By David C. Leonard, Ph.D., Assistant Dean, Mercer University, School of Engineering, Atlanta Graduate Programs

Graduate education in Engineering and other related disciplines is undergoing a transformation and an expansion. Part of this transformation is a result of a new discipline that is shaping the way knowledge itself is being disseminated. This new discipline, defined for years as technical communication in academia, is beginning to be referred to in industry as knowledge management. Knowledge management involves primarily three areas: 1) Business Transformation, 2) Organizational Learning, and 3) Web Enablement.

Business tranformation is different from Process Reengineering for it is less concerned with departmental cost reductions and more concerned with spearheading enterprise-wide learning, innovation, and the application of breakthrough digital technologies to create new products and services.

Organizational Learning is a result of an enterprise reaching a point of metacognition, of being self-aware and conscious of its own processes, decisions, and skills of its knowledge workers. In the recent past, many pre-digital companies have performed activities not conscious of what they were doing, not able to step back and analyze how they go about satisfying their customers.

With the rise of the digital economy, with the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web (Web Enablement mentioned above), enterprises are better able to disseminate and share information within and outside of the corporations on a global scale.

In the recent past, enterprises utilized data processing primarily to handle structured information to run the financial and accounting aspects of the business. With the rise of the Web and with the digitization of rich data types (Image, Audio, Video, Animation, 3D Graphics) and electronic document like objects (white papers, design documents, contracts, policies & procedures, technical specifications), enterprises are able to process unstructured knowledge objects and to shift their product focus from physical assets to knowledge assets. In the world of electronic work teams, engineers and other knowledge workers are manipulating bits more and atoms less.

Technical communicators working with computer hardware and software engineers provide the "digital" glue that help link the bits: the rich data types and the electronic document like objects mentioned above to the physical products (automobile, airplane, software programs) being created.

Many computer hardware and software engineers are not fully cognizant of the vast army of technical communicators who are helping move enterprises from the industrial age to the digital age by the creation of a vast library of electronic information or "knowledge packs" that support the products and services offered by the enterprise. As knowledge managers, our roles should be focused on the evolution of knowledge objects from analog to digital, from paper based information to indexed and catalogued electronic information.

Before Gutenberg, information was shared primarily by monks in medieval monasteries. Retrieval of this information was difficult, copying was laboriously slow, and cataloguing of information was virtually non-existent. After Gutenberg, information was published and disseminated more readily, but the cataloguing and indexing of information was still slow and laborious, making retrieval of the information needed difficult at best. In the more recent pre-digital age, the era of print publishing, analog media, and manual cataloging, what we encounter is a situation where these objects are not able to be easily manipulated by the computer. They are not easy to be catalogued, indexed, and shared.

In the current early digital age that we are working in, a vast array of unstructured digital information is available via the computer to be used by the enterprise. The problem is that most enterprises are choking on "infoglut" -- too much information that is not indexed, catalogued, and easily retrieved by the knowledge workers.

In the more mature phase of the digital age (we aren't there yet), infoglut will be alleviated as media objects are automatically catalogued, indexed, and "pushed" to the knowledge worker as needed.

At Mercer University in the School of Engineering in Atlanta, professional technical communicators are learning about the digital knowledge transfer aspects of their profession. They are taking via the internet graduate course modules in advanced technology (multimedia and hypermedia), knowledge development processes (usability evaluation, online information, digital libraries), and business issues (electronic work teams, internationalization and localization of technical information).

At Mercer University, graduate education (MSTCO) is moving far beyond the pre-Gutenberg phase of professors as fact pushers writing formulas on blackboards. Through active learning strategies that incorporate interacting with the Web, we are helping educate and train knowledge workers for the digital age. Just as with corporations who are required to innovate in order to survive, so too do we in graduate education need to innovate or else lose out to our competition.

For more information on the distance learning Master's degree program in Technical Communication Management, please browse our web site at

Dr. Leonard previously taught and developed graduate and undergraduate technical communication programs/courses at Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Maryland, and University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. In addition to previously writing books and numerous articles in the field, Dr. Leonard is co-author with Dr Patrick Dillon of IBM Corporation of the book, Multimedia and the Web from A to Z 2^nd Revised and Enlarged Edition, to be published later this year by Oryx Press (www.oryx.com). This book contains an introduction, 1,500 terms thoroughly defined, an acronym table, and an extensive annotated bibliography of 100 items.