RE: conference fees

["Le Vie, DonaldX S" <donaldx -dot- s -dot- le -dot- vie -at- intel -dot- com>]

Thank you, Sharon...that's the point I was trying to make on Friday. I too
enjoy presenting, networking, and sharing ideas at conferences, but none of
that pays the bills. Those fellow TCs who have always worked for someone
else forget that when they are at a conference all week, they are still
getting paid. Folks like us only get paid for billable hours. Even a
complementary registration would at least help offset some of the cost, but
overall, it's really debatable about the return on the investment. 

We often hear complaints from tech comm folks about not getting any
professional respect from engineers or developers, and some people have hit
on part of the problem: not having enough technical knowledge about the
products or services we document. The other part of the problem is that few
of us have any idea how to determine the valuation of the documentation/tech
pubs organization and relate it a way that makes upper management take
notice. Instead, we resort to efficiency metrics that reinforce our
organizations as "overhead," and that don't have any bearing on the
strategic business model or customer satisfaction. Executive management
doesn't give a rat zass about the things we typically measure. To paraphrase
a 1992 election campaign slogan, "It's the bottom-line value-add, stupid." 

True, the value we provide comes with transforming data or information into
<usable> information that helps makes our customers and their customers
successful. How do you assign a dollar value to that? That's the problem.
But you can come close by assigning a value to the cost of NOT having
customer/requirements-focused information products. Customer have to be able
to leverage success off of our products. If they can't, what's that worth to
the company?

At this year's STC Conference in Orlando, the idea for an STC Business SIG
was kicked around in a panel discussion by Saul Carliner and Bill Gribbons.
The idea blossomed and at the end of the meeting, we had nearly 2 dozen
signatures of people interested in such a SIG. This SIG would address the
big-picture issues of how technical communications integrates into the
organization's overall strategy and other similar ideas. It will not focus
on the "trench warfare" issues (such as "How much should I charge for a
300-page manual?").

That's a small step forward, but STC needs to belly up to the bar and
provide a migration pathway for the membership as the demands in the
workforce evolve. Otherwise, it becomes a closed system that doesn't move
forward. 

Ed Weiss gave a presentation at one of the SOLUTIONS-sponsored events last
year where he compared the problems of technical writing in 1980 and 1999,
and guess what? Most of the same problems persist today. What does that say
about the efforts of the world's largest professional support organization
for technical writers?

Donn Le Vie
(climbing down off of large soap box) 







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