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The Commerce of Content
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by Saul Carliner
Originally published in the August 2000 issue of Performance Improvement.
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In this Article |
We see one anothers' topics in our respective publications. "Online Help Supports Performance," which recently appeared in Performance Improvement, encourages instructional designers to consider online help--which emerged from the field of technical communication--as a performance intervention. Similarly, a recent article in Intercom (the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication (STC)) describes performance support systems and why technical communicators should be aware of them.
We hear about one anothers' issues at our conferences. Sessions at the most recent ISPI Conference explored issues of the single sourcing of information, while sessions at the most recent STC Annual Conference explored instructional design.
Instructional designers increasingly find technical communicators in their territory, as technical communicators find instructional designers. Is this increasing contact merely a coincidence, or does it portend an evolutionary merger of the two fields?
This article explores these questions. Specifically, it suggests how instructional designers and technical communicators moved onto similar paths, how that path has caused both to re-defined their work and seek new identities and one anothers' work, and how those forces--along with outside factors--are bringing about a merger of the two fields.
With neither much more than a half century old, the disciplines of instructional design and technical communication are professions entering adolescence.
Like most adolescents, each is developing a stronger awareness of its environment and, in response, is redefining itself. These new definitions show striking similarity to one another.
Instructional design first developed as discipline during World War II. At the time, the U.S. military needed to more efficiently design and deliver training on the new military technologies that were introduced in that conflict. They turned to the American Institutes for Research, which developed an efficient methodology for preparing training courses--called instructional systems design--and principles for designing courses so that learners could learn the material more efficiently and retain it more effectively.
Technical communication also emerged at that time, but wasn't well defined until the late 1970s. At that time, consumers who were fed up with unclear language in legal documents, such as insurance policies rallied for laws requiring that their authors of legal documents use plain language so ordinary people could understand what they agreed to.
To helping inform practice in writing plain language documents, the U.S. government contracted with researchers at the American Institutes for Research and Carnegie Mellon University to develop a series of guidelines for designing documents.
The PC revolution followed soon afterwards, providing additional demand for cogent technical information, as well as funding for related research, especially into methods for designing documents that focus on user tasks.
As each profession has grown and developed, so has their understanding of their potential and limitations as disciplines. For example, instructional designers came to learn that an effective training program alone would not improve the performance of learners if other issues, such as resources and motivation, were not addressed.
Leading instructional designers suggested broadening the scope of that field from developing training courses to designing interventions that promote the effective human performance. To suggest appropriate interventions and develop them, however, instructional designers would need to become involved earlier in a situation, and receive permission to suggest a broader range of solutions.
Similarly, technical communicators realized that good information can help people effectively use products but can only go so far in covering up poor product design. If technical communicators could become involved earlier in the development of software and other products, they could help design products that are more intuitive for users and, ultimately, need less information.
As a result of more broadly focusing efforts, instructional designers and technical communicators have found that some of the old "tricks of the trade" hinder the progress of the field.
For example, old measures of productivity no longer work. Typically, training organizations (the organizations where instructional designers typically work) would measure their productivity in student-days--that is, the number of students taught multiplied by the number of days of training each received in the classroom.
When instruction is offered online and training organizations offer a variety of interventions to promote performance (most outside the classroom), student days is, at best, a partial measure of productivity and, at most, a misleading measure. However, no similar measure has yet replaced it.
As instructional designers grapple with the measurement of student-days, technical communicators grapple with the measurement of page and screen counts, which assess the productivity of technical communicators as the number of pages and screens published in a given time period.
When technical communicators have had a positive impact on product design, however, they do not need to write as much because the products they describe require less explanation.
As choosing appropriate productivity metrics baffles the two disciplines, so does choosing a name. Traditional names like instructional design and technical communication no longer adequately position disciplines for the work they seek.
For example, instructional designers are increasingly changing their job titles to performance technologists (or similar) to more clearly state their focus on performance.
Similarly, technical communicators are increasingly calling themselves information developers, designers, and architects, to identify that they have a broader range of skill than merely writing, and that they have the skills to become an integral part of the software team.
Changing names, too, is also intended to distance professionals in these fields from the connotations of the older job titles and position professionals for a different a broader range of assignments.
One broader range of assignments is interactive communication programs. Despite long-time interest in online learning and communication, until the past few years, few people actually worked on these types of assignments. In fact, because so few instructional designers and technical communicators developed interactive communication programs, a community of people in all communication disciplines that specialized in interactive communication emerged.
With the Windows and Internet revolutions of the 1990s and the corresponding growth in interactive multimedia, online learning and communication have moved into the mainstream of activities of instructional designers and technical communicators.
As they do so, interactive technology has also led to new forms of communication, forms that blur the traditional boundaries among training and documentation. One of those new forms is a wizard, which is software that performs most of a task for a user online, such as calculating a mortgage or choosing a flight.
Because wizards reduce the amount of learning needed to perform a task, instructional designers have embraced them as one of many tools in an electronic system that can support a user's performance
Technical communicators have embraced wizards, too, because they eliminate work for users. They call wizards and similar electronic types of communication user assistance or embedded help (because this information is helpful information that is embedded in the product).
The lines have similarly blurred around marketing materials, because materials that were merely informative in print, can now serve instructional purposes when developed as interactive, online demonstrations.
As the lines that traditionally delineated technical and marketing communications, and instructional design blur, they increasingly compete for the same work. Similarly, as the work of the three disciplines merges, people more easily move jobs in the three fields.
Outside forces, too, are encouraging mergers among the disciplines. Many organizations that separately create training and documentation see the separate efforts as duplication of effort.
Similarly, as organizations increasingly focus on knowledge management and on realizing the largest gains on the knowledge that has been captured and stored within the organization, they seek to centralize or, at least coordinate, the development and storage of that knowledge so it can be most efficiently and effectively disseminated.
So corporations as diverse as Lawson Software, Marquette Medical Systems, and Xerox Corporation have merged their training and documentation systems.
Although the mergers seem like natural ones, the cultures of the occupational disciplines are somewhat different, creating some initial challenges for managers. For example, one manager noted that the instructional systems design process id especially strong in the analysis, design phases, and evaluation phases but weak in the development phases.
In contrast, technical communication offers a strong process in the development phases, but is weak in analysis, design phases, and evaluation.
After clearing the initial hurdles, organizations realize many benefits. Because they work together, instructional designers and communicators can offer their organizations the efficiency and financial benefits from developing content once, with the intention of re-using it.
Both communicators and instructional designers have broader opportunities, because their organizations now offer a broader range of assignments. In addition to developing a broader range of communication products, the challenges of coordinating design among performance interventions and information design results in broader design and project management responsibilities.
In the academic world, collaboration is more prevalent than mergers. Individual professors in disciplines encourage their students to take courses in the related disciplines. For example, many professors of communication suggest that their students take courses in educational (cognitive) psychology and instructional design. Similar, many professors of instructional design suggest that their students take courses in document design and authoring tools.
But more formal mergers may be in the offing. The University of Minnesota has proposed merging two of its communication faculties: mass communications and speech communications.
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(c) Copyright. 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002. Saul Carliner. All rights reserved.
