About TO07 by Klaus Daube
The article by Ulrich Thiele (There goes the productivity..., TC-Forum 2-98, TO 7) points out a major issue of service provided in the documentation area. There is a big difference in the computing environment between service providers and departments in companies supported by some IT staff: the customer dictates!
In the current harsh economic climate a service provider cannot escape even ill-behaved projects (or his income decreases further). The burden he must carry to a large extent has its roots in "The blind leading the enlightened" (TC-Forum 2-98, TO 8), as people with no appropriate knowledge at the customer side set the conditions in a documentation project:
- the tools to be used (and even their version!) are prescribed by the customer
- multiple versions of one tool do not behave well on the PC (try, for example, to run a German and an English version of the same SW concurrently)
- the data provided by the customer very often are accompanied by incomplete or faulty information about these data
- the work flow forced by the customer does not fit the task (e.g. TIFFs must be imported into Corel Draw to generate a WMF, although FrameMaker could handle the TIFF directly).
This all adds to a huge amount of time fiddling with PC concerns which have nothing to do with the real task. This waste of time is nourished by many SW companies (the bigger, the more) with their hyped marketing effort ("everything" is sooo easy with their product), which is taken for granted by the "blind" (but they have the budget).
How to educate the customer (better: their managment)?
Klaus Daube
Docu + Design Daube; Schäracher 11; CH-8053 Zürich
Technical documentation & consultancy; On-line and paper
Phone/FAX: +41-1-4228625
email: daube§dial.eunet.ch
HTTP://www.daube.ch/
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