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Technical Documentation, the new outsourcing powerhouse

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CIOL Bureau
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Dr. Annapoorna Ravichander

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The IT boom is fuelling the growth in technical documentation in India. Technical documentation connects the use of complex technologies, products and processes with the people who use these.

As today's world depends increasingly on high-tech products and services, every innovation creates a demand for new documentation. User guides, technical reports, maintenance procedures, assembly instructions, project proposals and quality manuals are among the many documents now required by business users.

In this new world of highly technical information to be presented to an ever-increasing number of users information management becomes as important as communication management. High quality technical documentation is a necessity and is required in fields as diverse as computer hardware and software, chemistry, aerospace industry, robotics, finance, consumer electronics, biotechnology.

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Technical documentation is therefore one of the emerging knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) sub-sectors that have huge potential in terms of employment, outsourcing, and revenue. It is so since technical documentation creation combines well with the Indian software industries mature development and outsourcing process. High quality technical documentation opens up a range of opportunities for India based companies to address the world market.

One of the largest challenges for the technical documentation industry is that though the requirements from technical documentation are mature the supply is still quite limited. This is meant from both a quantity and technology perspectives. While a large part of the technical documentation is not be very visible as it is embedded in the software revenue figure, it is estimated that the number of technical authors across India would be approximately 3500- 4500. This puts the total value of technical documentation developed in India at the present to be approximately $ 70 - $100 Million. While this is a far cry from the total potential market approximated at upto 2.5% of software developed in India - over a 5 yr window this will be pegged in excess of $ 1 Billion, it is still a significant and rapidly growing market.

The interesting thing is that in a Billion dollar market the largest players should be approximately $ 70 -$ 100 million. In the Indian landscape this is so far not a reality because (a) most large documentation development teams are captive i.e. they produce documentation for their parent organizations (b) there are few large and established documentation plays and (c) there is huge gap between supply and demand and the demand latent since the market does not know how to meet it – since there are very few institutions that provide international quality education in technical documentation.

In most developed countries technical authors are created by Graduate/Post Graduate/Doctoral courses in Professional Writing. In India however the educations scene is nascent with only a couple of Universities in Pune and Pondicherry providing diploma courses. There have been other trainings available for the last couple of years but they are typically non-standardized, inconsistent and indifferent quality. One of the notable exceptions has been The Writers Block (TWB) which has created its own Certification programs as a benchmark in training. The Director of Training at TWB, Dr. Annapoorna Ravichander says “While TWB is a young company we are a serious technical documentation company founded by people with more than 40 hrs of rock solid technical documentation experience. We have put this experience to use by creating programs that are valued by employers. Our quality imperative is endorsed by the fact that more than 150 leading software companies hire directly on the basis of these programs”. 

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