Following is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of the first draft of "Designing Effective Information Support Systems".
JoAnne Hackos, in her book ‘Managing Your Documentation Project’, talks about the development of documentation systems within an organization.
Things start with some of the people doing their own documentation, some of the time, in a haphazard way.
People then start to develop some internal standards, and employ some documentation production and management specialists.
The organization then realizes that they can save time and money, and reduce customer complaints (both internal and external), if they formalize the whole business of documentation.
Imagine this formalization concept extending to the whole spectrum of information support – all manner of documentation, from the online help used by the telephone company call center staff to the user manual supplied with your new toaster. This is the way that the world is going – towards integrated information support, looked after by specialists.
There was a time where, in some software development areas, a set of standard documentation was produced for each product, regardless of what the product was or who was expected to use it. Thus we had situations where four kilogram (ten pound) paper manuals were being produced at great expense for computer operators who really only wanted one page of shortcut keys that they photocopied out and stuck to the side of their terminals. The rest of the manual made a great doorstop.
The knee-jerk reaction of “we have a system, therefore we need a user manual”, usually tacked on at the end of the project as punishment duty for junior software developers is over. We’re now living in web time, where integration of the information support professional into the project team is becoming more common.
Beyond this integration has to come holistic information support, where all necessary factors are considered (or as many of them as possible) prior to the design of the solution.