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In defense of English majors: we can understand business issues, too
Monday, July 27, 2009 — posted by Alan Pringle
In his latest blog entry, Neil Perlin explains how important it is for technical writers to have an understanding of business issues. With such knowledge, they can contribute to cost justifications for decisions that affect them directly. I couldn't agree more with that. It is absolutely in writers' best interests (and a matter of self-preservation) to understand processes and costs.I strongly disagree, however, with the following assertion:
Writers from fine arts or English backgrounds can rarely discuss cost-justification in finance terms, so they have little input on buying decisions.I am an English major, and I freely admit I am more of a "words" person than a "numbers" person. That being said, I am no slouch in the finance department. (Calculus is another matter, though.) I know many people with degrees in English and the liberal arts who are quite adept at understanding The Big Picture and developing business cases. Lumping all of us into a "can rarely discuss cost-justification" group is unfair.
Now I need to remind myself not to group software developers into a "can rarely write a coherent procedure" category. (It's easy to make generalizations when you're not the target of them.)
Labels: business, cranky, technical writing
10:34 AM Permalink | |
Think global
Tuesday, May 26, 2009 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe
We are joining with a couple of other technical communication companies to form the TechComm Alliance:
Three companies—Cherryleaf Ltd., HyperWrite, and Scriptorium Publishing—are forming TechComm Alliance to help us handle technical communication projects around the world. We are located in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, respectively, and each company has customers in both its home location and in other countries. TechComm Alliance will make it easier to work with global companies that need services worldwide.How will this work? We expect to:
- Work together on large projects that require support in multiple locations. For instance, Scriptorium might be implementing structured authoring for a U.S. company that also has operations in Europe and Australia. During rollout, instead of sending a Scriptorium consultant around the world, we partner with Cherryleaf for the training in Europe and with HyperWrite for the training in Australia. The result? Our customer saves on travel expenses, and our consultants spend less time in airplanes.
- Refer projects to each other. Each company has (and will continue to have) clients around the world. When we feel that a local presence would benefit the customer, we can refer the project to our alliance partners.
- Produce webinars and other events together. I'd like for Scriptorium customers to benefit from the expertise of our partners, and we are working on joint webinars.
Labels: business, techcomm alliance
9:00 AM Permalink | |
Zohoho, and a bottle of rum...
Friday, September 19, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe
The excellent ReadWriteWeb has a couple of articles that are must-reads:How Decoupled is The Innovation Economy From Rest of The Economy?
Zoho: The Little Engine That Could (Take on Both Microsoft and Google
I'll just recommend that you read them both.
We recently shifted our customer relationship management (CRM) system to Zoho, and we are quite pleased. Why Zoho?
1. It's cheap. We looked at Salesforce, Netsuite, Sugar Professional, and several other options. Zoho is a LOT cheaper. We're talking hundreds of dollars per year instead of thousands of dollars per year. The price differential is absolutely stunning.
2. It's easy to use. I set up trial accounts with several other providers. Zoho is oodles easier.
3. Their support is somewhere between excellent and astounding. Our questions are answered quickly, and the support staff is quick to offer to call and/or set up a web meeting to solve a problem. Given what we're paying them, I can't believe that they even bother to return our email.
4. We tried using open-source CRM. The maintenance cost to us was simply too high.
I have to agree with the RWW guys, who note that:
They [Zoho] charge real money for their software, with no advertising. But the price is really low. This is like WalMart. This is like Basecamp, reasonable prices for great software. That is so boring! In branded consumer goods, buying expensive conveys status. In software, buying expensive when there is an equivalent at lower cost, simply conveys a willingness to burn money.
Zoho is offering an enormous amount of value.
Another interesting part of the story is that Zoho is based in India, which may help explain their low pricing. It's common these days for U.S.-based companies to have development offices in India, but Indian-owned companies that are focused on the U.S. market are less usual.
Labels: business
4:03 PM Permalink | |
Interesting times...
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 — posted by Sarah
First, some bad news. I have decided to postpone release of our structured FrameMaker title. This decision was due to several factors, including the following:- Disappointing sales of the unstructured FrameMaker 8 book. Frankly, based on the level of interest shown before the book was released, we expected a lot more sales at this point.
- Resource allocation. I need the people who were working on the book to focus on client projects. I suppose this is a good problem to have.
- Historically, FrameMaker has been on an 18-24 month release cycle. We're about a year into FrameMaker 8 already, which means we're looking at a lifespan of 6-12 months for this next book. And that's if we made it available TODAY. And the content is not ready.
So we've decided to try something different, and that brings us to what I hope is the good news part of this post.
Today, we are launching wiki.scriptorium.com. Our new wiki currently includes the training content from our FM 101 (unstructured/accelerated introduction) and FM 201 (structured/introduction to authoring). We will also add the content of our other three FrameMaker workbooks as soon as possible. Our workbook content is for FrameMaker version 7, which means that about 90 percent of it is accurate for version 8.
As of today, you have access to free FrameMaker tutorial content. The sample files needed to complete the exercises are included on the wiki. Furthermore, we have licensed the content under a Creative Commons license, which means that you can reuse and repurpose the content as long as you provide attribution.
We hope that you will consider registering on the wiki and contributing to the needed updates.
Meanwhile, we will continue to offer live, web-based training on FrameMaker. You can also purchase PDF and printed versions of the workbooks from our store. The commercial versions have much nicer formatting than the wiki content does. For more details about the difference between the commercial and the wiki versions, see the front page of the wiki.
I know that some of you have been looking forward to getting the structured FrameMaker book, and I apologize to you for this change in plans. I hope that you'll find the wiki option a worthwhile substitute for the time being.
We are also looking at releasing some of the structured content (especially the DITA-specific information) as a stand-alone technical brief, but I don't want to commit to that approach at this point.
Labels: business, FrameMaker
3:10 PM Permalink | |
Digital rights management in Web 2.0
Tuesday, July 08, 2008 — posted by Ethan Duty
The argument for digital rights management (people will steal your stuff) sounds good from a retail perspective. Who would buy the book when they can get a pirated copy for free? But if retail sales aren't the focus of your company, there is value in the illegal proliferation of your stuff.This does not mean piracy is good. Pirates take from the producer without investing anything back, leaving that producer with fewer resources to make better stuff, and thus slowing the progress of knowledge, technology, and perhaps civilization as we know it. But piracy is an additional form of marketing. Unprotected content results in additional readers at the expense of lost sales. But "free" content will reach consumers that cannot afford or justify the cost of a book, so your content gains exposure to individuals who otherwise would not have access to the information.
Let's say you're a consultant. You attract your clients by being the authority on certain information. One way to prove your authority (see the connection, authority and author) is to create white papers and books that others find useful.
The more people that read and use your stuff, the bigger an authority you become on the topic. If piracy drastically increases the copies of your books being used, you have that many more people that recognize your authority.
The more individuals that recognize your authority, the more likely they are to come to you for answers not available in the book. Since cloning isn't perfect, the public cannot pirate your personal knowledge and experience, and you get to charge the money for consulting services.
With everything going to the web, attention is rising in value. Your content is just one drop in a vast ocean of stuff and announcing your existence and value to potential clients becomes ever more difficult.
If pirated copies of a book generate more searches on the author and drive traffic to your site or blog, then perhaps there will come a time when you can't afford DRM.
Labels: business, DRM, web 2.0
1:07 PM Permalink | |
SDL and Idiom: A marriage made somewhere warm?
Monday, February 11, 2008 — posted by Sarah
[corrected stupid math error]I was talking to someone from SDL about Idiom a few years back. "We hate their %$#!%$#@! guts," he told me. I never found out whether this was because Idiom was taking sales from SDL or because, I dunno, this person hated words that start with I or something.
But today, we have the announcement from SDL that they are acquiring Idiom for $22 million (plus another $5 million in assumed debt). Why did Idiom agree to the sale? They weren't exactly printing money (and perhaps that was the only other viable alternative).
Idiom’s audited revenues for the year ended 31 December 2005 were $7.9m (2006 unaudited - $10.0m), generating an audited loss before taxation of $5.9m (2006 unaudited loss - $5.3m).Let's translate. The company lost $5.9 million in 2005 and $5.3 million in 2006 as revenue increased 25% over that period. Not good.
Based on the revenue multiplier or 2.7x ($27 million sale price/$10 million in revenue), this looks like a sale based on services rather than products. In other words, SDL is picking up Idiom for their expertise and consultancy and not primarily for their software.
Idiom had investor backing. It looks to me as though the investors were none-too-happy with the growth rate and forced the sale.
As a business owner myself, I hope that the principals got something out of this, but based on the information I have, I kind of doubt it.
(via Gilbane)
Labels: business, localization
11:01 AM Permalink | |