I read an interesting article the other day via TheContentWrangler, which discussed managerial use of (or lack there of) performance metrics in evaluating writers. The article stated that most technical communications managers have a background in English or journalism and find writing skill and experience to be the most valuable skill set.

Seeing that I have a background in English, I’m curious what metrics can be used to evaluate writing performance. I’ve seen folks in the consulting world use metrics to log “state changes” throughout the day to determine how much “mental firing” they’re putting into their work. As it turns out, most people tend to write, from scratch, for about 15 minutes at a time. There’s also a much quoted statistic that it takes a writer about four hours to write one page of documentation. What other metrics can be used? The amount of documentation produced in a given period of time?

The full article for this topic can be found at < Most Managers Don't Use Metrics As Performance Measure

So I just attended an event at the Pittsburgh Technology Council on Portals, Wikis, Blogs, and other new media technologies. When I arrived, I expected the presenter, Ian Rudy of Plus Consulting, to discuss these topics from a generalist perspective. As the presentation unfolded, however, I soon realized that the event was focused on how each of these new media technologies have been integrated into Microsoft SharePoint 2007.

The presenter touched on a point that interested me: Microsoft integrated a content management system into the 2007 edition of SharePoint. The question on my minds was: what advantage does SharePoint offer over pure content management systems in the traditional sense.

Rudy also touched on how wikis and blogs can be used in enterprises to capture knowledge. A blog, for example, can be used for information that doesn’t quite fit into more formal structures: notes from web conferences, seminars, favorite links someone may come across, etc. Wikis can be used more for dynamic documentation to form a collective knowledge base. IT professionals can use a wiki to update content for new software releases, allowing for minor changes to be quickly integrated.

At any rate, I found the event to be very informative.

I recently read Ann Rockley’s book, Managing Enterprise Content, and had to pause on the section titled “Collaborative Authoring.” In some more traditional authoring environments, writers are asked to take ownership of specific content areas within an organization. Often times this leads to a kind of territorialism among individual authors and creates a siloing in the content creation process. Moving into a unified content strategy with a specific focus on content management and structured authoring only compounds the issue.

Within the technical writing profession thre often exists two very distinct personality types: those that are very integrative and those that are very detail oriented. Rockley writes:

"In a unified content environment, the concept of ownership becomes irrelevant. Instead of the usual cooperative approach to writing that many groups use, a unified content strategy requires true collaboration, which means working together so thoroughly that you no longer own any part, any chapter, any sentence, any procedure. In this way, authors truly become information architects, with more and more emphasis on the analysis and design that drive the content.

What does this mean in the workplace? It means that authors may need new skills, such as information analysis, design, modeling, structured writing, and conflict management to help them in the transition from independent to collaborative work."

I’m curious to know how the more detail oriented technical writers, with years of experience under their belt, adapt to the transition of a structured authoring environment. Many such writers are used to writing in a very linear fashion, a concept that is shattered when writing on an “elemental” level.