Some industry sectors, such as finance, often require strict adherence to specific policies and procedures. Compliance departments have to ensure these are kept up to date and accessible, from both a legal and industry perspective. The problem is that governance can be expensive, really expensive. Unfortunately, the volume of written content continues to explode, and… Read more »
Category: Technical Author
When will the Technical Author become the Customer Engagement Manager?
Rahal Baillie posted on Twitter a link to an article which, in passing, made reference to “Customer Engagement Management“. Julie Hunt described it as: The activity of monitoring of brand and customer conversations on corporate websites, as well as bi-directional communication extensions to external social sites. In essence, it’s about creating and managing content that… Read more »
The infinitely reusable document
Alongside Education and Publishing, Design is a profession from whom Technical Communicators can learn a great deal. The BBC TV series, The Genius of Design, looked at new trends towards green, “cradle to cradle”, design, where components in objects are designed to be capable of being stripped down and reused infinitely. I’ve never head anyone… Read more »
Writing technical documentation in 2010 and beyond
If new technologies are creating new social behaviours in people, do those writing technical documentation need to adapt to these changes? Linda Stone, who coined the phrase “continous partial attention“, argues users have, over time, changed the way they use technology. They’ve moved from an era of creating, to an era of connecting and then onto one of… Read more »
“Digital Natives” and the end of traditional hotline support
Are we seeing a new generation growing up who are shying away from telephone-based support in favour of text-based support? This is one conclusion we can draw from a New York Times article last week on teenagers (whom it called “Digital Natives”) and technology. It reported on research from the Pew Research Center that indicated: Children… Read more »