Huawei case study: Solving worldwide communication challenges

I am one of the 1,000-plus technical writers at Huawei, a leading ICT provider with facilities in over 170 countries and regions. With such a huge presence, Huawei has to address global challenges when it comes to technical communication.

Text by Emma Lilin

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Huawei case study: Solving worldwide communication challenges

Image: © chinaview/ istockphoto.com

In the 1990s, Huawei resolved most Chinese customer issues through their technical support service. At that time, there were only a few technical documents and the content tended to be fairly simple and monolingual, and was predominately delivered in printed copies.

Starting from 2000, Huawei expanded rapidly into international markets, and it was confronted with some rather significant challenges in terms of technical communication. First, an exponential increase was seen in product documentation. Before 2000, Huawei created only a few different types of manuals. However, after 2000, the company needed to develop a complete set of documentation for each product series, including network planning, deployment, upgrade, operation, and maintenance manuals. This increase in technical communication requirements led to a tenfold increase in the word count.

Second, the content delivery mode ...