Availability: Retired

Contacts:

By Post:

Unit 38, 24-28 First Ave,
Blacktown,
Sydney, Australia 2148

By Email: mailto:john@mcghie.com.au

By Phone: +61 (0)4 1209 1410

So: What do I do?

Welcome to my personal web page. These days I am retired, living in Sydney, Australia.

I take this opportunity to wish you happiness and great success in your undertakings now and in the future. If you are interested in my career the way it was, Click here to download my former resume.

Documentation Engineering

I was the principal of McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd, a privately-held Australian company specialising in documentation engineering.

Documentation engineering begins with the premise that "Documentation that serves your needs is a piece of engineering, not a work of art" – which just happened to be my company slogan. That's what we really did: We analysed what the customer wanted people to be able to do after reading your documentation and we analysed what they already know. Then we designed a suite of information resources to bridge the gap.

Documentation engineering is normally practiced by a team of five or six people, including the documentation engineer, one or more subject matter experts, a business analyst, a project manager, an editor and a production editor.

Note that in my day, no Artificial Intelligence of any type existed. Today, its role would be confined primarily to research compilation.

The current AI platforms are Large Language Models (LLMs).  LLMs are very good at predicting what “an average person” might say on any given subject — recycling already-existing knowledge into useable text.

However, my customers required 100% accurate, completely reliable text that does not yet exist, to describe the use of products that do not yet exist.

Many such assignments have a safety- or security- or finance-related exposure where mistakes can kill people or have a catastrophic impact upon the survival of the customer’s business.

The likelihood that an AI application may hallucinate — make up an answer it doesn’t “know” — would present an unacceptable and unmanageable risk exposure.