Change is gonna come

19 Aug

Posted by Scott as content, opinion, technical communication

Our new partners: the crowd And you have to be ready. In fact, to quote the band Yes, the wings of change are on display. The change on those wings will definitely have a profound impact on the role of the technical communicator in the coming years.

What am I talking about here? A shift in the way that documentation is produced. We’ve all seen the beginning of it: the growing volume of what’s called (among other things) user generated or crowdsourced documentation. That trend is growing. And while a number of people in our profession are still resistant to the idea, it’s only a matter of time before users are our main partners in creating documentation.

We can’t stop that wave. We shouldn’t try to. Or try to resist or ignore it. In a number of areas, crowdsourced documentation will be the way in which a good chunk of the job will be done. And for a good reason: by collaborating with users, and even having them write a portion of the documentation, we’re producing documentation that is truly focused on the needs of the user.

The obvious effect of that will be to change the traditional role of the technical communicator. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The roles that the future may hold

It’s crystal ball time. Here are the roles that I think that technical communicators will shift into in the coming years.

First up, content curation. Anne Gentle wrote a good blog post about that topic recently. In a comment to post, I wrote that much of the content that’s being curated on the Web isn’t a fixed point. It’s changing, sometimes in subtle ways. The same applies to documentation. A curator will incorporate those changes to keep the content fresh and up to date.

Next, information architecture. How will the documentation be structured? How can it best be adapted to the needs of users, and to make it as easy to navigate. That, as you know, isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Technical communicators will also be finding new ways of delivering documentation. Simply delivering it as a PDF or a Web-based help system or even a wiki isn’t enough. Finding how best to deliver content to users in the way they want and need it is a challenge. Check out this presentation for our thoughts about this.

Related to that is reusing and retasking content. What do I mean by that? A lot of documentation can be used elsewhere — in other pieces of documentation, in training materials, or in marketing materials. Some cotent might not be quite the right fit for the main documentation set. You can extract that content and use it in a knowledge base article or a quick tip. Or, you can take information from a forum post and merge it with the main documentation set. That takes some thought and a bit of creativity. On top of that, you need to be able to analyze the content to determine its optimal use.

Of course, not all of the documentation produced by the crowd will be in usable shape, or will conform to a company or project’s style. A good technical communicator will be able to edit and rewrite crowdsourced documentation to make it read better, to shorten it, to break it down, and to make it more usable. It’s something that many of us do now, and it probably will be a bigger part of the job in the near future.

On the other hand, user-generated documentation won’t necessarily be complete. Someone will need to fill in the gaps. That someone will probably be the professional technical communicator. It’s not a stretch for us to research and write material that will supplementary any user-generated content.

Finally, don’t discount content strategy. We can analyze content, plan how it will be presented and deployed, and even shift into usability and user interface work. If you want to learn more about content strategy, listen to Tom Johnson’s interview with Rahel Bailie.

Summing up

When will this all happen? It’s hard to predict. I could say five years, but it might happen in two. Or nine. Or any number in between. What I’ve been talking about may never happen; there could be other changes that I’ve yet to anticipate.

The key is to be ready to adapt with (and not to) the changes, and perhaps start moving things in the directions I outlined. Of course, by doing that we could be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy …

Thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment.