Endangered Technical Writer

Santosh Khadka

Endangered Technical Writer

Among other things, essays on the special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly on content management discuss the merits and limits of content management as a system. On the one hand, “Content management provides a process of answering for questions by encouraging you to categorize and organize information for future retrieval and development. Grounded on a vision of the user experience, content management focuses not only in keeping track of information assets and making them accessible to users, it also focuses on finding new ways to deliver information to customers, employees, and business partners who need it” (JoAnn Hackos qtd in Clark 38). On the other CMS also has serious limits and problems. “One common problem facing content management systems is the disproportionate ratio between cost and effectiveness….a large percentage of such systems fail to yield the kind of effectiveness that is even remotely acceptable by industry standards. As Stephen Jeffrey-Poulter (2003) has claimed, CMS implementations have rarely successful (p. 159)” (Pullman &Gu 2). The contributors seem to imply that given the current situation of CMS, problems outweigh the merits.
Another even more shocking fact that the contributors highlight is that “technical communicators, are “often the worst served by a new content management system” (Robertson, 2002)” (Pullman & Gu 3). Since content management is a big investment, usually the entrepreneurs and managers make decisions about CMS for their enterprises which put technical writers in a precarious position. They therefore are in a do-or-die battle now as Anderseen states:
Technical communicators, whose work is situated the intersection of technology and people, will experience profound changes and thus must be prepared to either help steer the future of the development and implementation of ECM solutions or be forced to work within the confines of these systems and their enterprise-wide content and metadata models that fail to address the unique needs of rhetorical work” (68).
Therefore it is imperative that technical writers should either carve out space for themselves in the changed workplace scenario or they will become irrelevant forever. Not to wonder that software engineers and programmers have already endangered their positions. That is the reason why technical writers should find ways to combat the threats including CM to their survival. I just wonder what could those ways be. This leads me to consider the pedagogical Question: How can we prepare our students to deal with content management in the workplace, a world apart from the academia? “What does all this discussion about content management issues mean, then, for our curriculum design?” (Pullman & Gu 7).