Expect to be Writing and Diagramming on Tablets

Posted on January 26, 2012
Filed Under Business, Communication, Technology, The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

Apple’s education event in New York City this month had striking implications, not only for high school and college students and their teachers, but for technical writers as well. That’s how we see it anyway.

Written and graphic communication and learning, it’s clear, are going to become increasingly tablet-based, especially iPad-based. To glean the possibilities, we invite you to watch the video on iPad learning that Apple has posted on its website. You’ll be wowed by the fluidity and currency that can be added to texts and illustrations by formatting them as idocuments. (You’ll need to use Apple’s Safari browser, though, it’s the only one the presentation plays on.)

Not only will you be impressed; over time your clients and colleagues will be expecting you to present the same clarity and timeliness in your tech documents and presentations. We’ll bet on that. Why? Because fluidity is much more inclusive and engaging in the insights and understanding it promotes. And learning at its best is a fluid and engaging process. (We’ll always remember the college professor who took us down the road with a column of knights festooned in the banners and bunting of their duchies.)

iPads are only in their early versions. But they’ve already become widely adopted in enterprises, including both corporations and the U.S. armed forces. If soldiers are being sent into the field with iPads in their packs, why won’t technical writers be expected to arrive at factories and power plants with them in their briefcases? (Our colleague, Dennis Owen, noted the inevitabilty of iPads as procedure carriers in a note at the end of our last post.)

iPads are becoming mini computers. There’s a keyboard stand available for them now, though their built-in on-screen keyboard isn’t hard to use. This post isn’t meant as a commercial for Apple, just as a presentation of some thoughts the company’s education event and our own experiences with an iPad thus far have prompted.

The challenges for technical writers are clear. You’ll need to learn the software techniques for animating drawings and diagrams – but that just means following other drawings and diagrams, your speciality. More importantly, you’ll need to think a bit differently, as a lecturer and curator rather than as “simply” a writer. – Doug Bedell

People at Work on Challenging Tasks, For Free

Posted on December 30, 2011
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How many people does it take to get a job done smartly and efficiently? Well, that depends on the job, the method applied to doing it and what’s available as an affordable level of pay or other compensation.

But suppose you have a truly massive job, like digitalizing all the world’s books. And your computers can’t recognize all the words on older, faded pages? There’s not enough affordable people power available for doing an epic piecework job like that, are there?
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Healthcare Costs Getting a Technology Monitor

Posted on December 1, 2011
Filed Under Business, Technology | 1 Comment

Now there’s even an Occupy Healthcare, for a good reason actually. U.S. health care costs have been in an unaccountable mire. That becomes increasingly evident, among other ways, as employers raise employee-paid deductibles on their health insurance plans, or shuck off coverage that’s been part of retirement packages. More and more people are getting hit with unexpected health care bills, and they’re upset.

So why can’t we even tell what the mean for health care pricing is in a given area? Good question, and it’s one that technology can help with, when it’s permitted to. MIT’s Technology Review has an article on Castlight Health in San Francisco, under an appropriate title, “Exposing the Cost of Health Care.” As its name suggests, Castlight (founded in 2008) is attempting to “cast light on the actual costs of medical care, so that people can make informed decisions.” Imagine that. Where else in the economy does consumer ignorance have such a presence, or is even permitted to exist?
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Nuclear Plant Vendors Adopt a ‘Code’ of Their Own

Posted on September 22, 2011
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The producers (vendors) of the world’s nuclear power plants have adopted a set of “Principles of Conduct” that’s really a code of conduct, but “code” doesn’t translate appropriately in all the world’s languages. The most salient aspects of the Principles are that the drafting process started in 2008, well before this year’s earthquake-triggered disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant, and that they are appropriate and welcome.

It’s not that the nuclear power industry lacks regulations, procedures and earnestly adopted resolves. But it’s a complex industry with many participants. Anything that brings them all together around their own versions of, not simply high-minded, but also practical, commitments on behalf of safety deserves applause.
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Writing Engaging Employee Handbooks

Posted on September 1, 2011
Filed Under Business, Technology, The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

Ever been asked to write an employee handbook? That’s a special challenge because you’re writing on behalf of an organization for the people whose enthusiasm, support and creativity are vital to its success. They don’t cotton to legalese or strictures. An effective handbook needs to be more than simply a recitation of rules.  We’re talking, in effect, about technical writing with a human face.

In this context, we’ve come across a website – klariti.com – with a page on “How to Make Employee Handbooks More Human.” It’s selling an employee handbook template, but it’s modestly priced ($9.99) and might be good to have on hand. Beyond that, though, Ivan Walsh, the writer, has some pertinent tips for putting an engaging handbook together.
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Daily Bearings In a Pressurized Economy

Posted on July 15, 2011
Filed Under Business | Leave a Comment

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has today’s job market pegged as he writes about “The Start-Up of You.” Something a lot of people, political leaders included, don’t seem to realize is that brainpower is powering today’s economic scene in more challenging ways than even. If you can’t envision new ways of doing things using the latest technology, you’re likely to lose out.

This writer discovered something like this two years ago after coming upon what became a course-changing client on Twitter.

Friedman cites the multi-billion dollar valuations of Silicon Valley companies like Facebook (nearly $100 billion), Twitter and Linked In ($8 billion each) and Groupon ($30 billion).

“These are the fastest-growing Internet/social networking companies in the world,” he notes, “and here’s what’s scary: You could easily fit all their employees together into the 20,000 seats in Madison Square Garden, and still have room for grandma. They just don’t employ a lot of people, relative to their valuations, and while they’re all hiring today, they are largely looking for talented engineers.”
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Crisis Lessons That Go Unlearned

Posted on June 8, 2011
Filed Under Business, Government, Technology | Leave a Comment

Michael Coston has eclectic interests, so on his Avian Flu Diary he writes about the continuing mishandling of the communication aspects of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant accident. “When, oh when, will they ever learn?” one is prompted to ask. The question seems to hold both for the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the plant’s operator, and Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA).

The earthquake-initiated accident was much worse than first reported, with three of the six reactors on the Fukushima Daiichi site experiencing meltdowns, and two of them possibly being melt throughs, with nuclear fuel actually “melted through the walls or floors of (the) reactor vessel.”

Yet the accident’s severity “was held at a 5 for a full month (the same as Three Mile Island), before being raised to a Chernobyl-comparable level 7 on April 11th,” Coston notes.
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Keeping Statistics Simple, Yet Profound

Posted on May 12, 2011
Filed Under Business, Government | Leave a Comment

Knowing what we’re doing requires ready, reliable observational methods – preferably, a method. The best method we know (though we wouldn’t claim to be expert in it) is statistical process control (SPC) based on principles espoused by the late Dr. W. Edwards Deming and the work and writings of Deming disciples like Donald J. Wheeler.

Dr. Deming was a godlike statistician who had a profound understanding of his discipline, so profound that he expressed it simply, and really caught your attention (if only on videotapes) with questions like: “What do you want to accomplish?,” “By what method will you accomplish it?” and “How will you know?”

Donald Wheeler had the good fortune of meeting Dr. Deming in 1972, working with him thereafter and writing or editing materials about him. He and his wife, Fran, founded SPC Press in 1986, which published Deming’s biography, The World of W. Edwards Deming, by his long-time secretary, Cecelia S. Kilian, in 1992. (Dr. Deming’s own “bible,” Out of the Crisis, was published by MIT a decade or so earlier.)

We noted that Don Wheeler is to receive the 2010 Deming Medal from the American Society for Quality (ASQ) in Pittsburgh this weekend, and felt it appropriate to note Dirk Dusharme’s May 4 interview with him at Quality Digest.
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Siemens Renewed Via Vision and Values

Posted on May 1, 2011
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Businessweek provides an example of why focus and inspired priorities are so important to building, or rebuilding, a business. Siemens’ return to prominence after a bribery scandal more than three years ago is a tribute to its new President and CEO, Peter Löscher, who, the magazine advises, put first things first and is keeping them there.

Vision, values and the processes to insure they are taken seriously are crucial to corporate renewal. “Being good today means you have to be better tomorrow, and even better the day after tomorrow,” Löscher says. “The biggest risk is complacency.”

Evidently, complacency almost brought Siemens down. The company was run as a collection of corporate fiefdoms with little accountability (values) by divisional managers. Now, under a new management roster, it’s been restructured partly around “green” businesses (vision) .

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A Crisis – No Time for Stoicism

Posted on April 22, 2011
Filed Under Business, Technology | Leave a Comment

Our colleague Doug Bedell has another post on the communications aspects of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant crisis.

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