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.