Trends for Technical Communication: Becoming a Career-Resilient Employee News & Views Feature Article

by Charlie Breuninger, Manager of Information Design and Development for External Affairs DuPont Corporation (Wilmington, Delaware) Originally published in News & Views September, 1996 issue. Copyright 1996 STC-Philadelphia Metro Chapter. For permission to reprint this article, contact the Managing Editor.

We in the information development business, like professionals in any other field, want to make sure that our skills keep pace with (and ideally anticipate) the changing needs of the marketplace. To do this, we must be aware of the trends that will most affect us and our customers. Trends are tricky because they're so interconnected. Because we work in the information industry, information-related trends are the most obvious to us and tend to be the ones to which we pay the most attention. Such trends are certainly important, but to anticipate and respond successfully to the forces that will dominate our professional lives, we must devote equal time to identifying and understanding the trends that are important to our customers--the people who pay us to do what we do. This article describes the major trends that are driving change in the corporate world, discusses the implications of these new business imperatives for the profession of technical communication, and suggests what we as information developers should do to live long and prosper in the new age of information. General trends in business Note: I'm most familiar with what's going on in large, traditional, diversified corporations outside the computer industry. While my comments focus on those kinds of companies, I think they're broadly applicable across a range of industries. Cost and capital control--profit margins aren't what they used to be. One way to increase margins is to spend less on people, equipment, and facilities. The business emphasis is on reducing fixed cost (primarily salaries/benefits) and capital expenditures. Outsourcing whatever you can--especially tactical kinds of work. This is and will continue to be a popular strategy for reducing fixed cost and capital expense. You still end up paying for the work (maybe even more than when you did it in-house), but it comes out of the variable cost pocket and there is no associated capital expense, which looks good to the investment community. Growth--many companies have set ambitious growth targets aimed at the year 2000. They expect all employees remaining after outsourcing to contribute to growth (as reflected by bigger market share, higher prices, increased sales, greater return on equity or net assets, etc.) in a demonstrable way. This usually means employees will have to learn and demonstrate new and very different behaviors. Focus on marketing--companies need to better segment, understand, and target products to specific markets to meet growth goals. Much of the reorganizing, restructuring, and reinventing going on these days is aimed at making companies more responsive to market segments in order to generate growth. This will continue, and everyone will be expected to understand and contribute in some way to the marketing process. Focus on core competencies--in order to grow, businesses will continue to cut their losses, retrench, and refocus on the things they know how to do well in markets where they have a competitive advantage. These core competencies may be technology or service-related, or both. Focus on information and knowledge as the source of competitive advantage--companies in many industries are beginning to realize that their real source of competitive advantage increasingly lies in their ability to collect, assimilate, deploy, and act on information faster than the competition. They believe that their products will be differentiated in the marketplace not by the intrinsic qualities of the products themselves but by the quality of the information and services attached to them. Information technology and business success The accelerating rate of change in information technology is at the top of everyone's list of trends that will directly affect our profession. Unfortunately, we tend to translate this into a fear that we will be unemployable if we don't know how to use the latest online authoring tool. The real point is that information technology is changing the shape and fundamental nature of business around the world. Regardless of their size, successful businesses will operate globally and have the flexibility of small companies. Information technology makes this fluidity possible. Because of information technology, businesses can and will set up shop anywhere in the world an opportunity exists. And they will use local talent whenever possible. Information and business success As mentioned earlier, the current mantra in business circles is that information is and will continue to be the source of competitive advantage. But I believe that business success ultimately lies beyond information. The key challenge for businesses is transforming data and information into knowledge. Critical success factors for businesses will be: Bundling knowledge with products so customers gain competitive advantage and are more profitable Using knowledge to make better, faster, lower-cost decisions Managing knowledge for competitive business advantage Opportunities and challenges Businesses will need professionals who are skilled in transforming information into knowledge and managing knowledge for competitive advantage. One inherent and, to us, especially significant characteristic of knowledge is usefulness and usability; indeed, testing and ensuring usability is a fundamental element in the transformation of data and information into knowledge. Designing, performing, and analyzing the results of usability tests are part of the skill set of many of us in the information development business. We apply the results of usability research, if not those of actual usability tests, to our work every day. If anyone is in a position to help businesses gain competitive advantage through knowledge, we are. Businesses will have great value for employees who can quickly analyze and respond to a variety of strategic and tactical information needs. They will have less value for employees they perceive as being involved in purely tactical activities, including what we now define as technical communication. Anything regarded as tactical will be a potential target for the cost-cutting knife. Communications as a sole core competency area for employees will decline. The use and development of information will become a critical task for people from all functional areas within the organization. The career-resilient employee will be an excellent communicator. What do we need to do? To prepare for success in a world where knowledge is the source of competitive business advantage, we must: Understand how business works--especially how decision-makers make strategic business decisions. If we're serious about helping our business partners use knowledge to gain competitive advantage, we need to be engaged at the strategic level with business leaders. To get there, we need to speak their language and understand their critical success factors. Get ahead and stay ahead of the information technology curve--with an emphasis on understanding how to apply appropriate technologies when devising solutions to information needs. I use technology in the broad sense of the word to include not only physical tools but also the processes and methodologies we use to analyze, extract, create, package, and deliver information and knowledge. Such mastery of technology will be key to our ability to create targeted, on-the-fly solutions to highly situational information needs. Expand our mental model beyond that of the printed page. When tackling information challenges, we must learn to think like video producers, architects, dancers, and others who are primarily nonverbal communicators. I'm not suggesting we abandon the page as a metaphor; the page's familiarity and near universality will continue to make it a reliable, effective information delivery vehicle for the foreseeable future. But we need to extend or augment the page through other metaphors that allow us to design and develop richer, more robust information and knowledge products. Develop a different image--of ourselves, our profession, and how we contribute to business success. I believe that this is the most important of all the things we must do. Many of us have worked for years to define what technical communication is and establish it as a recognized profession. By doing this, we have carved out a niche in the large field of communication and more or less successfully differentiated what we do from other communication specialties. In my experience, these distinctions are largely lost on the decision makers in the businesses we work with. In the few instances where a business leader does have an image of technical communication, it's often not a compelling one. And we ourselves are largely to blame for this image. We've chosen to package ourselves as technical communicators, "the bridge between those who create ideas and those who use them." This definition, taken from the STC Code for Communicators, is a succinct, accurate description of the role we've traditionally played in the information industry, and it seems an honorable and reasonable proposition. But, as one of our STC colleagues has observed, bridges get walked on. We have created for ourselves a role that is viewed by many business leaders as tactical, of questionable value, and ultimately not essential to business success. To be perceived differently by decision-makers in businesses, we must first learn to perceive ourselves differently. We must learn to think of ourselves in context of the value that we add to the offerings of our business partners. We must learn to sell that value, not the products and services in which the value is embodied. To understand the value we should be selling, we need to look no further than the trend I mentioned earlier--that of information and knowledge becoming the ultimate source of competitive business advantage. Every business leader worth his or her subscription to the Harvard Business Review knows how critical information and knowledge are to business success. But few of them have any idea how to create usable, useful information and capture and manage knowledge. That's our job! We create value through the competencies and skills we bring to the process of creating information and transforming it into knowledge. It's not about technical communication; it's about (and we're about) information and knowledge.

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Last updated: November 8, 1996 (rst)