Identity and Authority: Why the Foundation of Documentation is Changing
Last week I attended the Web Content 2009 conference in Chicago. I found the conference informative and entertaining. I was glad to see useful content about an emerging and troubling issue: the identity crisis of the technical communicator. However, I was surprised to see the topic show up in a marketing discussion.
On the second day Joe Pulizzi gave a keynote presentation entitled “Please Stop Talking about Yourself: Marketing is now Publishing (and what to do about it)”.
I’ll summarize (although you should really click through the slides even though there is no audio available): the future of marketing is about original, educational, and entertaining content. Traditional marketing is littered with companies talking about themselves, but future marketers will create and publish uniquely helpful content to help solve common customer problems. By doing this, companies can establish themselves as the go-to, trusted, expert resource for their industry.
## An Authority Crisis for Documentation?
There is most definitely a technical communicator identity crisis underway. Recent posts from online technical writers include:
* Tom Johnson’s thoughts on How to Avoid Extinction as a Technical Communicator.
* Anne Gentle on her concern about a Dangerous Future for Technical Writing.
* Ellis Pratt’s reaction to the implications of online research trends: The ‘Google or Death?’ choice for technical authors.
Three posts from well respected industry professionals in the span of one month, all dealing with a fundamental shift in an core product development profession. What’s going on here?
To put it plainly: documentation now has competition. It used to be that the published manuals from a company represented the sum total of available educational and troubleshooting content for a product. The appearance of the Internet began to change that in the 90’s as people turned to USENET, mailing lists, and other forms of online interaction to collaborate with peers and to solve common problems. However, with the rise of social networking and online communities wrapped in a very efficient Google (and now Bing) search experience there is now an alternative to wading through the piles of help content published by many companies.
Documentation now has to compete for the status as the go-to, trusted, expert resource for a product. Sound familiar? Marketing is transforming into a publishing effort, all in the hopes that a company can be seen as the definitive resource for an industry. The future of documentation is a microcosm of a bigger content revolution.
To a certain degree the identity crisis that technical communicators are facing is a consequence of the growing authority crisis facing documentation. Writers want their content to be useful, but they’re finding that users are finding answers somewhere else, resulting in a devaluation of the documentation. Note, I said they were finding the answer somewhere else, not the content. There is a very big distinction here, and it relates to the channels that are used to publish the documentation.
The majority of documentation today is published in one or two channels: PDF and WebHelp. This content is usually distributed on the corporate web site, after which the writers set to work on the next release. Users, however, are finding their answers in forums, on wikis, on Twitter, and in other communities where people share information. It’s not because the documentation doesn’t contain the answers, in fact in many cases the forum messages that solve a problem are either links to specific topics in the documentation or a summary of the content available there. The true problem is that of distribution, search, and findability.
Of course, for an overworked writing team getting the content out into PDF is a win, and even though many writers want to do more they simply don’t have support from the tools that they use daily.
## Better Tools are Needed
On Tom Johnson’s blog entry that I referenced above there were two comments that I think are related to the root cause for this particular problem. First, the commenter, Gordon, noted:
> I definitely think, as Ellis suggests, that our roles should be changing (should have been for quite a while). Partly I think we are too governed by the technology available in our own profession (we seem to tend to wait for the vendors) and partly because we still struggle to express the benefits of opening up information and embracing any/all new methods of communicating with the customer at a technical level.
and Tom replied with:
> I agree that we tend to wait for vendors to supply the technology we need. If we technical writers were programmers, especially web developers, we would have much more innovation in our field. Because most of us don’t have programming skills, we often have to wait for others to do it for us. But this area is usually uninteresting to programmers.
Technical communication is an industry that has seen very little true product innovation in the past decade. The established vendors have maintained, essentially, the same product approach since EHelp: a predominantly single-author centric content editor with little emphasis on how users actually find and use the content created by the tool. Sure, there are lots of new features in the editors, but there has been no fundamental rethinking of documentation within the context of the modern Internet.
The documentation’s authority crisis and the technical communicator’s identity crisis will be the beginning of a new valuation for documentation from within the wider lens of a company’s overall content strategy and its quest to become and maintain thought leadership within an industry and customer segment. This shift will be dominated by multi-channel publishing of single-sourced, collaborative content that works to engage and bring users into communities influenced by the companies they orbit around.
Of course, like Gordon and Tom note, tools must evolve for this to happen. At LugIron we think about this every day as we march towards our first product release.
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