Associates

The CIDM Associates are information-development industry experts. The Associates serve on the Best Practices editorial board, write articles for the newsletter, moderate chats through the listservs, and provide their services at a 10% discount to the CIDM member community.

Mark Baker, Analecta Communications, Inc.

Mark Baker has studied methods for improving the efficiency of content creation for 15 years. His former positions include Manager of Information Engineering Methods at Nortel and Director of Communications for SGML pioneer OmniMark Technologies.

Mark was named one of twenty leaders to watch in the content management industry for 2004 by CMS Watch. He is currently president of Analecta Communications, a writing and consulting company in Ottawa, Canada.

Julie Bradbury, Independent Consultant

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.

Bill Gearhart, Independent Consultant

Bill Gearhart is a management consultant and instructor specializing in information development, strategic planning, and operational efficiency. In collaborating with his clients and students, Bill draws on nearly 20 years of experience in developing information and managing operations, including market leadership, customer experience, customer advocacy, usability, technical communication, project management, and software infrastructure development.

Prior to working with Comtech, Bill spent 15 years in the enterprise software industry, most recently as a director of operations for BMC Software, Inc. After starting his career as an information developer at a variety of manufacturing and consulting companies, Bill held several management positions in information development, usability, software engineering, project management, and support services.

Bill is a prior member of the Center for Information Development Management (CIDM) advisory council and has actively participated in the annual CIDM Best Practices Conference since its inception. He's a senior member of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) and has presented numerous times at local, regional, and international conferences.

Bill's interests lie in listening to, analyzing, and clearly defining the challenges faced by his clients and students and then drawing out their strengths and unique talents to address the issues. He has a personable and engaging style and enjoys sharing his experiences with others while creating a shared vision of success for all stakeholders. Bill holds a B.S. in technical writing and editing from Carnegie Mellon University.

Susan Harkus, Independent Consultant

Susan has 15 years experience in web site, user interface, and online information design, including knowledge bases.

Since 2000, Susan has explored the implications of designing for a new generation of information users—users who have little time to read and even less time to learn before they are challenged to perform and deliver.

As a result, her design work has focused on developing online architectures and content that engage and deliver value to information users, and that encourage the take up and use of online information, services, and tools.

Sue King, Independent Consultant

Sue King has been a corporate executive with IBM, Apple, Dell and Cadence Design Systems. She has a broad range of experience in both hardware and software product development—from the systems architecture and product marketing through design, development and test. She has also led large worldwide software consulting and customer support organizations. She has been responsible for long range technology and product strategies in a variety of key business areas.

Sue has held various positions overseeing both information and training development and delivery. Sue has recently overseen professional training development projects emphasizing "learn by doing" techniques and designed to improve professional training effectiveness in complex technologies. Both Sue's recent and collective experiences have led her to become particularly interested in innovations in information simplification and effectiveness as a key leverage point for future technology.

Sue consults in the following primary areas: strategic planning and assessment, planning migration of innovation to product adoption, change management, and training development. She has worked with Joel Barker for almost 30 years and is an authorized consultant for Barker's Strategy Matrix® and Implications Wheel® processes.

Jaap van der Meer, Translation Automation User Society (TAUS)

Jaap van der Meer is director of TAUS. Jaap van der Meer is a language industry pioneer and visionary, who started his first translation company in The Netherlands in 1980. In 1987 his company INK published the first desktop term extraction and translation memory software. He inspired and funded the founding meetings of the LISA organization for the localization industry and he co-founded the SAE TopTec Multilingual Communications Conference for the automotive industry. He was president and CEO of ALPNET. He is also cofounder and partner of Cross Language n.v., a consultancy and system integration company specialized in language technology. Jaap van der Meer is a member of the Localization World management team, a regular speaker at conferences and author of many articles about technologies and translation and globalization trends.

Jonathan Price, Independent Consultant

Author of How to Write a Computer Manual and The Trail Guide to America Online, and co-author with Henry Korman of How to Communicate Technical Information, Dr. Jonathan Price has coached documentation teams in his object-oriented approach to creating hardcopy and electronic information systems for major computer manufacturers in the US and Japan. Dr. Price has authored two dozen books, including two books on technical writing from major publishers, an academic study of electronic outlining, and two other books on writing. He is the co-author of Hot Text: Writing that Works on the Web with his wife Lisa, from New Riders (Pearson). He has assembled and edited special issues about organizing information for the web for two major journals in technical communication, Technical Communication, and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. He has worked professionally in technical communication for 20 years, with an A to Z of clients such as Action, Adobe, Apple, Broderbund, Cadence, Canon, Cisco, Cray, Dell, Epson, eToys, Fujitsu, GO, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Informix, KBKids, Kodak, Lotus, Matsushita, Mindscape, Mitsubishi, NEC, Nikon, Oracle, Peoplesoft, Qronos, Relational, Ricoh, Seybold, Sprint, Sun, Symantec, and Zycad. For a high-level view of his approach to restructuring, see his articles on Structuring Complex Interactive Documents and Complexity Theory as a Way of Understanding our Role in the World Wide Web at www.theprices.com.

Jonathan Price has a Doctorate in Fine Arts from Yale, and a BA from Harvard. He has taught at the undergraduate and graduate level for New York University, the University of Bridgeport, Rutgers, the University of New Mexico, and New Mexico Tech. He has also taught extension classes for Bentley, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UCSC. He frequently gives workshops and talks at meetings of the Society for Technical Communication, in which he is an Associate Fellow.