For the producers of such innovations, however, these changes come as a mixed blessing: they must constantly adapt to a changing landscape of consumer demand. It's a challenging time to be a producer.
Among the people who are right in the middle of these changes are technical communicators. Most commonly, these are the people who document how products work, how they are to be used and how they can be fixed when something goes wrong. Using a mix of media types, technical communicators effectively help consumers to get the most from the products they buy. It is a vital task and its importance grows rapidly with the increasing complexity of products.
An aircraft, for example, would be easily outweighed by its documentation if all this information was printed out as hardcopy manuals. Without the work of technical communicators, these aircraft would never get off the ground, or at least they would never be allowed to. But we don’t need to go this far to illustrate our point. Consider the latest array of technology components that make up a typical home entertainment system. The installation and configuration of these integrated systems are often so complex that the retailers typically include onsite installation services. And, the teams that perform these services have been trained using documentation, which they also routinely consult when problems arise.
So, technical communicators are at the center of the changes that are sweeping through the global economy as digital technology takes the wheel. We have also established that technical communicators play a key role in helping people to deal with all this new technology. They provide the documentation that people use to install, configure, use, and – if necessary – fix these technology products. But there is more to the story than this – much more. Let’s start with a case study to see if we can catch a glimpse of the future of technical communication.
Accepting change
This case study takes us back a few years to a repair and overhaul service provider for large aircraft engines. The organization would receive huge turbine engines and undertake major refurbishments. One of the tasks was to completely redo the associated documentation. As part of their service, the company would provide their customer with a carefully refurbished engine along with a newly baselined documentation. It was a good business to be in. Customers obviously had a vested interest in aircraft engines that were working well. It was also a competitive business to be in because customers were becoming very cost-conscious, and more and more options were becoming available for offshore repair and overhaul services. The organization in this case study needed to modernize how it operated if it was going to stay competitive.
So this was the environment that I entered when I arrived to work with the technical communication team. My task was to modernize their tools and practices. In this case, I was playing the role of "change instigator" as I was the one responsible for introducing new technologies for the creation, management, publication, and deployment of documentation content. The starkness of the change in this case could not have been more extreme. The documentation team worked in a large open office with the team manager in the center. Each team member was an expert at producing beautiful printed manuals using a highly sophisticated desktop publishing system that was a relic from an earlier age. Into this environment I was to introduce a radically different approach to planning, authoring, illustrating and controlling documentation as reusable modules that would be delivered to users primarily in electronic form. There was a good chance that the changes would include an increase in the use of external suppliers so soon the technical communication team would not be working in a single room.
On one occasion, one of the desktop publishers asked me a very simple question: "What is going to happen to me?" It must have been on everyone's mind as the entire office stopped to listen to what my answer would be. The question took me aback because it so completely conveyed a sense of fear, or at least uncertainty, about what these changes would mean for these technical communicators and the specific skills they had worked so hard to acquire and hone. And, I will confess that I was caught off guard and I did not have a clever answer ready.
I remember this episode particularly well because it illustrated so clearly that those of us pushing content technologies in ever more novel directions need to stop and think about what this means for the people who actually create that content. Being caught off guard my spontaneous answer was: "I don't know for sure what will happen to you".
I quickly continued with some further thoughts: "The changes we are implementing here are big changes. They cannot be avoided or postponed – not if this company is going to survive. But there are some things that we do know. The tools you have been using are obsolete and one day very soon they are going to stop working. So there is no future in using these tools, here or anywhere else. With the changes we are implementing we are aiming for standards that are used around the world and we are introducing a new web-based publishing solution that uses state-of-the-art tools and techniques. If you give these changes a chance, I can at least promise you that the additional skills you will develop will make you far more marketable in today's economy."
It was the best I could come up with at the time and I was being completely honest. Luckily, events then unfolded in a way that fell completely in line with my promise. The team did commit themselves to the changes and soon started working in a different way.
A fully digital future (and present)
This short case study illustrates some key points about the future of technical communication: For one, the future is fully digital and is geared, completely, towards providing enhanced digital information services to customers and to end users operating the products. Secondly, an inescapable part of this change is that technical communication is pushed into an even tighter integration with the product lifecycle that is itself becoming more digital. The organization in our case study was now receiving source data in more useful digital formats and it was investing in its design and workshop technology so that it could use this data directly. The same applied to the documentation to be updated. The company needed to be able to receive, use, and return documentation in accordance with a number of international standards. Also, data from the parts inventory system and revised procedures from the workshop needed to come directly into the documentation set. The team had always worked closely with colleagues across the organization but never as dynamically as this or at such a detailed level.
At this point the case study has brought us up to the present. Today, technical communication is conducted using digital technologies and is an integral part of the overall product lifecycle. So far, so good. Here the case study takes an unexpected turn and allows us a glimpse into the future of technical communication.
From technical communication to information services
We set out to measure the success of this particular project. To be more precise, we tracked the improving efficiency in the documentation process as we squeezed out layer upon layer of redundancy in the content and eliminated hand-offs and wait-times. And we counted the savings to see that our original business case justifications were in fact being realized. For the first three years, the numbers tracked a gratifying curve that showed that the cost of implementation, thanks to the team's efforts, was lower than expected and that the savings realized were in fact greater than projected. There were smiles all around. But then one year the numbers came in with some unexpected changes.
The new numbers showed that there was a sudden sharp rise in documentation expenditures. Management immediately became concerned. But fortunately a closer analysis of the numbers exposed some very good news: The reason why documentation expenditures had spiked could be traced directly to new orders placed specifically for enhancements to the new web-based documentation system that had been put into place for aircraft engine maintenance information. This had not been seen in the past, so the accounting systems had not been set up to handle customer orders that were directly, and exclusively, related to documentation. What they did track was the increase in expenditures that the technical communication team needed to make to fill those orders. This realization prompted management to take a fresh look at the technical communication department: Could we make more money from the work of the technical communication team? In which ways could these new information services help our business?
TC as a sales pitch
This part of the case study brings us to one of the latest trends in technical communication. Several large organizations have started to see technical communication as part of a new “customer experience” focus. In some cases technical communication has been formally moved, organizationally, from engineering or logistics over to marketing or “customer experience”. These organizations are the ones that realize how high-quality digital information services can directly feed customer satisfaction and can support a new breed of technically informative marketing campaigns. For example, studies of consumer purchasing decisions have been highlighting the large, and growing, role that online research plays in the choice of products. For more complex products, further studies of Google search patterns have shown how frequently people make a point of searching for, and consulting, product documentation as part of this product research. Good documentation, it turns out, drives product sales. The common thread in all of these initiatives, in line with the questions that management was starting to ask in our case study, was the idea that technical communication could be seen as a revenue generator and not just as a cost center.
Taking the lead
But the case study does not stop here and neither does our exploration of the future of technical communication. In the final stages, the organization began to expand the scope of innovation that had been applied to the technical information services. There were more encouraging, albeit challenging, questions. Can we apply the same approaches to creating, managing and using content that we use for aircraft engines to how we document our own business procedures from finance through to human resources? Can we provide similar digital information services to customers and partners for all our activities? Can we leverage digital communication strategies to streamline how we conduct reporting financial information, maintaining regulatory compliance, aligning our supply chain, and recruiting new talent? The answer to all of these questions is “yes”.
It turned out that the technical communication team was, for a number of reasons, very well positioned to play a leadership role in answering these new questions. Members of the technical communication team were now recognized across the organization as specialists in not only communicating but also doing so using the latest in digital technology to reach customers and partners. The future demanded that the whole organization shift to a posture of digital collaboration and it was obvious that management would bring these questions to the technical communication team.
Peter Drucker, the esteemed Viennese management thinker, was among the first to recognize the character of a new global knowledge economy and what this would mean for organizations. One thing he pointed out in particular was that the business functions in our organizations will become increasingly specialized as we move into the future. This is not something that can, or should, be reversed. But it is something, he advised, that we need to deal with. And the one response that is essential is that we leverage another growing specialization, that of technical communication, to facilitate the collaboration and integration of all the other specializations working within a modern organization.
Our case study illustrates this clearly, although, at that time, we were not fully aware that we were doing this. What we were doing, it turns out, was exploring the future of technical communication and what we encountered was very encouraging.