What Ever Happened to the Transformation?

News from the Board

By Paula Berger
STC President

Quite often, STC members ask about the results of the Transformation. In an earlier issue of News & Notes, I promised to address this question, so I’m finally doing just that.

The "STC Transformation" was the name given to 3-year plan developed by the Board of Directors to change many aspects of STC to better meet the needs of today's technical communicators. The plan was quite ambitious; its goals included overhauling governance, membership, communication, education, communities, finance, and technology.

The Transformation officially kicked off in 2003 and ended in 2006. So, what happened? Did we achieve our goals?

Some of the changes in the Transformation plan were implemented pretty quickly—generally those that could be implemented primarily by the Board and the members. I won’t go into details here, but you should recognize these major changes that occurred early in the Transformation:

Membership—STC introduced new membership categories in 2005, and introduced global tiers a year later.
Governance—We have been phasing out STC's eight regions, and the role of director-sponsor has changed to that of director.
Communities—We have been steadily moving toward putting chapters and SIGs on an equal footing. Communities were also asked to recharter to ensure that they were addressing the needs of their members and the profession.

What about the rest of the Transformation initiatives—technology, finance, communication, education? Making major changes in those areas require very strong ties between the staff, the Board, and the members. Working out those ties slowed us down for a while. Over the last few years, strong leadership and support from the staff has enabled us to leap forward in all these areas.

So while the Transformation officially “ended” last year, the work laid out in those plans is still going strong! You’ll recognize many of our current initiatives as part of the original Transformation plan:

Technology—In October, the Board voted the funds needed to build an entirely new infrastructure for STC this year. This will allow STC to better support our staff, our communities, and our members.
Finance—New accounting systems and controls have recently been put in place to allow up-to-the-minute reporting and strong financial management.
Education—Our annual conference is being totally overhauled this year. Also, we hired a new Director of Education in 2006 and we’re looking at a range of new education programs to implement over the next year.
Communication—The Web site redesign is in full swing and we’ve added more online communication (like News & Notes). In addition, a task force will be looking at all our publications later in 2007 with an eye to upgrading them.
Communities—The Leadership Community Resource (LCR) has been developed to take over the sponsorship function formerly handled by the director-sponsors. Watch for the formal LCR launch at Leadership Day at the annual conference in Minneapolis.

So where are we today? We’ve achieved many of the goals laid out in the STC Transformation, and the rest have now been folded into the Strategic Plan we use to guide the actions of the Board and staff. One thing we learned over the last few years is that STC will always be in a state of transformation. It’s the only way we can meet the continually changing needs of our members and our profession. And each bit of progress continues our mission—supporting the profession and providing value to our members.