Technical Communication Quarterly 17(1) 2008

“Guest Editors’ Introduction:  Rationalizing and Rhetoricizing Content Management” by George Pullman and Baotong Gu

• The authors argue that we’ve been practicing CM for years through work like single sourcing, knowledge management and course management (Blackboard, etc.)
• This issue is an attempt to move technical communication from the static sphere of document design to the dynamic horizon of content management.
• Why do CMS’ fail?
  • Complexity across organization need representation
  • You have to change people’s writing habits for the good of the organization
  • CMS’ allow for relatively little improvisation which might demotivate users.

• For CMS to be successful:
  • End user emphasis (documentation specialists)
  • User needs

• Why do technical communicators need to care?
  • CMS’ change the way we think about writing because they require a strict separation of form and content to allow for seamless repurposing of content, data mining, reduplication of effort control mechanisms, and writing in collaborative spaces.
  • Tech. Comm’ers aren’t currently involved in the implementation of CMS – IT job.
  • We’re already doing work on single sourcing and knowledge management in the field.

“Coming to Content Management” by Bill Hart-Davidson, Grace Bernhardt, Michael McLeod, Martine Rife, and Jeffrey Grabill

• The authors use a rhetorical approach to explore CM in its capacity to guide technical communicators and others in the process in their decision making about knowledge creation, information arrangement, tools selection, and workplace practice design.
• In the two studies (one of a professional organization and the other at Michigan State libraries) the authors explore the dynamics of CMS as well as the complexities of content management and focus on relationships between people and information as well as the needs of end users.
• They argue that Tech.Comm. doesn’t understand a lot about CMS.  These elements include:
  • How to balance information and people needs
  • How to define the role of communication and technical communicators in the CMS practice
  • How to interpret the impact of “fine-grained changes in writing practices” brought about by the CM practice on the work of writing
  • How to understand writing practices where “market, organizational, and rhetorical vectors intersect.”

• The authors note that Tech.Comm. is poised to help small businesses and nonprofits make the transition to a new infrastructure supported by CMS.
• To understand the relationships among actors, stakeholders, and organizations in CMS, the authors turn to Latour’s “tracing associations.”
• The adoption of the CMS was a move toward creating a perpetual convention of the NPO (national professional organization).
• The idea of an audience must assume multiple user “roles” rather than users – i.e., some users will come as members to pay dues but will come as professionals at a different time to make connections.

“Content Management and the Separation of Presentation and Content” by Dave Clark

• In this article, Clark undertakes the separation of form (presentation) and content in CMS.
• Clark recognizes that the separation of form and content is not a new concept; however, he also notes that no content is ever truly separated from form.
• Within CMS’ Clark suggests understanding this separation two ways:
  • Content as completed written texts and presentation (form) as structure, navigation, and visual style
  • Content as being modules (modules are sections, paragraphs, sentences, even words that are broken down and reassembled to build custom documents on the fly) and presentation being output structure, navigation, visual style, and genre definition.

• These new understandings of what CMS do to content and form change the way that Tech.Comm. thinks about CMS’ because there are now new business pressures, new complexities in task and process management, changes in what it means to write “genres”,  new user expectations, and standardization and enforcement of form.

“The Rhetoric of Enterprise Content Management” by Rebekka Andersen

• Andersen argues that ECM (enterprise content management) is usually adopted by business leaders who see the technology as a production process model that increases efficiency and reduces production costs.
• These new production process perks include:
  • Bigger ROI (return on investment)
  • Reduced time to market of product and product info
  • Increased worker and process efficiency
  • Improved content quality
  • Increased knowledge sharing and collaboration (more corporate control)

• Technical communicators often aren’t involved in decisions and implementations of ECM because they are not participating in the discourse of the business world.
• To address the Tech.Comm. absence with respect to ECM, Andersen recommends that Tech.Commer’s raise the visibility and accessibility of their scholarship to go beyond the focus on end users and rhetorical problems.  Further, Tech.Commer’s should also complicate ECM’s mission of providing a technical solution of sociotechnical and rhetorical challenges of empowerment, collaboration, quality, usability, and technology adoption.
• Substantivist perspective of technology – technology has an inevitably positive impact on an environment.
• A lovely quote: “Many knowledge workers tend to view technology as neutral and tend not to be trained to or have the time to notice that adopting interactive communication technologies is yet another method for organizations to regulate and control information flow and worker productivity” (72).
• The collaborative, social nature of knowledge in the ECM environment disallows private communication and imposes tighter strategic control over technical communicators.
• This might provide you with a way to discuss tech comm. In relation to piracy – the issue of control.

“Metadata and Memory:  Lessons from the Canon of Memoria for the Design of Content Management Systems” by Stuart Whittemore

• Whittemore looks to the canon of memory to think about how data can be stored and retrieved in CMS.
• W. recognizes that the relationships between different pieces of information in a CMS (metadata for example isn’t easily integrated into the writing process; hence, the memories of workers are overstrained) are not explicitly created; further, they are often technically linked, but the user-input doesn’t see that relationship.
• The writing process is reduced to assembly line granularizations wherein writing occurs as an assemblage without reference to the rhetorical situation.
• Metadata functions to track “views” or the task circumstances and display conditions under which users of a document actually encounter text objects”
• This metadata awareness for distributed, granularized CMS’ is almost impossible for single authors to be able to do.
• Memoria provides a “concern for retrieving and adapting existing knowledge to the exigencies of shifting rhetorical situations” so that CM delivery can be improved.
• To improve this, W. recommends the adoption of mnemonic systems for the design of the memory tools in CMS.
• Spatial and physical visualizations (a la Cicero and Quintilian) of the writing process that integrates metadata would be one method of allow writers to concentrate on keeping “certain pieces of metadata” available during composition.
  • This would include 3-D models of data for granular placement and
  • This would also provide on-the-fly spatial representations of large-view designs-in-progress for projects.