Lines from Leaders

Challenge, Change, and Trend

By Beau Cain, Region 8 Director-Sponsor

In order to be nominated as a candidate for the office of Region 8 Director-Sponsor, I answered several questions designed to help the nominating committee members choose candidates for the office. One question in particular seemed to guide my strategy for the 3-year term the office requires. The question asked, “What important trend, change, or challenge have you seen evolve during the past two years in the field of technical communication?”

My answer incorporates all three of the conditions: challenge, change, and trend.

The Challenge

The greatest challenge I’ve seen develop in the past 2 years is our growing need to demonstrate the value of our work to our employers and to our clients. Managers are vitally concerned with profitability in our struggling economy, and we serve our interests best when we demonstrate to management how our efforts produce profits.

I’ve benefited from many educational presentations from my colleagues during my 12-plus years of STC membership, but it seems that the members of the international and local Consultants and Independent Contractors SIGs have offered the most information about managing expectations, resources, income, and expenses for profitable results. That’s understandable, since each of these professionals is, in effect, a business, and they won’t succeed if their efforts don’t produce more income than expenses.

Perhaps if more technical communication professionals who work in a hired position (or who aspire to work in a hired position) regard themselves as businesses, with income and expenses and deliverables to juggle, we might all have better knowledge about how to demonstrate our value to our employers. How many of us can show our employers the numbers that prove we’re worth what we’re paid?

The Change

The greatest change I’ve seen develop in the past two years is our members’ response to this challenge. Society, chapter, and SIG presentations increasingly reveal how to demonstrate value, and how to apply metrics to all that we do professionally.

I was pleased to see several sessions devoted to metrics at the recent Society conferences in Nashville and Dallas. Leaders in our profession demonstrated the business aspects of satisfying their clients’ documentation needs. I’ve noticed that the six Northern California chapters share job hunting and networking SIGs, and that members of each of those groups actively seek to know how to add quantifiable results to their résumés along with descriptions of activities and the quality of their work.

The Trend

The trend is to become increasingly aware of the profitability of our work. Simply stated, it’s necessary for us to help management see how our efforts enhance profitability.

This is important when predicting the future effects of offshore outsourcing, too. For decades, the high-tech culture we promoted in the U.S. fostered situations wherein we didn't have to work in the office every day in order to work for a company every day. We in the U.S. reasonably insisted on telecommuting, and most of us shortsightedly wouldn't imagine that by doing so, we promoted the development of the technology and processes that would eventually allow employees and contractors to telecommute between offices in the United States and remote sites such as Bangalore, India, or Bucharest, Romania.

But we insisted on it, we enabled it, and now we have it, with its unavoidable ramifications of global markets and global competition.

Along with that global competition comes opportunities and even obligations to demonstrate to our managers how our efforts match or beat our competitors efforts, regardless of where our competitors are. For my Stateside constituents, if you already know how much it costs for your company to employ you and to produce your documentation, there’s a worksheet to help you compare the cost of your productivity to the cost of your Indian competitors’ productivity.

http://www.cio.com/archive/090103/money.html
(Read the article, and find the interactive spreadsheet at the bottom of the page.)
Source: CIO Magazine, September 1, 2003

I wonder how long it will be before someone devises a spreadsheet that allows companies to quickly determine which country currently offers the best prospects for rapid, large, and continuing return on investment (ROI).

For the remainder of my term in office as Director of STC’s Region 8, I will encourage all STC communities to apply cost-effective determinations to all their activities. Being a nonprofit organization doesn’t mean that we don’t need to balance our chapters’ demanding expenses against their strained incomes. All good things are enabled, in some way, through revenue, a maxim voiced by Region 6 Director Jim Romano at our Board meeting in Montreal.

We may be seeing the long-delayed maturing of our craft through the increasingly pervasive necessity of cost-justifying our existence to our employers and clients. I will foster this trend by encouraging members and communities to learn and to teach how to determine and demonstrate the value of high-quality, highly usable documentation and communication.

Thanks!

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