will be squandering company resources by developing information that goes unused, and at the same time forcing stakeholders to re-do our work in order to meet their own needs. Although legally, companies may always be required to produce documentation that no-one reads, that’s a pretty cynical and risky premise on which to stake your career.

There is evidence that software developers are turning away from both product doc and 3rd party books in favor of peer-to-peer communication via the web, as evidenced by sites like stackoverflow.com. Additionally, recent conversations I had with operators of a large retail technical content site were focused on delivering alternatives to book content, since the 3^rd party market for tech books looks to be heading into a downward spiral of fewer readers, fewer titles, and decreasing shelf space.

As for the relationship between traditional, formal, deliverables and speed, JM puts it succinctly: “It’s much easier—and often faster—to ask someone in the next cube how to do something… The Web is a logical extension of this idea, where the person in the next cube becomes someone in the next state or country, or just someone anywhere who is online at the same time.” For me the question becomes, “What do technical writers need to do to become that person?”

• Increased modes of interacting with content and knowledge

I separated the ideas of content and knowledge, because the speed with which people can discover one another, form a relationship, and exchange knowledge online is pretty staggering. In online environments, knowledge can be exchanged effectively in very casual, informal, diffuse, fragmentary, and temporal forms – all of which are really anathema to the goals of traditional technical writing; in the past, it would have been our mission to capture, organize, and publish this ’street-level’ information in some enduring repository – in other words, turn it into ‘content’. Content development most definitely still needs to happen; but we are moving into a world in which various information channels will be treated as more or less equal knowledge sources, and credibility and authority will be based more on efficacy and reputation than solely on brand.

It’s always been easier to ask questions of peers than to delve into static information sources, but the social networking aspect of the web has increased the effectiveness of speedy, sloppy information from friends by increasing the potential number of trustworthy and knowledgeable friends and the speed with which one can locate and communicate with them.

As technical writers, we are experts at gathering and conveying information, and we need to continue to improve there, but we will also need to adopt a more public and personal role in communicating with our stakeholders by making our information and ourselves accessible through the social tools that the web provides today.

As J points out, we need to engage with a generation that has grown up online, and to do that we need to understand their expectations. I would add that we also need to understand that our audience today can and will develop solutions to meet their own needs without looking for direction or asking for permission. So the onus is on us to be relevant, and to participate and contribute in those environments and communities.

There is emerging theory and practice around online Communities of Practice, which J and I discussed as an area that technical writers should be developing expertise. As I plan to detail in a future post, the characteristics of online communities of practice have much in common with best practices in technical communication; many of the necessary skills for facilitating communities of practice are already present in the technical writer population, more than in other areas of the organization that are traditionally tasked with online community management.

Both the business environment and the audience for technical communication is changing, so it shouldn’t surprise those within the industry that we need to change as well. I should stress that I advocate building onto, not dispensing with, the value that we currently provide, the same as any other profession must do to remain viable. I’m sure it won’t be painless, but it should be fun and interesting…

Filed under: ROI   |  Leave a Comment