Notes from 46th International STC Conference
Cincinnati, Ohio, May 16-19, 1999

Twenty-Three New Ideas from the 46th Annual STC Conference

W.C. Wiese
Lockheed Martin Corporation
Missiles and Fire Control, Orlando, FL

Description: W.C. Wiese developed a clever and effective format for sharing professional enrichment gained at the international STC conference with his colleagues back at Electronics & Missile -- a "waterfall" of 23 juicy tidbits distributed by e-mail every day or two in the weeks following the conference. Here, with W.C.'s kind permission, are those tidbits.

Overview: The 46th annual conference of the Society for Technical Communication was held May 16-19 in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was of special importance to E&M attendees because they are part of the host chapter for the Year 2000 conference to be held here next year. During the Awards Banquet on Tuesday evening, STC Senior Member Dan Voss was honored for his work in ethics and education by being named an Associate Fellow of the Society.

A CD copy of the Proceedings is available with WC.

During the course of the conference, Dan and I were pleased to have individual conversations with 7 previous presidents of the Society, including Austin Brown, Bill Leavitt, David Armbruster, Annette Reilly, Elizabeth Babcock, Donna Saxon, and Lance Gelein. Tampa resident Mark Hanigan, currently First Vice President, will become the Society's President next year. Current STC membership exceeds 21,000 internationally, and growth is continuing, particularly in Europe. Forty-eight communicators from Nokia in Finland were in attendance, and the new Trans-Alpine Chapter in Southeast Europe was also well represented.

Twenty-three Tasty Tidbits from the River of Communication

1. Eclipsys Corporation in Atlanta, Georgia, a medical services company, has begun to use United Parcel Service's news service for secure electronic delivery of proposals to Australia and other countries. They also use Intravation software for proposal management functions with distributed (virtual) proposal teams. The software cost them $16,000 to acquire for 50 seat licenses. It exports to html format. Details on the Web at the Intravation site.
2. STC Exemplar Virginia Book reminded communicators in the opening session to retain a sense of humor. She said: "Change is mandatory, stress is manageable, misery is optional."
3. Past President of STC Saul Carliner has just joined the faculty of Bentley College in Boston, continuing a career that has included a professorship at the University of Minnesota, a stint at IBM, and work as a consulting information architect. He presented a session filled with reminders that we do our best work at the macro-level. Focus on editing to get performance improvements in product users and users who need your information. Provide solutions and anticipate oversensitivities such as race, gender, and extra cost (is your Help line toll-free?). Speed communication through the brain by predigesting and boiling down information. Use a visual vocabulary and match user expectations (don't expect table service at McDonalds).
4. Carliner focuses on document and information design from a performance perspective. Document design: Can users find things? Information design: Can users understand the information? Use training concepts to define your goals for a user. What are the main tasks, options; what are your company's objectives? For insights into current studies in performance improvement, visit Carliner's Web site.
5. Carliner recommends that communicators adopt a customer service model. Give your customers fact sheets that discuss design choices, media choices, and issues in creating a Web site, for example. Find out the customer's needs, offer alternatives, clarify his/her expectations, explain your process, deliver a prototype, and involve them in the project at all steps. Customers that have this kind of access feel better about what you're doing.
6. Indexing is evolving as a specialty within STC. Several sessions were presented, and networking luncheons had separate tables for indexers. (There were only 7 members at the proposal networking table...)
7. Trends in Technical Communication. 86 percent of communicators are still producing print media. But all must be willing to work online. PDF has been adopted as a print standard by service bureaus. For the future, communicators continue to need life-long learning skills. You need to know FrameMaker and RoboHelp. You need to know HTML, and you need to know what XML is. You must be able to successfully convert FrameMaker to HTML in hours. In California, you must be able to write C or Java to be able to bond with the software engineering team, many of whom are not native English speakers.
8. Finland's Nokia focused on communication products of the future. Our world will be filled with products that listen to you and talk back. Cellular phones will add Swiss Army Knife features: video and data transmission, video conferencing, Internet access, opening garage doors, credit card transactions, transferring your medical records. We will live in "smart homes" in which your washing machine will send e-mail to the repair shop when it malfunctions. Your computer printer will no longer need a wire. By 2020, computers will be as smart as humans, meaning they will adapt to their users and update information dynamically (learn) to stay current.
9. Today's college student created a personal Web page in 7th grade. Instructors are challenged. Think of universities as 175-year-old companies challenged by the demands of older students (who aren't as timid as 18-year-olds). Half the student body attends evenings or off-campus, or are distance-learners for whom PowerPoint files and video streams must be built. Instructors must do more, without an increase in resources.
10. Honored as an Honorary Fellow of the Society, Timothy Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1986 as a tool for scientific collaboration around the world. He didn't see it as a personal information system (all those bookmarks). He wanted a documentation system that was flexible and independent of proprietary tools. SGML had already evolved as a standard, but the CERN research laboratory used very few DTDs--the result was HTML. Where can the Web go now? Berners-Lee thinks the Web and its system of URLs isn't very intuitive and wants a Web that captures the creative moment. When your mother can almost instantly see a picture you've taken of your children, the Web will do that.
11. Also honored as an Honorary Fellow of the Society, Charles Goldfarb invented GML, the model for SGML, in 1974. SGML was adopted as an international standard in 1986. He was first a lawyer, and later joined IBM to work on a law office information system. He discovered lawyers had too many data formats to consolidate. He based his implementation of computerized documentation on Bibles and newspapers, and only then considered the computer. Mission-critical applications depend on SGML: Defense, patents, nuclear manuals, aircraft maintenance documentation are all stored in SGML. SGML also made it economic to publish to the deaf and blind.
12. What a relief! XML is merely a subset of SGML, although it's been built up by software publishers to confuse the issue. SGML tags provide extra meaning through tag definitions, and style sheets provide more control over rendering displays. Rather than issue paychecks using a word processor, XML-based templates will create checks and feed account data. Goldfarb sees XML replacing both PDF and HTML files on the Web. We will be able to query data, not just sites in Web searches. Level 5 browsers will have this capability.
13. Goldfarb states the growth of the Web is unparalleled in human existence. The new danger is that we will expect to save knowledge in a system with the lifespan of a butterfly. He insists SGML, an ISO standard, is the key to protecting our knowledge base.
14. Increasingly, Web addresses are displayed on all briefing materials. It's a nice way to invite your customer back. During the conference, most presenters took advantage of this easy way to advertise. No doubt many are consultants looking for exposure. But since E&M markets worldwide, our leave-behind files and vugraphs ought to include appropriate Web addresses to facilitate further contact.
15. Part of the fun was a Taiwanese presenter who digressed long enough to explain color significance in the Chinese culture. He was talking about web sites and assured us that you need to be cautious with color only in context: you can still use white (the color for mourning and death) as long as it doesn't include suits and flowers. He told us not to make the mistake John Deere did, however. At a trade show, the marketers passed out green hats, but nobody put one on. You see, in China, a green hat identifies an adulterer!
16. To address a problem with late proposal involvement and lack of control over the proposal process at Johns Hopkins University, W.C. Wiese provided his published paper on power storyboards. Most of the proposals prepared there relate to mission payloads for medical experiments onboard future Space Shuttle flights.
17. FrameMaker was almost uniformly cited as the professional's choice for document development.
18. Former STC President JoAnn Hackos has begun to focus on organization structure and placement for communicators. Quality concepts are also being applied here. What process maturity is reflected by the publications organization? How are prospects hired? Who makes the final decision? What professional development is offered? What quality controls are in place? Is there a high level of technical integrity? What communication services are offered? Are project management and budgeting processes successful?
    
    
    
19. At Hackos' first workshop at Sun Microsystems, she introduced the writers to each other--they'd never met! They'd been hired by the engineering team and lacked their own department support structure. They had also been hired based on criteria reflecting engineering priorities other than writing. Many communicators like this relationship because they have autonomy in how they work, feel like part of the development team, and get to choose their own software tools.
20. The drawbacks of autonomy are that documentation costs are not visible to the company and there is no attention to the issues of professionalism. There is no training, no recognition for achievement, and no career path. Because there are no standards, there is no measure of document quality, no management strategy, and no consistent archiving or continuity of documentation. Customers begin to complain and the Help lines buzz.
21. By contrast, centralizing writers in a departmental structure uses specialization to lower costs, leverages information, defines quality, and prepares to use new media. A problem is that costs become visible for the first time. Also, development teams react to relocation of writers outside the development team. Suddenly, there are questions of support and technical accuracy.
22. Companies (primarily rapidly growing software firms) now typically change the organizational structure of their writing departments every 2 years, oscillating between functionally centralized and fully independent decentralized operations! This has a severe impact on writers. A few organizations are beginning to experiment with small centralized functional support and writers deployed to the development team. Department placement should be as high as possible, any place it fits well. Some publication teams are in Auditing! (It's interesting that E&M has used this model for over a decade!)
23. "Task-oriented documentation is not the solution anymore," asserts Dr. Hackos. "I believe we must stop writing documentation as we now know it, abandon the developers and their need to explain how everything works, and go to work for the users."