Yesterday, one of the members of our team told me about her interview with a subject matter expert the day before. Because of his experience with the processes with which a new application is going to assist, this fellow was asked by the project team to be the SME. When my coworker went to talk to him, he said, “I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time. I’ve looked at the system only once.”

There was a fundamental problem there: The SME thought that his job was to know the application inside and out. My teammate began asking him questions about the process, and they talked for two hours.

I’m guessing that when this guy was asked to be the subject matter expert, no one told him what that meant. He assumed that it meant he was supposed to become the expert on the application. That will come later as he actually uses it after its launch. As a SME, his role is to provide the technical communicator with the understanding of the business processes that the application complements. It’s the interaction designer’s—and the technical communicator’s—job to be the expert on the product.

The moral of the story is plain: Help the SME understand that his role is to help you learn the business processes or other matters that relate to the product you’re documenting. There are other people who can tell you about the product itself. Without that fundamental understanding, a SME may start on the wrong foot and provide irrelevant information or little at all. Our team member improved the situation by asking the right questions to get her SME talking about the processes.

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