Originally published in the January 1999 issue of Intercom. Reprinted with permission.

Last year, I published a list of general trends in technical communication that I had noticed in my travels and consulting during the past year. In some instances, I acknowledge trends that many people had already observed, such as the growth of the web. In other instances, I tried to call attention to issues that I had heard from several people, but were not openly discussed because the issues are sensitive ones. Because the response was so strong, I have prepared another such compendium.

Business Trends: Managing Ever More with Increasingly Less

The generally strong economies in developed countries have created a variety of "good" problems: more work than workers, more information than we can deal with, international opportunities, and increased competition. It’s also created a complacency about some key issues that we shouldn’t ignore.

Where are the workers? The demand for technical communicators now exceeds the supply. Several employers have asked me for help in finding workers. They’re finding that, instead of several candidates for any given position, they have only 1 or 2 to choose from—if that many. To attract talent, many employers have broadened their recruiting efforts, often outside their geographic markets. Employers have also become more creative with their compensation and benefits packages.

All that information. In contrast to the shortage of workers, organizations face a glut of information—of their own creation. If they only knew what information they have, organizations might be able to effectively re-use and distribute information. When organizations do know what information they have, they have several versions of the same it and often have difficulty distinguishing the most recent from earlier drafts. Organizations are turning to sophisticated software (as high as 6 figures) to track the inventory of information available (not just documentation, but also product plans, reports and other internal documents), identify responsible parties, and distinguish among versions. Choosing the software and implementing it often falls to information design and development groups.

We’ve gone global—and have the frequent flyer miles to prove it. At a recent board meeting of the Society for Technical Communication (STC), I noticed something: nearly half the board members had been on a transcontinental business trip in the previous 3 months. (People are even asking me to travel internationally.) The increased demand for technical communication services outside North America is also indicated by the growth in STC membership and chapters outside this continent: it’s our highest growth group.

But the ultimate beneficiary of this growth might be translation and localization companies. Many are finding that, if they create the original information, they simplify the process of localizing and translating it. Not surprisingly, many of these firms are expanding into technical communication and some industry observers predict that they’ll control a significant part of the business within the next few years.

Speed—it’s not just a movie. Companies continually seek to reduce the "time to market," that is, the time between inception and introduction of a product. In our business, that has 2 implications. First, the organizations we serve often have an endless cycle of product releases, some as short as 2 weeks to 3 months. (6 months seems to be more typical, but that barely leaves technical communicators enough time to update information, much less address usability issues.) Second, web publishing has allowed organizations to significantly reduce publication time from the time needed for production and printing (as many as 6 to 8 weeks) to a day or two. (Now, if they could just figure out how to reduce the time needed to actually write the material….)

Sound the alarms. Technical communicators are overlooking these important business issues:

• More talk than action. Despite all of the talk about demonstrating the value added by technical communicators, we still lack a cohesive, widely followed methodology for doing so. Few organizations conduct usability tests, and even fewer are exploring the bottom-line benefits of the technical communication products they publish. The academic community hasn’t contributed to our understanding in this area either; we’ve seen little academic research. This do-nothing-about-measuring-effectiveness-and-value trend is in sharp contrast to a lively amount of evaluation efforts in training and marketing communications groups.
• Intellectual capital—new frontier. The financial community seeks ways to put an economic value (dollars) on "intellectual capital—the sum total of an organization's brainpower. This effort is leading to new ways of thinking about information resources. Unfortunately, the subject is of greater interest to the IS and financial communities than it is to the community of technical communicators. Nothing has been written about it in any of the major technical communication publications, nor has it been a topic of discussion in technical communication conferences.

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Technology Trends: Stability

Although technology appears, in some ways, to change rapidly, in other ways, we’re starting to see some stability.

Tally Ho! Technology. The web continues to grow as the primary means of delivering information online, so HTML is the primary means of preparing that information. Because many technical communicators dislike working directly with HTML or have specialized needs, many work with tools that prepare the HTML code for us. We’ve even seen some standardization in this area. RoboHelp is becoming the most popular means of preparing help and other technical information for the web. For non-web page designers who have to design web pages anyway, Microsoft Front Page has become one of the most popular means of doing so.

Don’t get comfortable yet. Not that many of you have mastered HTML, XML is on the way. XML is markup language that represents a union of HTML (the markup language for web-based materials) and SGML (the markup language for more traditional books and printed materials). With XML, people can prepare information once, use it in a variety of media (such as print and online), and easily transfer files among platforms (such as Mac and Windows). The good news is, your HTML and SGML skills should transfer to XML.

Standardization—it’s not just for help. People who prepare training materials are also noticing a consolidation in the market for authoring tools. For the past few years, a few authoring tools have held the majority of the market, such as Authorware, IconAuthor, Quest, and ToolBook.

Now, the publishers of these authoring tools are bundling software for managing online learning modules into their authoring tools. (In many cases, the software they’re bundling was once separately published by other software organizations.) Ultimately, trainers will be able to purchase 1 authoring tool that will provide nearly all of the support needed for online learning—from course design to delivery.

As long as the tools were new and in flux, managers often felt that the most valuable skills employees offered were their ability to use the tools. But as industry standardizes on a few tools, the ability to use them becomes a commodity skill—one that nearly anyone has, like typing. Because the ability to use tools becomes a commodity, employers can once again hire people for their ability to design and develop information that’s usable.

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Writing and Design Techniques: The Elusive Killer Website

As the web becomes an increasingly common way of communicating online, technical communicators are increasingly exploring the frontiers of online communication as well as addressing the implications of the ever-increasing supply of information that the web brings.

Just say yes. A year ago, experts were advising "Just say no"—to frames, that is. But in the past year, website designers have figured out how to effectively integrate frames into websites. Many have done away with those tiny boxes with pesky scrollbars and replaced them with visual maps of websites that aid in navigation and help users of web-based references more easily move among entries.

Website designers are similarly figuring out how to deal with the next version of HTML "bells and whistles," such as dynamic HTML and cascading style sheets.

Garden your webpage. Or should I say, prune your website? Balancing all of the enthusiasm for moving information onto the Web is a lethargy for keeping the web pages current. Maintenance of web pages is a major problem; it is not an exciting assignment and people do not want to do it. That’s prompted Jakob Nielsen to suggest a new job, that of the web "gardener," whose job is to nurture a website, keep the content current and changing, and watch it bloom.

Catch them if you can. As people become overwhelmed by more information than they can possibly handle from more information sources than they can possibly track, getting and keeping the attention of users is going to be an increasing challenge. Richard Saul Wurman (another short guy who calls himself Saul) wrote about the glut of information in his pivotal book, Information Anxiety in 1989. In February, Business Week explained how the glut of entertainment and information products have saturated the market.

How organizations are responding to this trend:

• Not relying on single communication products to reach users; they rely, instead, on information campaigns that use several communication products prepared for several media to get a single message across.
• Questioning the need to publish and maintain for rarely-used information so they can devote their attention to communicating the most important messages.
• Mass-customizing information—that is, providing clearly targeted audiences with just the information they need, in terms that make sense to them. That's no easy task--as easy as writing once and tailoring for many audiences sounds, it's still a lot of work getting to know the different audiences and actually revising the work. For people interested in working on document databases, information design, and the like, this should present some interesting work challenges.

Versatility in writing styles is increasingly important. A person who can only write a tech manual is of limited value. A person who can switch between writing manuals, kiosks, online help, tutorials, and so forth is easier to place.

Still Waiting for "Wow!" I’ve judged in 3 of the 4 International Online Communication Competitions (every year except 1996) and have been impressed with the increasing overall quality of the entries. These entries represent the best of the best online communication, and I look to them to set the trends that others will follow. For the most part, entries represented solid communication, and that’s certainly a trend worth following. But none of the entries really knocked anyone’s socks off, that is, brought a feeling of "wow."

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Professional Issues: Marketing Is Everything

The key issues that seem to arise for technical communicators this year focus on the marketing of the field—in terms of what we call ourselves and whom else competes for our work.

Call me anything (but not a technical communicator). One of the major issues facing our field is what to call ourselves. The STC membership database lists over 500 job titles that correspond with technical writer/editor. So the Society thought that perhaps we ought to reconsider our own name. When we surveyed our members and asked them what they would call the work we do, half called it information design and development. Only 38 percent called it technical communication or similar term.

Some people suggest that we call ourselves knowledge management. But others have already taken that term. The Information Systems community uses the term to refer to capturing, storing, and disseminating information. Although we certainly perform all of these tasks, the IS community primarily considers the role of technology in these efforts, rather than the human decisions and actions affecting them.

We’re not alone—and that’s a scary thing. As the number of available technical communicators decreases and other branches of communication seek work, we increasingly compete with them for work like multimedia, training, electronic coaching, and wizards. Each discipline brings strengths to the process, but because the strengths of technical communicators primarily lie in development rather than design and analysis, some industry analysts, and because so many professionals in the field focus on technical proficiency with tools and programming languages rather than excellence in communicating technical information, some industry analysts have commented that technical communicators could become clerks, with the more rewarding tasks of designing information going to instructional designers and marketing communicators.

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Closing Note

Like the weather, trends quickly change and conditions vary by area. If you have observed other trends not noted here, or if your perspectives differ from mine, please contact me.

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Check out my predictions for the year 2002 and 2000.

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(c) Copyright. 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002. Saul Carliner. All rights reserved.