Competing in the Information Age
Competition drives all life on Earth. It is the invisible hand of markets and the engine of evolution. In our economic world, we see the traditional competition for jobs: Younger employees versed in new technologies forcing out workers with older skills, experienced employees competing with new graduates for fewer jobs, new technologies and services driving out existing companies, and the ever-popular corporate strategy of moving to cheaper labor markets. These are competitive factors we know and expect. But nowadays, new competitive pressures and opportunities present themselves in our ever-changing technological and globally socialized Age of Information.
Quick Note: I talked about the evolution of a new breed of technical communicator and content strategist in earlier postings, as well as adapting to a new open information environment. This is my third posting on changing ecosystems for content strategists of all types—web programmers, technical writers, knowledge managers, and anyone providing technical content to a new generation of Web 2.0 technologists and communicators using various media ports, portals for social interaction, and groups of common stakeholders.
Competing in the cloud
In the world of Web 2.0 social groups, companies rely on open forums, corporate Facebook pages, Twitter tweets, Linkedin, and other online social mediums to expand services and communicate with current and prospective customers. It is a symbiotic ecosystem in the web cloud where predators and prey feed and find their natural markets. But it is also an environment constantly roiling with changing roles and opportunities.
Competing as a solitary barracuda to challenge larger corporate sharks in the high tech ecosystem or scavenging as pilot fish for high-value product leftovers is nothing new. Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Blackberry, Google, and other high tech companies rely on independent third-party developers and authors to assist in educating their user base and providing applications for their platform. Subcontractors are needed to provide service engagements and work as project-based consultants. Most platforms rely on the competition of independent software and information developers. It is a developed market ecosystem.
Evolving markets and changes in traditional markets are also changing the economic environment. Small, nimble companies of individuals or collaborative tribes of developers now compete directly with larger competitors and in-house corporate teams. These small competitors provide more focused product lines (see TriActive), support the “long-tail” of products abandoned by companies but not customers (see exprescient), or develop innovative mashups and service-oriented applications for specific market needs (see programmableweb). Small companies and individuals can develop add-on features and upsell to existing customers, fill in with new utilities for existing features or products, or develop entirely new applications by integrating open data sources and employing universal web artifacts.
Independent developers employ easy-to-build mashup applications, knowledge portals using RSS and Atom feeds, adoption of configurable social user interfaces (UIs), consumable APIs, and semantically-rich web content marked with XML syntax or other metadata using the resource description framework (RDF) data model. All new cloud infrastructures, methodologies, markups, and emerging protocols allow for easy assembly of powerful applications and personalized, contextual knowledge resources to fundamentally challenge the way we communicate and work together as societies.
For the content strategist, the ecosystem is a cloud of web objects ready to be formed and given purpose. Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a data-based system rather than a document-based system will be a reality at some time in the future. Personalization of features to deliver raw data and then render data as usable knowledge will be required—no one wants your UI or your doc or your education. They want THEIR user interface and THEIR doc and THEIR education. They just want you to provide a way to consume it, even if they <gasp> have to pay for it.
Darwinian rules for everybody
Adaption to environment. Natural Selection. Inheritance. Survival of the fittest. Predators and prey.
All of the driving forces of the natural world apply to our brave new economic world we live in As the 150th anniversary publication of “The Origin of Species” passes by, it would serve us well to take a closer look at the technological and economic Darwinism that faces us today.
Change brought on by the “Great Recession” seem to be destroying one ecosystem while creating opportunities in a newly emerging climate and 
environment. The world is in transition. Like always, all inhabitants are simply looking for a steady source of sustenance and a new way to survive. Much like the finches of the Galapagos Islands.
Most evolutionary processes take too long to view using standard empirical scientific research, but the finches off the small island of Daphne in the Galapagos archipelago evolve very quickly it seems. Like most of the flora and fauna of these islands, their distant location makes it easier to see how species evolve independently based on an isolated environment separated by miles of ocean. For a young Charles Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle, the Galapagos was a perfect laboratory of segmented evolution. It still is the perfect laboratory for seeing evolution on steroids.
The finches of Daphne seem to be evolving almost instantaneously. In a matter of decades, larger finches first noticed in 1982 began replacing the smaller finches because they had larger beaks for cracking the native seeds. They were more efficient at their jobs. Consequently, the birds with the smaller beaks moved to eating the smaller seeds overlooked by the larger birds, which favored the smallest of the small birds. The smallest finches were more adept at eating smaller seeds. This is known as “character displacement,” the act of finding a position to minimize competition in order to live in better harmony (i.e., to better survive).
During a drought in 2003 and 2004 on the island, fewer seeds grew overall and the larger birds competed for large seeds and the smaller birds competed for the smaller seeds. A more competitive environment accelerated the size change between each species of finch based on the size of the seeds they competed for and the efficiency in finding, cracking, and eating the sees: the larger birds got larger competing for the larger seeds and the smaller birds got smaller competing on the smaller seeds. After the culling of the less efficient food gatherers in each population, the most efficient size of finches evolved to fit the ecosystem. The finches of Daphne found an equilibrium and defined a new competitive system with each subgroup finding their most advantageous size and position.
So must we.
Some Feet-on-the-ground Ideas
Okay, so enough of the nebulous references to cloud computing, birds, and highbrow talk of becoming an independent content strategist. As my new friend Corda asks: How do you make this happen? Let’s get real. We have mortgages and grocery bills. How do we make it work?
First of all, I do not call myself an expert in telling others what to do professionally. I am a student of new trends and and inquisitive bystander at this point, although I plan to put all of these ideas to the test very soon. So with that gigantic caveat, let me share some ideas:
Basic premises:
- If this is fun, we’re having it. The world is changing. Get used to it. It’s not like we have a choice. Enjoy the new skills you are about to learn and the challenges in front of you, and embrace all the opportunities. Because if this is NOT fun, we’re also having it.
- The markets are changing. Products, services, and corporations in the market that have gotten fat, lazy, and effete are vulnerable to competition. A new type of democratic mercantilism of independent experts, collaborative tribes, and organized crafts men and women is emerging. Increased productivity, better tools, innovative practices, open web infrastructure, and skilled communicators can compete with anyone.
- The old markets are still in place. Some corporations are de facto monopolies or at least oligarchies. Think Toyota, Walmart, Microsoft, Google, and Apple. Technical Communicators need to keep close to these behemoths to utilize services and infrastructure and tap into customer base.
- We are straddling changing societies and technologies. The IT management system your company bought today will be obsolete in five years. Everything will be virtual partitions on a hard drive with embedded or online applications. 25 percent of what you know this year will be obsolete next. Your iPhone, Blackberry, of Google Droid is yesterday’s model. All of this change affects societies. The Iranian government is slowing down web access and using Twitter to counterstrike protestors.
- Skills are changing. Jobs are changing. You need to evolve into a multi-skilled Technical Communicator. The goal is to get information to people. That will require some additional skills in the emerging Information Age.
How to compete:
Let’s get down to some specifics ideas. How about a table to keep notes. I an going to start taking a list of ideas here and expand it through time and effort.
| Projects | How to compete |
| Author contextual knowledge | Find a topic needing content and become an expert. Take a stance on a social issue. Blog, comment on sites, build social coalitions, write e-books, and push your agenda |
| Build mashups | Design and build web products using content and services from cloud resources. Mash videos, text, graphics, audio, and legacy content to provide alternatives to corporate products. |
| Build custom applications | Design and build applications for various platforms such as iPhone, Blackberry, Adobe AIR, MS Silverlight, and others large and small. |
| Sell services | Become an independent contractor. |
| Extend professional services | Work directly with customers or with other contractors to supply real-time, real-world content directly to customers. |
| Become an information portal | AppDeploy.com was an information portal bought by KACE. These were guys who provided a knowledge portal that was bought out. |
| Provide independent training | Undercut education wherever you can. |
| Hire on as content strategist | Build a résumé abound social networking and strategies to get companies noticed and their message out. |
| Become an analyst for a market and set of products. | Became a customer advocate in defined fields and compare, contrast products specifically for readers. |
My goal in this posting is to ferret out some of the opportunities for competing in a changing marketplace and point out some vulnerabilities to be exploited. We need to identify our seeds and see how big our beak needs to be to compete. That would be a significant difference between humankind and finches. We can decide what kind of forager or predator we are suited for and how we most want to compete.
I intend to openly discuss some of the problems and requirements associated with being a new type of technical communicator or content strategist and web masher. I plan to address more ideas around the reality of being an independent communicator (regardless of your current situation in or out of a corporation), what that means, and where the market is today. I will start by throwing out these basic ideas and hopefully get some comments. I will be updating this article from time to time as well.
December 11, 2009
· 
Michael Hiatt · 
9 Comments
Posted in: Cloud Computing, Content Strategist, Contextual Data, Information Age, Information management, Knowledge management, Mashups, technical communicator
9 Responses
Great, thought-provoking information. I just saw that a company is advertising a job for a “Project Manager” who would be supervising a group of technical writers overseas. Although it’s painful for me to see U.S. jobs being replaced like this, you might as well add this to your list of ideas for adapting. It’s a reality here to stay.
Your advice is basically to SPECIALIZE. I think this short-sighted advice. If you are proposing that the technology-related environment will continue to be DYNAMIC going forward, what benefits are there to the info worker of specialization? How does one predict which applications, associations, industry standards, etc. will have the most traction 5 years from now? It’s impossible. To the extent that you agree, I would expect you to advise today’s evolving TWs to consider generalizing their knowledge base as to web technologies, content production tools, etc. The content industry should be producing “analysis” that provides a path through these multiple streams of technology change.
The Galapagos Islands are the most incredible living museum of evolutionary changes, with a huge variety of exotic species (birds, land and sea animals, plants) and landscapes not seen anywhere else.
Paul K Scholar is correct. We don’t want to specialize. That is the difference between humans and birds–we get to decide our size of seeds, size of beak, and island to compete on.
I also agree with Paul that we need to expand our writing to be analysts, as well as champions of customers, creative forces in the marketplace, and writers of high-value content.
Corda’s point, that more tech writer jobs are moving to lower wage locations is also a good point. The traditional way of rotely writing help files, reference tables, and inside-out product doc is also dying.
The need in the market relies on an understanding of customer needs in vertical markets and delivered to them where they congregate. The traditional ways of tech writing are fading away and those left should be done as cheaply as possible because it is little more than a required, but low value delivery.
What is really needed is what Paul says, more analysts to help wend through changes, best practices for vertical markets, better writing to capture an audience, and more useful delivery methods. This will require real content strategists and fewer tech writers. We just need to evolve to this higher value position as Paul says and Corda points out and I agree with vociferously.
The small seeds will be taken leaving the larger seeds for a new breed of aggregator.
I’m a little confused (it doesn’t take much) by your comments.
“We don’t want to specialize.”
“The need in the market relies on an understanding of customer needs in vertical markets and delivered to them where they congregate.”
Aren’t vertical markets specialized as opposed to horizontal markets that aren’t? So aren’t you really saying that we need to understand vertical (specialized) markets and target those customers? If that’s not your message, examples would help. Thanks.
Thanks for the response Corda. I need to clarify this in my own mind too.
I believe that writers need to present content in all mediums(videos, e-books, blogs, formal doc, working with social groups) and be flexible in voice, message, and style. That is where I think we need to be flexible. I think that is where Paul is correct in this statement…we don’t just want to specialize in being help system writers (and many of us are today).
But I also think we need to be subject matter experts. We need an understanding of a domain of information that we research and write about. We can’t just be scribes anymore following around the SMEs. We need to be SMEs at some level. In that way we are going to need to be more specialized as authors/content strategists/technical communicators and not just tech writers.
Here’s an example: I understand the market for IT system management tools for small-medium businesses based on my experience of the past decade. I want to engage these customers in this domain using a variety of mediums, portals, and publishing techniques. I want to be flexible here.
But I also want to define what market I am after. I don’t want to be hired by one of these companies. I want to compete for customer attention. I believe large companies don’t really want extensive information about their products in the cloud because they depend on training and professional service add-on sales. They are also outsourcing the tech writing jobs to junior ESL writers that provide low value, low quality help files only to save money. I want to engage in the questions of this IT mgmt system for now and the future and take away mindshare from their marketing departments and go directly to the user.
I want to compete at the market level and be more of an analyst and provider of ITIL and other best practices for existing (or new) customers in providing useful, unbiased content for users of MS, BMC, Symantec, KACE, LanDesk, and other competing vendors. Or for those using a miscellany of products. Or maybe just those who partner up with Dell to manage their systems.
My main goal is be flexible in providing content wherever I can and in whatever format is needed, yet stay in my domain of knowledge.
This came out of my analogy of the finches on Daphne which was a bit convoluted. My point was that the competition and environment changes, so we need to decide what we want or is available to feed on–what domain or market or job we want–and find our rightful position to do so.
As an independent author, I think I can bypass the vendors marketing messaging, staid and obvious doc, marketing slanted positioning papers, and go directly to the customer/user/reader. But I need to also be more than just someone who writes low value, obvious content. I need to confront the customer needs using whatever tools of communication I can use an be loyal to them. I need to create a new job in the market…go after other seeds.
Does this make sense? I am still making my way through this. I am putting together a PRD for this market with my intentions, cash stream, audience, publishing portals and possibilities and more. I need to take my theoretical and take it to the streets.
This comment is kind of a brainstorm, so let me know what your thoughts are. Thanks again.
A New Year in the Protocol Society | Mashstream - January 4, 2010
[...] and anyone providing technical content to a new generation of Web 2.0 technologists. See also evolving, adapting, and competing in the Information [...]
Hi,
I am a technical writer and editor from India working for the software sector for over a decade now.
I would like to point out that ESL writers can be more careful writers than native speakers. I have seen this happen repeatedly when working as part of teams spread across USA, UK, and India. Also, they build formidable SME knowledge in their domains. Consequently, the writing from such writers is indeed very valuable to the customers. Often such technical writers lead doc departments here.
And there are many organizations here hunt for good technical writers till they get one. This is evident from the number of interviews they conduct, the kind of people involved in the hiring process. In spite of such careful hiring, sometimes they end up with wrong hires. This leads to some attrition. Attrition also happens when organizations try to employ good writers with minimal hikes or good writers switch jobs because they have better opportunity elsewhere.
And then why does the world carry the opinion that ESL writers produce low quality content? There is more work here than good technical writers alone can handle. So that leads to staffing doc departments with less-than-perfect writers who are bound to do a bad job. Here India presents a unique case. In India, all of us study English for 13-14 years. And those who are good at writing English can become good technical writers, if not SMEs, pretty quickly. However, we still find mediocre content being created by such writers. I guess the reason lies elsewhere. Time and again I observed bad jobs are from those writers who are not ethical or plain careless. They do not want to justify the pay check they take home. They don’t raise all the questions they should raise as a tech writer, and don’t research enough. Consequently, the content takes a hit. And bad ethics a found anywhere across the globe.
Also I see that mediocre writers are rarely tolerated in start-ups/small setups. In large setups, often mediocre writers hide behind rules, processes, and metrics and are tolerated.
So, I would like the world to consider one fact. Probably places like India are not only cheaper but they do a great job….and the CEOs, many of them, who ship the jobs to places like India do have a keen eye for the quality of the documents produced here.
Sincerely,
Surya.
Thanks for the input Surya. You made some very good points, notwithstanding the jingoistic perspective I may have conveyed. I may have been a bit angry in my posting about outsourcing which hit me and my team very hard.
Here’s my experience:
I worked for the third largest sw company in the world. They came through and laid off the writing team in the US, Australia, and NZ and then moved tech writing to Estonia. Before Estonia formally joined the EU, they laid off those writers to avoid EU constraints and hired writers in India.
Now, management has found that they can go to China and decrease their costs even more. They now have a mandate to move all technical writing (and other jobs) to China in the coming years. Do you really think that this was done because these writers are more competent or because they are cheaper? Was it their keen eye on quality or their myopic vision on the bottom line?
Indian is not a unique case. China also spends a lot of time teaching English through their education system. It will be interesting to see your perspective when your job moves to Bejing.
Also, it has been my experience that many companies don’t really want great documentation. There is more money to be made by consulting than handing out free information to allow internal corporate teams to do tasks themselves. As margins for sw and hw diminish, it is the implementation and consulting teams that continues to make money.
But all of this is up to the market. If I am really a better writer than an ESL writer, then I have to prove it. To that end, I am putting together a tribe of writers to start publishing in competition with cheap corporate writers and steal away customers. Let’s see what the CEO does then. I plan to offer superior training, documentation, and professional services information using disruptive technologies such as information mashups focused on customer needs rather than corporate needs.
Let’s see what happens when we really compete on quality and subject matter expertise in the open market. To that end, maybe you can join up with me after they send your job east.
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