Coming to Content Management: Inventing Infrastructure for Organizational Knowledge Work

Abstract

Two project profiles depict content management as inquiry-driven practice. The first profile reflects on a project for a national professional organization that began with a deceptively simple request to improve the organization's website, but ended with recommendations that ran to the very core mission of the organization. The second profile focuses on an organization's current authoring practices and tools in order to prepare for a significant change: allowing users to develop and organize content.The discussion of content management in the professional and academic discourse of technical communication has been, in large part, focused on a rather narrow range of features associated with generating multiple output formats from a single repository: single sourcing. We take a different approach in this article, focusing instead on content management as "a type of conduct" (Miller, 1989, p. 23). In so doing, we align the practical work of content management (CM) with a form of reasoning, phronesis, that permits us to explore CM as a means to guide decision making about the creation of knowledge, the arrangement of information, the selection of tools, and the design of work practices associated with the making of texts. Invoking phronesis allows us to position the focus of CM not on the making of texts, but rather on "the good of a community" for which text making is a central, sustaining activity (Miller, p. 23). This shift suggests a role for the technical communicator as advisor or consultant. Though not altogether new, this role positions the technical communicator as having authority over what are, for many organizations, the fundamentals of their mission rather than simply on matters of procedure (e.g., editorial practices, documentation strategies).To be clear, we are not borrowing Miller's formulation to argue for a new role for technical communicators so much as to describe how we have come to understand our own roles vis-à-vis organizations that we have consulted with in the last several years that were coming to content management. In many cases, our work began with rather simple requests to evaluate an organization's website or to offer a workshop on a topic like how to write for the Web-topics that we might locate in the realm of techne. Mindful of the richness of rhetorical techne (Atwill, 1998), we always expect even these types of projects to be much more than training courses or product-oriented critiques of a Web presence. But the shift we want to write about here goes beyond a view of rhetoric-as-productive that concerns itself with intervention in an organization's day-to-day work, often without explicit reference to big ideas such as an organization's mission or overall effectiveness. The shift we want to write about is a moment when an organization and its members face choices in their day-to-day work that are, perhaps for the first time, unambiguously choices about the ends toward which they and the organization work. These organizations are coming to content management and discovering, in a d...

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