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RE: Concepts (was Technical Writing Tests)

Subject: RE: Concepts (was Technical Writing Tests)
From: GeneK <gene -at- genek -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2003 16:55:51 -0800


I would agree completely with this, and it was certainly not my intention to
argue that the way things are is the way they ought to be. The reality of life
as an information developer is that I am often arguing in favor of a more
comprehensive document set than my employer is willing to pay for, and
I can look back on my past positions and see more than a few instances of
employers who crashed and burned after I left them because they were buried
under the weight of providing live product support to answer "RTFM" questions
that users had no choice but to call in to ask after some beancounter decided
to save $5000 on a $200,000 system by cutting back on the "FMs." In fact, I
often cite some of these companies as examples of what can happen if
comprehensive user info is not provided, if not in the manual then at least on
a CD somewhere. The bottom line is, it s***ks when your marching orders are
to do what you consider to be a shoddy job, but until we technical writers
manage to take over the world...

Gene Kim-Eng



At 11:01 AM 2/18/2003 -0700, Jennifer Rondeau wrote:

Whether workforces are dumbed down and workloads increased or not (and
it's certainly my perception that they have been), if workers don't
understand the larger picture of what they're working with in (for
instance) a complex CRM or ERP system, the system will (at least
eventually) routinely fail everyone who tries to use it. If you don't
learn how what you do with such a system affects everyone else who uses it
for different tasks from yours (the conceptual level), you'll never carry
out your own tasks with the degree of care and understanding necessary to
make the whole system work consistently (I'm not even talking about
working well). And the same thing is, of course, true of other complex
systems as well, including but not limited to computer software.



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