Content management and a self-service society: Identifying and solving a key problem of organizational writing

Writing functions are increasingly distributed across an organization. This is true because contemporary “knowledge organizations” are by necessity writing-intensive organizations, but it is also true because functions that once fell to professional writers are now tasked to professionals who must write. In this paper, we report focused findings from a 3-year workplace study project designed to understand the effects of the introduction of a content management system (CMS) on the writing practices in an administrative office at a large organization. We argue based on these findings for increased attention to enabling forms of flexibility that might enable writers to innovate new tools in response to their social and cultural needs of the environments in which they write.