News & Events
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CM Strategies Conference
The Center for Information-Development Management is excited to bring you the 2004
Content Management Strategies conference to take place on April 19–20, in San Francisco, California.
Register Today
JoAnn Hackos Workshop Series
Seminars in Usable Design has changed its name. More information here.
View the new website.
Astoria White paper
Read about The Strategic Business Value of Structured Document Management
Best Practices Newsletter
CIDM Members: you can now search the Newsletter Archives online
You can purchase the Best Practices
newsletter online even if you aren't a CIDM member. The subscription costs $99 per
year. For subscribers outside the US, the cost is $109 USD.
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Upcoming Workshops
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The CIDM sponsors the following workshops.
Sign up now:
Structured Writing for Single Sourcing
JoAnn Hackos, PhD,
March 18–19
Morrisville, NC
Managing Your Documentation Projects
William Hackos, Jr., PhD,
March 30–31
Waterloo, ON
June 16–17
San Diego, CA
Minimalism: Creating manuals that people will use
JoAnn Hackos, PhD,
May 19–20
Seattle, WA
Choosing your Content Management Tools
Tina Hedlund,
May 19–20
Boston, MA
User and Task Analysis for Information Design
William Hackos, Jr., PhD,
May 27–28
Houston, TX
Offshore Outsourcing
JoAnn Hackos, PhD,
June 10–11
Denver, CO
XML for Writers
Tina Hedlund,
March 29–30
Oakland, CA
June 16–17
Dallas, TX
For more information on these and other workshops,
visit the JoAnn Hackos Workshop Series Web site
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Making the Executives Play the Game
JoAnn Hackos, PhD
CIDM Director
www.infomanagementcenter.com
Phillip Armour, VP of Corvus International, had a brilliant and cruel idea. In conducting a three-day workshop to teach executives about software, he gave them the task of creating software themselves—just to see what it felt like. The first day of the course was predictable enough, consisting of a lecture about the software-development process. Attendees included executives from marketing, finance, manufacturing, and even a corporate counsel. Their goal was to learn about the software-development activities in companies that are not in the software business or at least don’t see themselves that way.
Read
the article
More articles
Innovator’s Forum Update
Solutions Must Deliver Outcomes to the User Context
More on Offshoring
When Will Outsourcing Stop?
Christmas Gifts and New Year’s Resolutions
Innovator’s Forum Update
Katherine Brennan Murphy
Principal, Tapestry Communications
www.tapestrycomm.com
During our January 7th Innovator’s Forum meeting, we discussed the best way to
communicate our vision both inside our groups and within the larger organizations.
JoAnn facilitated our discussion by taking us through a draft presentation entitled
“The Tech Writer’s Life in a Content-Management World: A Vision of Success.”
The group generally felt that this storytelling approach might work well for
their staffs and that it did begin to focus attention on how the changes affect
each member of their teams.
Read the article
Solutions Must Deliver Outcomes to the User Context
Susan Harkus
Independent
Driven by a great desire to deliver value to clients, the Department embarked on a “Listening to Users” program and commissioned a tribe of consultants to conduct many, many, many focus groups across the length and breadth of the land.
Read the article
More on Offshoring
William Hackos, Jr., PhD
Vice President, Comtech Services, inc.
In this election year, offshoring is becoming a hot political topic. We’ve noticed that everyone, not just the high-tech community, is getting involved. On Tuesday, January 6, an op-ed article in the New York Times by Senator Charles Schumer (New York) and Paul Craig Roberts (Assistant Treasury Secretary under Reagan) addresses the issue of offshoring. They report that it is incorrect to link offshoring with “Free Trade.” Historically, free trade relates to the sale of products from one country to another. Free trade encourages each country to sell those products, which it produces with its own resources (factors of production) to other countries with minimal interference by the governments of those countries. The theory is that countries will specialize, depending on what they do best, and everyone in the world will have the advantage of the cheapest and highest quality products. In the theory of free trade, everyone benefits.
Read the article
When Will Outsourcing Stop?
Tina Hedlund
Senior Consultant, Comtech Services, Inc.
If a company doesn’t earn enough to make a profit, it either has to increase revenues or cut expenses. In these days of economic downturns and disintegrating markets, many companies have decided to cut expenses to stay afloat and survive. A very popular way to cut expenses has been to outsource IT and technical writing functions to areas of the world that charge much less for the same services.
Read the article
Christmas Gifts and New Year’s Resolutions
Vesa Purho
Development Manager, Nokia
The holiday seasons are already over when you read this article but I still want to give you a gift for Christmas. When the times are tough and we have fewer and fewer resources for doing our work, it is easy to neglect planning and dive in immediately doing “real work.” So my gift to you all is having time to plan.
Read
the article
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Feedback
Have you found this issue useful? Got a great story idea? We’d like your input
and suggestions. Email our editor, Jen Linton, at
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The Center for Information-Development Management
The Center for Information-Development Management (CIDM) is an
organization of information-development, training, and support
managers across the United States and internationally. The CIDM
is directed by Dr. JoAnn Hackos, international leader in the management
of the design, development, and dissemination of information to
customers and employees. Under her leadership, the CIDM conducts
benchmark studies among member organizations and elsewhere, sponsors
research into information development and its management, and
gathers and disseminates results and resources through newsletters,
the Web, seminars, two annual conferences, and research white papers.
The CIDM facilitates the sharing of information among the most
skilled managers in the information industry.
If you are interested in reading more in-depth articles, you
should consider subscribing to the Best Practices newsletter at
www.infomanagementcenter.com/masterindex.shtml.
©2004 by The Center for Information-Development Management. All rights reserved.
Tel. (303) 232-7586
Fax. (303) 232-0659
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