Technology

Fighting for the Ultimate Desktop

by Peter Vasdi

Lately, articles have been appearing in some computer magazines expressing disappointment at the failure of electronic technology to produce a paperless office. What is the problem? Why are offices using more paper than ever before?

Who Is Out there and What Have They Been Doing?

Our society has been caught up in the eddy of expectations about the wonders of the latest technologies, and in the process, has lost focus of what we really want to achieve. For success in communications, there must be at least two players and one ball that must be thrown by one and caught by another. Whether the ball is green and glows in the dark, or whether it is propelled by a magical force, is immaterial unless that ball reaches its intended destination. Sometimes a basic concept is the most difficult to convey.

I think that is because electronic technology — its products, its hopes, its fears, its attraction — have all been controlled by technology-enthusiastic people who pursue technology for technology's sake, without close inspection concerning its ultimate usefulness. The result is that our garbage dumps are cluttered with the debris of expensive high-technology outcasts.

Technology-oriented people are the information-producing side of our society. They are not information receivers. Information producers are, for the most part, a creative but undisciplined lot.

Documentation is, at its core, a collection of other people's ideas; the art of reading and understanding that documentation is that of taking the time to absorb these ideas and to learn. In our world of rapid technological innovation, documentation is sometimes viewed as a dam in the middle of a great river, slowing down the creative processor, a dragon that needs to be slayed rather than understood.

Building on the reputation of such developments as the printing press, the typewriter, and the postal service, which fulfilled their initial promise of reaching out to those who wanted to (and liked to) read, new electronic technologies have allowed the enthusiasm for technological advances to drive the market. When technology hinted at being able to produce good documentation painlessly, technocrats looked no farther than the covers and attractive page formats. Never having worked with documentation — or even having read that much of it — they equated "visually appealing" with "good" and thought that "good" could be achieved instantaneously. The result is that people have spent the money, acquired the tools, have the electronic capability, yet still have not met reader requirements.

The Challenge

The challenge is, and always has been: to communicate.

The charter of the company that I co-founded includes this tenet: documentation must be read to be useful. Up until now, technology has been making this task more and more difficult. The wrong people have been in the driver's seat. Technology, being driven by information producers rather than information recipients, has inadvertently become a mere tool to help produce more information. With Internet and the World Wide Web, technologically generated documentation is becoming the largest dumping site history has ever known. As a result, audiences now not only have the old challenge — reading — but a new challenge: trying to find the information from within an ever-increasing pile that is now global in size.

It is not what you write, but how well it is written that is important. To write well takes expertise, and consequently it becomes clear that documentation is a field of expertise on its own. How many technical people have been seconded into writing reports under the assumption that all they need to do is to put pen to paper? Then, when they have to figure out things like how to make the page numbering automatic so that additions and changes to the document won't make the document more difficult to read — let alone keeping track of which draft of their document is the most recent, and the name of the electronic file they spawned to contain their document, they cry foul. Oddly enough, it seems that technically minded people lack the discipline and organizational skills required to keep a documentation project on track.

The Facts

No matter how many machines anyone has around them, the simple fact is that the information has to enter one's head, and fit into and mix with the ideas already there. This is a very severe limitation. Even when we're interested in a topic — and have the time to devote to it — our minds are very selective, and our memory capacity limited.

I look upon the mind as the "ultimate desktop". Whatever you have to say, however important it is, if you want the information read and understood, then it must end up on that desktop. And if the intended audience already has his/her ultimate desktop partially or completely covered (as most of us do), then your information must compete for that space. With all this competition for such limited space, writing a document is like entering an army of soldiers into a war. To succeed, each battle must be won, or the effort will die.

Technical people (at the moment) are the kings of the information world. For years, we have been trusting them to make our lives simpler. But they haven't succeeded. Like any ruler or government that doesn't succeed, they must either change or face a revolution; in other words, they must hand the reins over to people who represent the information receivers (rather than the producers).

A person who is an expert in documentation will be able to view documentation through the eyes of an information receiver; such a person will give you a fighting chance to win the communication war. A documentation expert is shrewd in the ways of producing information and, more importantly, of competing for the limited space on that ultimate desktop.

Will we see a paperless office anytime soon? I suspect not, but on the road to a paperless environment, documentation experts are the people to lead the way. Documentation — no matter what the medium being used — requires experts knowledgeable in the field. Such experts have the background to know what media are the most appropriate to compete with the other information on the audience's ultimate desktop — and to know that sometimes simple, "low-technology" means of communication are all that are needed.