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The Looming Crisis of Content

Significant change, especially in organizations, doesn’t happen because someone wakes up one day and suddenly decides to do things differently. Change comes as the result of a crisis that underscores a problem so dramatically and forcefully that it can no longer be ignored. Since the technology bubble burst half a decade ago (and probably even before that), such a crisis has been looming in the way we conceive of, create, and deliver content. Most notions about content are still rooted in old paradigms, but signs have increasingly pointed to significant shifts to come.

SIGNS OF A CRISIS
• Cost-cutting
Anyone who’s been in technical writing for more than a few years has been witness (victim?) to some dramatic cost-cutting measures. Remember technical editors? Gone. A vice president at one of the largest companies in the world once told me that he asked content development teams in one of his divisions why they no longer had editors. The doc manager told him, “Because no one knew what they did.” Then there’s the desktop publishing department. Page layout came in-house with much fanfare in the 1980s. Over the following decade it devolved to fewer and fewer “specialists” until nowadays writers are simply expected to integrate the function in their everyday work. Technology changes like XML may even make format and layout considerations completely obsolete. These cuts intensify the focus on writing and meaning, rather than process and delivery.
• Offshoring
At the risk of stating the obvious, content is created by people. Since the tech bubble burst, many companies suddenly seem to have become aware of this fact. When cost-cutting measures failed to reduce content costs enough, companies went searching globally for solutions. And they found them in places like Bangalore and Mumbai, where technical writers are 50-80% cheaper. Global technology infrastructure has made the whole process of offshoring easy and affordable, too. But, U.S.-based tech writers lament, what about quality? Given the non-stop wave of offshoring, it seems that cost savings still outweigh any perceived “quality” concessions companies may have had to make. Did quality become unimportant all of a sudden? No (at least no more than it ever was), but the perception appears to be that the quality from offshore labor is roughly equivalent to that of their erstwhile onshore counterparts. That’s a bitter pill for tech writers to swallow and may indicate a trend to commoditize the way content is currently produced.
• Productivity pressure
Technical writers have come under increasing pressure to produce more content with fewer resources in less time. Writing teams have been reduced across the board and those that are left are expected to take up the slack. Most departments now have to make do with half the staff they once had. Full-time tech writing positions have become scarcer, too, with contract work the norm now, not the exception. This puts the emphasis on production, because the only way to get things done with fewer resources is to be more efficient. And efficiency invariably means technology, which has been allowed to define the content development process more. The result is a loss of focus on the value of content to the end-user.
• Localization price pressure
For years now, translation and localization have been under tremendous, increasing price pressure. Per-word pricing for most commercial language work has dropped by one-half or more. Costs for content-related services (like desktop publishing) have experienced similar pressures. Technology has facilitated this trend (and made it more palatable to service providers), but anyone who sells language services for a living will tell you that lower localization costs are still a top priority among customers. Why does this point to a looming crisis of content? Because as efficiencies and cost savings in localization (the back of end of the content cycle) are exhausted, companies are hunting further and further upstream for optimization opportunities. It is finally becoming obvious that the solution to content quality, cost, and time problems will be found in the content itself. (Those who have begun addressing this problem already know that it’s much, much more difficult than squeezing costs out of localization.)
• Volume creep
In the old

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