By Joe Gollner | STC Member and Jack Molisani | STC Fellow
Two years ago, Sridhar Ramaswamy, a senior vice president at Google, wrote:
Consumer behavior has changed forever. Today’s battle for hearts, minds, and dollars is won (or lost) in micro-moments—intent-driven moments of decision-making and preference-shaping that occur throughout the entire consumer journey.
Micro-moments occur when people reflexively turn to a device—increasingly a smartphone—to act on a need to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something, or buy something. We want things right, and we want things right away.
The successful brands of tomorrow will be those that have a strategy for understanding and meeting consumers’ needs in these micro-moments.
(Source: www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/micro-moments/how-micromoments-are-changing-rules/)
Two years can be an eternity in the technology world. In addition to accessing content via mobile devices, we now have voice-activated devices, the Internet of Things, and a new wave of digital transformation. Welcome to the era of Content 4.0.
The question we want to explore is what will it mean to be a technical communicator working in this brave new world. Put another way, what is the human face of Content 4.0 if indeed it has one?
Progressive Stages of Content Evolution
Let’s start with some definitions. Content 4.0 loosely parallels Industry 4.0.
There are four stages in the evolution of manufacturing, starting with the industrial revolution in the late 18th century:
- Industry 1.0 Refers to the days when steam power and mechanization was first applied to large-scale manufacturing.
- Industry 2.0 Brings us to the early 20th century when electricity and the assembly line again revolutionized manufacturing.
- Industry 3.0 Refers to the introduction of systematic automation to the manufacturing process in the later 20th century.
- Industry 4.0 Highlights the most recent trends in advanced automation, where manufacturing devices communicate with other devices and dynamically reconfigure to optimize production.
When we talk about Content 4.0, we are applying these same four phases to how we prepare, manage, and deliver content.
- Content 1.0 Refers to the way that content has been prepared since the invention of the printing press—with no real distinction between the content and the medium on which it is delivered. At this level, “authors write books” you could say. The vast majority of content produced even today exists at this level.
- Content 2.0 Represents a major step forward, where content is created and managed separately from the way in which it is formatted and delivered. The practice publishes multiple information products from a single managed source.
- Content 3.0 Currently stands as the state-of-the-art practices of integrated content management, where content is digitally connected not only to its sources, but also to the workspace of subject matter experts (SMEs). In this way, content changes made by authors and SMEs are dynamically filtered and published to multiple information products.
- Content 4.0 Looks ahead to the next generation of communication practices where content “objects” are created and shared with partners and customers. Content objects (like objects in object-oriented programming languages) contain not only data but also instructions for what can be done with the data, such as rules for how the content can be accessed or formatted.
The recipients of these content objects (as opposed to the author) combine and then publish content objects, producing totally new and unforeseen micro-moment information experiences.
Content 4.0 is in fact every bit as futuristic and abstract as it sounds. But what will it be like to be a technical communicator working with Content 4.0?
Phases of Technical Communication Work
One can apply these same four phases to the field of technical communication as a whole:
- TechComm 1.0 Should be quite familiar. At this level, communicators perform the traditional role of preparing and publishing end-user documentation.
- TechComm 2.0 Is where many communicators find themselves today. They author content that is structured and modular so that multiple publication formats can be produced from a single source: print, ePub, webhelp, online knowledge bases, embedded assistance, and so on.
- TechComm 3.0 Is where the role of the technical communicator really starts to change. At this level, the communicator establishes and maintains digital, persistent, and fine-grained connections back to the original sources, including SME groups, for all information products so that changes flow dynamically. The communicator becomes a part of a team that designs, operates, and evolves an integrated content lifecycle.
- TechComm 4.0 Represents a future state where the technical communicator will be part of a virtual team of specialists that design, operate, and evolve complex content ecosystems. As part of a virtual team, these communicators will become responsible for creating content objects, both the content and the associated behavior. The downstream publisher of these content objects will frequently be automated processes run by a customer to provide micro-moment information experiences, such as a chatbot or voice-activated product answering questions.
A picture begins to emerge of what it will feel like to be a technical communicator working on Content 4.0. It will be a more technically demanding activity than it is now, even if the communicator may not always be coding the application behaviors along with the content itself. It should be expected that many technical communicators will take on more and more of this “technical” work and that organizations will be interested in communicators who can cover both the technical and communication sides of the task.
One can also predict that the work of communicators will become even more collaborative than it is today. No one will really be completely proficient in all of the specialties that must be called upon to create a fully functional content object. The specialties include domain knowledge, user task awareness, user analytics, data visualization, videography, animation, and illustration. And let’s not forget intelligent categorization for smart discovery, assembly, and rendition. So, communicators will always work as part of a team of specialists and, following the trends in the marketplace, these teams will almost always be virtual and distributed.
As with the trajectory that connects Industry 1.0 to Industry 4.0, and Content 1.0 to Content 4.0, we see a continuity that will connect technical communication at TechComm 1.0 to TechComm 4.0. It’s not like we have been beamed to another planet—communicators still need to communicate. And even multi-directional communication, reaching forward to users and backward to subject matter experts, is not entirely new. What is new is the sheer number of communication pathways and players that will be involved and the technical sophistication and precision demanded of everyone who will be part of the larger content ecosystem.
In many ways, the human face of Content 4.0 is fully recognizable. It, in fact, has many faces as we can see the many people you will need to build relationships with in order to create, manage, and deliver the next generation of micro-moment information experiences. The scale and speed of the brave new world of Content 4.0 represents is a little daunting to be sure. But it is also exciting. We should look forward to “getting our hands dirty” with Content 4.0 because it is absolutely true that the strategic value of good communication skyrockets as we move toward this future.
If today you feel frustrated that the important work of technical communication is not fully appreciated by your organization, you can look forward to a time when that work becomes the one thing that is irreplaceably important in the next generation of smart products. This is true because at the end of the day, the smart content ecosystem and product lifecycle will sit idle if the communication pathways between customers, users, and product specialists come to a halt. And these pathways depend on people skilled in translating between specialties, perspectives, and interests. It depends on you.
So we set out to find the human face of Content 4.0. And what we found should be reassuring.
We have found our own reflection smiling back at us.
JOE GOLLNER is the Managing Director of Gnostyx Research Inc., an independent consultancy that helps organizations acquire, manage, and leverage digital content technologies (www.gnostyx.com). A veteran implementer, he has overseen dozens of content management projects in a variety of industries and in organizations ranging in size from start-up ventures to global enterprises. A graduate of the University of Oxford (Masters of Philosophy), he blogs as the Content Philosopher (www.gollner.ca) and is still working on a book about the effective and sustainable management of content and content technologies.
JACK MOLISANI is the President of ProSpring Technical Staffing, an employment agency specializing in technical writers and other content professionals: http://ProspringStaffing.com. He’s the author of Be the Captain of Your Career: A New Approach to Career Planning and Advancement, which hit #5 on Amazon’s Career and Résumé Best Seller list. Jack also produces the LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and TechComm Management (http://lavacon.org), which will be in Portland this November.
