760: on pullman and gu

Of course I should have read the introduction to the special issue before diving into any of this week’s essays. I would at least have understood that the guest editors were creating an intentionally text-centric theme in which to consider CMSs and the common practices of technical communicators.

As with Whtimore, I find in the introduction a common hang up with CMSs: “Content management has a direct bearing on our field because a central issue in content management is the role (or a lack thereof) of technical communicators in the process of CMS design and implementation" (2). Maybe I’m just struck by the agency, relevance, and authority the authors are assigning to the technical communicator in the workplace. I realize my experiences are my own and limited to niche software development industries, but they aren't unique or exceptional experiences. I can honestly say that I’ve never worked with a technical writer, editor, or developer who saw themselves as THE SOLE content creators within their organizations.

The foundation of technical communication is cemented by collaboration, cooperation, and communication – synthesizing and shaping. As I understand tech comm, it has never been about the end product. I’ve always seen my efforts “as part of an endless flow of information” (2) – long before CMSs and similar systems began appearing. Have CMSs affected the way in which technical communicators think and practice? Absolutely. But involving technical communicators in the design and development of such systems will not make working in CMS-based environments any less problematic. The CMSs I’ve worked with and implemented were never intended to serve a single group of users –technical communicators. Rather, they were intended specifically to remove the reliance on "documentation specialists" and information gatekeepers – to allow other “symbolic-analytic” workers to perform the work traditionally assigned to technical communicators. If technical communicators are ill-served by CMSs, it is only because they are being de-valued by the machine.

The anger toward the CMS – the machine – is mis-directed and a little disingenuous. Is it necessary in the introduction to note that "CMS implementations have rarely been successful" and to provide financial statistics to support the claim? Trying to justify or argue certain positions using traditional ROI models has never worked for technical communicators. As our “value-add” historical narratives continually show, we have long wrestled with the difficulty of proving a return on investments in what we do and the information products we produce. Trying to make a similar move in a discussion about CMSs is just sloppy. What we need to do is move away from the tired old ROI arguments and explore more current fiduciary theories to IMPROVE our returns on investments in our practice and products. If we are going to treat what we do as business assets (as Pullman and Gu claim), we should find more creative and appropriate ways to consider how to reconcile our practices with all forms of asset capitalization, including the CMS.