The Commerce
of Content
Article:
Future Travels of the InfoWrangler
Project Management | People Management | Business Management | Information Design Models, Processes, and Techniques | Home
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The Commerce
of Content
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Project Management | People Management | Business Management | Information Design Models, Processes, and Techniques | Home |
Originally published in the September/October 1998 issue of Intercom, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication. Reprinted with permission.
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Some of the questions most commonly asked by professionals in a given field are "where is the field headed?" and "how will that affect me?" In this article, I give one person's view of where the fields of technical communication, training, and marketing communications are headed and how that might affect people working in those fields. Saul Carliner |
You may already be an InfoWrangler. And if you’re not, you may want to become one soon. It’s where we’re all headed as technical communicators; we just have to decide whether we’re going there on our own power, or whether we’re going to be dragged down the road kicking and screaming.
Just what is an InfoWrangler? The term was coined by STC Past President Donna Sakson, and in its most basic form it refers to a communicator who has adapted to the new world of business--a world driven by emerging technologies and a constantly mutating business culture. This new communicator, the InfoWrangler, has responded by learning radical approaches to lassoing in information and rustling through projects. The InfoWrangler experiences work differently from yesterday’s technical communicator, both on a day-to-day level and over the course of a career.
Does that description sound fun or scary? Perhaps a bit of both. But the more you understand the new business world and the work, the skills, and the attitudes of the InfoWrangler, the better you’ll understand why it’s the future of our work.
The InfoWrangler is a response to the business realities of the 1990s and beyond. But just how do those realities differ from previous ones?
Competitive business environments, re-engineering, new communication technologies, complex communication challenges, and a host of other developments are causing corporations to change the way they approach communication tasks. Most of these issues are probably familiar to you, but two deserve special attention.
The first is complex communication challenges. In the past, technical communicators assumed that, if we published information, users would read it. Even though private market studies showed that users would seek the guidance of a co-worker or a call help line before checking the product information, we continued to maintain this belief. No longer can we.
As a cover story in Business Week noted earlier in the year, as organizations produce information in ever-increasing quantities, they produce saturated consumers. These consumers respond by tuning out: when users do read information, they want less of it and demand communication products that are specifically tailored to their needs. That’s the basis of the remarkable success of third-party documentation for popular PC applications: different books are geared towards different types of users. For example, books published by Sam’s meet the needs of highly technical readers, while books in the "Dummies" series meet the needs of less technical end users.
As PC users find their information needs for popular applications well met in the commercial sector, they bring those expectations to information provided by the publishers of highly specialized software. Users expect software publishers to provide just the information they need, suited to the context in which they work, and easily available at the time of need.
Similarly, as organizations and the software that supports them become more complex, the problems of communicating information become more complex. Even if consumers were to accept a "one-size-fits-all," approach, that approach would not meet organizational needs. The number of issues that communicators need to consider when planning information continually grows in volume and complexity, and includes concerns such as security, job issues, geographic issues, cultural issues, and competition.
The other issue worthy of mention is the growing concern with intellectual capital. Intellectual capital refers to the "brain assets" of an organization that ultimately add value to it. These assets include human resources, training courses, policies and procedures, product plans, customer relationships, and other special assets that contribute to the value of a business. Now, the financial community is estimating the value of these assets when determining the true value of a company.
Unfortunately, the financial community has no formulas for preparing these estimates and is working feverishly to develop them. That’s a boon to those of us who develop intellectual capital. We have long recognized that our work adds value to organizations.
However, we have not had any means of identifying what that value is and stating it in financial terms. No methodology exists for determining precisely how intellectual assets contribute to a company’s value. Janice Redish and Judy Ramey’s STC-funded research into the value added by technical communication represents one of many efforts by people in our field to develop this methodology. Now that the financial community is working on the issue, too, perhaps we will have a more precise means of demonstrating the value of our products and services.
Faced with an increasingly complex and demanding base of readers, new demands that we demonstrate the value of our work on the bottom line of an organization, and the imperative that we find ways to publish information in less time and with fewer resources than in the past, we must reconsider our traditional approaches to technical communication.
The Vancouver Roundtable, a group of consultants who meet annually to discuss trends in the field, recognized that in a technical communication market that is fixated on tools and programming skills and weak in the core skills of creative information design, writing, visual communication, and project management, the "fun," cutting-edge, showcase-quality work in multimedia often goes to employees in marketing communications and training. But in many cases, those professionals cannot succeed at the work because the technical level of the content is more complex than they can handle.
Hence, the InfoWranger: someone who has the technical savvy to publish more information in less time, plus the business savvy to demonstrate the value of our work to management.
Consider this situation. A user wants to follow the instructions in the users’ guide for programming the keyboard. The first thing the guide discusses is how to "disable" the programming mode. Next, the guide presents a list of restricted keys. That’s followed by a number of dense paragraphs. The frustrated user wonders, "If the heading says ‘How to Program the Keyboard,’ why can’t I find the instructions?"
Why indeed? Although the users’ guide was grammatically correct and sported a great page layout--with hanging headings and pictures--it was ultimately nothing more than "wordsmithed" engineering plans, information by engineers for engineers. The author of the guide transformed the plans by giving it a nice layout, but never adjusted the content to the needs of the people using it. The author added elements of page design, but didn’t add value.
That passive approach to information development simply won’t cut it in the age of the InfoWrangler. . In fact, in the Age of the InfoWrangler, documentation becomes a dirty word, because it implies that the information is merely produced as an historical record. InfoWranglers must recognize that we act as messengers in the communication process. And like Federal Express, United Parcel Service and public postal services, we, too, must develop services that ultimately meet the needs of both the "senders" and receivers. Repackaging the senders’ design specifications and other source materials merely creates documentation; it does not create communication products.
Ultimately, the work of the InfoWrangler solves a business problem; it does not merely document a system. Our job therefore begins at the end: by stating the results that should be achieved when the problem is solved. We call such statements objectives. They state, in observable and measurable terms, the results that should occur when using a particular communication product.
To solve business problems, we must first identify them. InfoWranglers, therefore, must first help the senders--engineers, programmers, marketing specialists--determine the business need driving their request to communicate—and state the objectives to be achieved. Business objectives ultimately fall into one of three categories: driving revenue, containing expenses, or complying with a government, industry, or corporate regulation (such as ISO 9000). Most of the senders we work with don’t realize that they have a business goal. Our job is to help them recognize, then verbalize it.
For example, a communication product might generate revenue by providing ordering information for parts (a business objective for a parts catalog). Or a communication product might contain support expenses by answering the ten most frequently asked questions. Senders will value our work only if we can show how it creates value for their businesses.
Once we help senders identify their business objectives, we follow by determining what users should be able to do as a result of reading the information--that is, we set the objectives for the content. Content objectives state the tasks people should be able to perform after using the information.
Setting business and content objectives provides a framework for making decisions about the increasingly complex choices for delivering information. And we do have more choices to make. If our work is intended to solve business problems, then we will need increasingly broader sets of possible solutions.
In addition to our bread-and-butter work in users’ guides and references, technical communicators are increasingly producing marketing-oriented materials like guided tours, training materials such as tutorials and coaches, and more traditional technical communication products.
Similarly, we are working in a broader variety of media than our traditional medium of print. As recently as five years ago, we published online information only occasionally and, on rare occasions, produced video and audio tapes. Since the Windows explosion in the early 1990s, we now publish a significant amount of our work online. We have also increased our work in other media such as video.
The communication products in the various media used to stand alone, also, but they now must be integrated in coordinated campaigns. For example, many large corporations are providing immense volumes of information online, but also make the same information available in print. This is called single-sourcing, because the information from a single source can be published in several ways.
In more sophisticated campaigns, information in one medium coordinates with that in another, rather than duplicating it. (For example, the Atlanta chapter of STC publishes a two-page newsletter that includes a brief main article, and pointers to information on its Web site.) Help with Microsoft Office products includes not only reference information and procedures, but also coaches and wizards. In some instances, the information in one part of the online help duplicates that in another. In other cases, the information in one part of help replaces that in another.
Wizards and coaches provide more than a new form of communication product for the online world. But they complicate the question of who produces information. For example, a wizard provides users instructions on how to perform a task, so we might classify it as "technical communication." But a wizard is also a means of shaping worker performance and is often used as a tool in technical training. And because wizards simplify the process of ordering information, they also fall into the realm of marketing communications.
To whom, then, do wizards belong?
The new media are quickly shattering the boundaries between marketing communications, training, and technical communication. When marketing communicators are increasingly producing users’ guides, trainers are producing wizards, and technical communicators are producing guided tours, we can no longer define ourselves by the products we produce. Instead, InfoWranglers skillfully produce a variety of communication products, and will define themselves by their role in the communication process. Most InfoWranglers will assume one of these roles:
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Project manager |
whose primary job is making sure that communication products are developed according to plan, on time, within budget, and at an acceptable level of quality to the sender and to the user. Project managers set schedules and budgets, choose and manage members of project teams, enforce product plans and quality guidelines, and act as a go-between among senders, the InfoWrangling team, and users. |
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Information designer |
who acts as an architect of a project, solving the complex communication problems presented by senders and developing the blueprints of the solution that will be acceptable to the "senders" and effective with users. The blueprints are more complex than the outlines that have paraded in the past as project plans. As building architects often specify details like faucets and doorknobs, so information designers will specify details like drawings and metaphors for a given section of a communication product. We can no longer rely on project managers to sever a dual role as information designers, or to design libraries by team. As informal research is indicating, information projects can have only one information designer. Furthermore, the skills that make someone a good information designer are not the same as those that make someone a good project manager or information developer. |
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Information developer |
who acts as a subcontractor on a project, creating the individual components according to the designer’s information plans and the manager’s project plans. Skilled information developers will be comfortable writing a variety of information products for a variety of media and will specialize, instead, in subject matter, such as computer software, telecommunications, or biotechnology. |
Whether InfoWranglers serve as project managers, information designers, or information developers, organizations will expect them to have a portfolio of skills in these four areas.
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Information design and development |
All InfoWranglers must master the basic communication skills of writing, editing, visual communication, and speaking, although strengths will vary among these capabilities. But communication skills go beyond these: InfoWranglers must be familiar with a variety of analysis, design, evaluation, and production skills, such as needs analysis, setting objectives, developing evaluations (such as usability tests), conducting evaluations, performing user-centered design, choosing media, choosing among types of communication products, preparing camera-ready copy, producing video, preparing code, and properly using copyrighted material. The level of skill will vary, depending on the role that the InfoWrangler plays. |
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Technology |
Technology refers to the subjects that InfoWranglers write about, not the technology they use, such as help authoring tools or animation software (unless these are the subjects of the communication products). Technology is changing in a variety of areas, from the well-publicized developments in computers, telecommunications, and biotechnology, to the lesser-known developments in fields such as agriculture and manufacturing. |
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Industry |
Technology, alone, does not affect users. Rather, the application of technology in a particular industry ultimately affects users. For example, computers have changed the way front desk personnel check in guests at hotels. New canning technology ultimately affects the way that bottlers package and ship soft drinks. To effectively write about technology, then, we need to understand not only the technology itself, but the way it affects the daily work of people in a given industry. Generally, InfoWranglers should have knowledge of the way one or two industries work. We can then use that knowledge to write more directly targeted material. |
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Business |
Because most InfoWrangling occurs for hire, we need to be comfortable not only in identifying and addressing business issues for which we develop information, but also explaining what we do in business terms and understanding how business conditions affect the demand for our services. |
Although the four categories of skills are likely to remain constant for many years, the given skills within a category are likely to change as technology and business conditions change. Good InfoWranglers regularly assess their skills, adding new ones and brushing up on other key skills as the market changes.
An astute InfoWrangler realizes that jobs are a date, not a marriage, and that the only way to remain "date-able" with employers throughout a career is to keep skills current in all four of the key areas. Some skills have a short shelf-life, such as WinHelp authoring skills. Others have a longer life, but lose value with time, such as desktop publishing skills. And still others are durable, but require refreshing over time, such as writing and estimating.
Because the majority of technical communicators are employed (according to STC membership information, about 75 percent are employed by corporations, and only 25 percent work in the independent sector as contractors and consultants, or for contracting firms we tend to think of the groups that request our services as "senders."
But these engineering, programming, scientific, and marketing groups pay the bills for our services and can be viewed as clients. InfoWranglers must therefore view themselves as consultants of sorts, even if we do not work in the independent sector of our field.
In a professional culture that, according to its job advertisements, seems to place the highest value on technical skills such as C++ programming and Robohelp authoring, the skills ultimately rewarded in the workplace are most often relationship skills. These skills include the following:
Only with these skills can we earn clients’ respect, and only when we earn clients’ respect do they provide us with opportunities to make an impact on their organization. This type of impact usually happens with early involvement in projects. Although InfoWranglers need to be assertive about the importance of their early involvement with projects, true involvement happens only when engineers, programmers, scientists and marketing specialists extend an invitation to do so.
To earn this invitation, InfoWranglers must perform well on first assignments, which usually do not provide us with the opportunity to make an impact. But this good performance, along with a positive, customer-oriented attitude, and an enthusiastic understanding of technical communication, are key tools in earning the respect needed to earn an invitation for early involvement.
To expect early involvement on a first or second engagement with a client, however, is unrealistic. Author Gerald Weinstein suggests that consultants need two engagements to establish the initial trust. Only on our third engagements are we likely to receive the invitation for early involvement in projects.
Now that we’ve looked at the world, work, skills, and attitude of the InfoWrangler, we can refine our definition a bit.
In response to complex communication challenges, new communication technologies, downsized corporate environments, and the effort to measure the intellectual capital of organizations, the jobs of technical communicators, trainers, and marketing communicators are evolving into a combined job which we have called an InfoWrangler. An InfoWrangler is a versatile communicator who does the following:
To some, communicators working in environments with this level of flexibility, maintaining this broad a skill base, and approaching work relationships as a consultant might seem daunting. But then, so is working in the age of the New Employment Contract, when none of us is guaranteed lifetime employment with any organization.
To others, InfoWrangling is the best way of ensuring an enriching career. With a broad set of skills to develop and maintain, an InfoWrangler has a curriculum for lifelong career learning. Bringing such a comprehensive set of skills and attitudes to any project, the InfoWrangler is assured of rewarding work that provides an unlimited outlet for creativity.
Are you an infowrangler? Take the skills assessment and find out.
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(c) Copyright. 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002. Saul Carliner. All rights reserved.