Re: Tool knowledge versus Task knowledge

[Smokey Lynne L Bare <slbare -at- JUNO -dot- COM>]

You go guy!  I could not agree with you more.  With the complexity of
companies' business cases for buying specific tools (and usually not the
ones which help TWs do their jobs better), studies show these tools'
learning curves have jumped off the boards.  Over the past 5 years I have
come into companies as an information architect to design the publishing
architecture and information process strategies.  In that time, more than
70% of the firms have done 180-degree turnaround on the publishing tools
they invested in at the beginning.

More often than not, one can find regional offices running pub shops that
do not have the same tool as their corporate division.  The un-common
system, as we used to refer to it in the banking industry, drove IT
planners nuts let alone what the tech pubs people had to deal with in
trying to merge 'common' material together.

With the diversity in the platform environments, no matter how hard one
would try to use a specific tool, some bus. analyst would come along and
change the suite of products without ever consulting the tech pubs side
of the house.  You know how that goes....the price bidding war....

I was involved with an informal study several years ago involving skill
set/productivity ratios. From the study's outcome, (due to the large
volume of tech production keystrokers I used for a pubs cycle) we made
arrangements to have a national temp agency create a special tech.
support group to meet our cyclic needs.  This was one of the best
decisions I ever made in my limited career.  The time that it would take
those of us in the project management side to learn all the details of
typesetting and high-end DTP, we could have produced almost 1 and 1/2
times our normal workload.

It was like the weather in our state, wait a few months and it will
change again.  It isn't so much on the TW and TC side that we could not
learn the tools, it was that we had too many other issues to oversee.  We
found the best model was having a solid, underlying tool support base
that allowed us to write and design.  It was more cost-effective to have
a tech. temp come in and keystroke manuals, which let us write vs
fighting with trying to get the footer to left align correctly without
changing on every page.  With this business case, we doubled the size of
the tech pubs group, which in turn up the road opened the door for some
telecommunting.  The national temp agency has taken its prototype we
started here and now is spreading the concept nationally.

But.....keep in mind.....this works for big companies....and if applied
right, can work for small companies as well.  This has led to paying a
higher hourly to the writers as they aren't tied up keystroking, for the
savings comes in using the temps at a much lower rate.  There is a vast
cost savings.  My 'numbers' counterpart keystroked the spreadsheets that
proved our theory.....I just did the words for the report....   :-)

Smokey


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