Dick Youngblood at the Star Tribune wrote up a nice profile of Dashe & Thomson:

When I introduced you to Marilyn Dashe and Jean Thomson 20 years ago, they were grossing $500,000 a year as writing consultants, helping clients unsnarl such syntactical transgressions as this doozie from a manager at a local food company:

Seeking suggestions for upgrading handling equipment for a new product line, he wrote, “Due to the upcoming project submission to support the system upgrade … it is becoming eminent to identify all capital needs required for this process. So as not to preclude your functional interest in this matter, please input on product-driven recommendations for the above concern.”

Grammatical felonies like that soon led the two former college composition teachers beyond business-writing seminars to a thriving business translating engineerspeak into comprehensible instruction manuals for consumer electronics and computer software.

So what’s new with these champions of grammatical clarity? Alas, I’m crestfallen to report that Dashe & Thomson Inc. (D&T), now minus the retired Dashe, has gone over to the dark side of what they once condemned as “diction inflation.”

D&T now indulges in “process integration” and “change management,” not to mention “knowledge mapping” and something we geezers might look into: “knowledge retention.”

But who am I to criticize? The company is on course to gross $6 million this year, up 20 percent from 2005, after a recession-induced run of flat sales dating to 2002. And its client list reads like a blurb from the Fortune 500 list, including such local worthies as General Mills and Medtronic.

What does it do to earn its keep? D&T has moved up the communications food chain to develop customized training programs — both Web-based and instructor-led — that help corporate clients adapt to increasingly sophisticated business software.

More significant, it also helps clients redesign existing business processes to fit most efficiently with new software and then develops pre-training programs to prepare employees for those changes in familiar business procedures.

“In the past, technology spending was less effective because processes weren’t changed or users were not fully informed about how new software would change their jobs,” said Thomson, the company’s CEO. “This led to frustration and resistance.”

The cost: $65 billion in “tech overspend” in the late 1990s, according to George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., technology research firm.

“Injecting technology into a company without process and organizational change creates waste and chaos,” Colony wrote in a 2002 article.

This part of D&T’s business, which generates 80 percent of its revenue, has been growing rapidly since 2004. That’s when the company cut a deal to do all training for clients of MatrixOne, a Boston product-design software company.

That relationship will generate about 30 percent of 2006 revenue, Thomson said. More important, it is the foundation for D&T’s move into the national software-training market after nearly 25 years of focus on the Upper Midwest.

To that end, Thomson said, D&T will open at least three regional offices in the next five years to support MatrixOne clients and to begin marketing to other corporate prospects. The first three sites will be New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

The consulting and training business recently led D&T into an even more-arcane area, something called “knowledge management.”

“As the training business grew, the question of where and how to manage the training guides and other corporate information quickly emerged,” Thomson said. “Our clients kept telling us, ‘We don’t know what we know.’ ” So D&T now develops systems that simplify the task of electronically organizing, storing, retrieving and updating corporate information, a business that will account for about 15 percent of 2006 revenue.

In addition, D&T recently added a testing and validation service to assure clients that their software is in compliance with health care privacy, Food and Drug Administration tracking and Sarbanes-Oxley record-keeping requirements.

Thomson, 57, doesn’t plan to be around to see all the growth these changes promise, however. In 2005 she began selling stock to employees Jon Matejcek, named last year as D&T president, and Matthew Mignogna, vice president of sales and marketing, with the idea of selling out and retiring in 2008.

Her plans for retirement? Considering the hazing I gave her because of the aforementioned diction inflation, Thomson said she’ll spend part of her time “searching for the path back to the bright side of grammatical clarity.”