Technical communications is a fine juggle. On a daily basis, I collaborate between customers, technical teams, and management to deliver complex projects, build customer partnerships, activate change, create concise content, document processes, and train staff. It is very fast paced and rewarding once you learn to negotiate all the moving parts.
For three years, I’ve written for the OpenSRS SaaS dashboard. My current position as technical communicator did not exist before I started. We created it from scratch and tailored it to meet the needs of our highly technical Internet customers. With a narrow field of expertise, I have few peers who focus solely on communicating uptime with real-time incident reports. I follow SaaS dashboard communications and industry blogs that discuss outages and uptime. Learning to be an Internet industry leader in technical communications requires constant comparison. I discovered Lenny Ratinsky’s blog Transparent Uptime and was happy to have my work featured as a successful model.
Recently, Lenny presented about software-as-service (SaaS) dashboards at Velocity 2010. Here are some of his thoughts on being a successful technical communications organization:
I think we need to consider the next iteration of technical communications. As most of us know, technical staff on video is a new concept for most development and operations teams. Communications, development and documentation are all changing with agile software development. Customers demand that companies communicate the messages in a human, timely and accessible method. Screencasts and videos are often used for product launches. It follows that screencasts and video streaming will move to technical incident communications and be one offering of the next SaaS dashboard model. Internet customers are savvy and they want real-time technical details. Companies will add this to their communications suite allowing customers to receive their uptime reports via Twitter, blogs (RSS), video streaming and live chats. Incorporating video into technical incident, change and escalation processes will be very interesting. It will be the responsibility of technical communicators to manage, to train and to assist this exciting transition. Changing to meet the information and communication methods will be a new spin on transparency.
Thanks Lenny!
h
