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Mark Baker summarized several interesting points about the future,
including:
People will cease to own a development project from
beginning to end. Technical communication departments will be staffed by
specialists in a number of different areas who will attend and manage a
central information repository.
In my opinion, this viewpoint probably represents a future, but not the
whole future. Case in point: the STC Special Interest Group for Lone Writers
currently has 904 members. Each of these individuals is the entire technical
communication department for an organization and, I am sure, owns several
projects from beginning to end.
As long as technology companies staff their technical communication
departments last and lean, this state will hold true for a significant
number of technical communicators.
