RE: Boeing Tech Pubs going offshore?

["Mark Baker" <mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com>]

George Mena seemed to summarize the thoughts of many saying:

> Definitely not good news.

I don't agree. It is really neither bad news nor a new phenomena.

Economic leaders export lower value activities to economic followers. This
is a good and necessary thing. If the economic leader retained the low value
activities, it would drag their standard of living down. By exporting them,
the leader maintains and advances its own standard of living and raises the
standard of living of the followers -- which in turn opens up new markets
for the leader.

This has been happening for centuries. When it stops happening, you know
that you have lost your economic leadership. And when you loose your
economic leadership, your standard of living goes down.

Economic leaders have to keep advancing. That means they have to keep
exporting lower value activities and inventing higher value activities. At a
certain point that means that some activities are going to get exported even
if their inherent value has not changed -- their value has stood still and
the export threshold has risen above it.

We have observed for years that productivity in technical communication was
not keeping up with productivity advances in design and manufacturing. Our
attempts to keep up through reuse and single sourcing have made some
progress, but not enough. Most content is still created by typing into DTP
packages without any appreciable degree of modularization or automation.

On top of this, a lot of technical communication practice has be
systematized. To a certain extent this does improve productivity, but it
also reduces value. Developing a system is a high value/high skill activity,
but following a system is a lower skill/lower value activity.

It is not surprising then that we are seeing the economic value of a lot of
technical communication falling below the export threshold. This is part and
parcel of the same phenomena that have been reducing wages in so many
sectors of tech writing.

If an advanced economy stops exporting jobs, everyone is in trouble. The
export of jobs is therefore good news for a country as a whole.
Unfortunately the export of my job is bad news for me, and the export of
jobs like mine is also bad news for me because it puts pressure on my wages
and my job security.

All I can do to comfort myself, I suppose, is to reflect that if my country
had not be exporting jobs for the last 100 years or so, then I'd be doing
one of those old jobs today, and probably not liking it much. If Ned Ludd
and his loom breakers had won, I suppose, I might be a weaver today --
working 14 hours a day on a hand loom for a pittance.

How can we keep the economic value of technical writing above the export
threshold as productivity continues to rise in the economy as a whole? I can
only see two ways:

1. Be a very high-value resource. Have skills and knowledge that cannot
easily be reproduce offshore. Write the kind of material that cannot easily
be written elsewhere. Keep pushing the envelope.

2. Really seriously get single sourcing working so that the productivity of
documentation groups can keep up with productivity advances in the rest of
the organization.

Alternatively, be adaptable. If tech writing has become too low value for
you, or for your employer, do what leaders do: find or invent a higher value
occupation and go do it.

---
Mark Baker
Stilo Corporation
1900 City Park Drive, Suite 504 , Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1J 1A3
Phone: 613-745-4242, Fax: 613-745-5560
Email mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com
Web: http://www.stilo.com

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