Julie Bradbury

Julie Bradbury recently retired from Cadence Design Systems where she led their Knowledge Transfer Organization for eight years. Cadence is the leading Electronic Design Automation company, producing tools, designs, and services for the chip industry. She describes her work as Cadence's Director of Knowledge Transfer as her "most challenging and exciting management position." Julie came to Cadence from Unisys where she managed the Camarillo facility Engineering Services group.

At Cadence, Julie and her management team responded to constant change in both organization and technology. Change management and people development were skills that Julie regularly practiced and are highly developed in her talented team. Under her direction, they drove information development and content management worldwide. Her team credits her with substantially improving the status, credibility, and impact of the publication organization.

As a leader with 23 years' experience in the computer industry, Julie believes, "to make good decisions and to lead the organization effectively, you must have a business perspective." She was one of the first publication managers to see the value of the Center for Information-Development Management (CIDM) membership. It gave her a way to efficiently get an industry-wide business perspective. Julie leveraged CIDM best practices, benchmarking participation, and JoAnn Hackos's expertise to position her organization for success with Cadence executives. Her participation allowed her to answer questions about how Cadence publications stacked up against the industry in resources and best practices.

The best practices of Julie's publications group included: building advanced content-management processes, automating document delivery to CD and Web locations, and aggressively prioritizing projects. "Customers wanted increased accuracy and richer content in our documentation. Our processes were taking too much time away from developing product information." She managed efforts to re-engineer the documentation delivery process, replacing a rigid proprietary system with a flexible browser-based one. She led the effort to move all the documentation into a repository and automate the document-build process, allowing writers to focus on content.

Julie has two Masters' degrees, one in management from the University of Redlands and the other in teaching from Webster University. Her Bachelor of Arts is from William Jewell College. She lives in Morgan Hill, California, with her husband and two happy felines.