Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
August/September 2007
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter August/September 2007 |
The August meeting is on Wednesday, August 15, 2007, from 6:00 pm to 8:30 pm at the Elephant & Castle in San Francisco's financial district. For details about the location and instructions for purchasing tickets, visit www.stc-sf.org/stc-meetings.htm.
Whatever technical communicators have been doing, we've not been achieving all that well. According to studies of technical communication departments, we are not getting the work that we seek. We are not perceived as the champions of users in the organization—usability groups get that responsibility. Web and intranet sites are developed by Web developers rather than technical communicators.
The news isn't all gloom and doom—many technical communicators are finding ways to get the work we seek. What are these people successfully doing?
That’s what this interactive session explores. Specifically, it identifies the needed skills and the sales strategies that work, helps participants develop their own action plans and, in the process, helps participants seriously consider what success means.
Barbara A. Giammona has been a technical communicator for more than 20 years and a manager of technical communicators for more than 15. After seven years as a vice president at Morgan Stanley in New York City, she is currently the manager of corporate IT communications for McKesson Corporation.
Barbara’s article “The Future of Technical Communication: How Innovation, Technology, Information Management, and Other Forces Are Shaping the Future of the Profession,” published in Technical Communication, the Society's journal, in August 2004, was the recipient of the Frank R. Smith Award for Distinguished Technical Communication.
Barbara is an STC Associate Fellow and a member of the San Francisco Chapter STC and the Orange County Chapter STC, where she plans to relocate.