Since I last crafted a legitimate post to this blog, I have enjoyed several months of changes, excitement, bombardment and general much ado about everything. Here are a few highlights:

1) Finished my first Quarter of LIS in one piece.

2) Spent a week in the Dominican Republic leading a Men’s Conference with 3 other men.

3) Was promoted to a new role at Compassion as the Enterprise Applications Architect. I am currently ramping down on day-to-day development work and ramping up (quickly!) into that job. It’s been a lot of fun so far, except the part where I tried to work on all tasks old and new for about two months.

4) Spent 3 days (starting the day after I got back into the country) in San Diego at the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit. That was a fun way to get started on the new job, esp. as I got to attend with my new boss.

5) Decided not to take class during the summer Quarter (see #3), but I am getting ready to start the Fall Quarter on September 12. I’ll be taking two courses:

• The Corporate Information Environment
• Legal Issues in Knowledge Management

I am looking forward to those. Not so much the cost of the textbooks, but I am looking forward to the classes themselves.

6) Compassion is at the end of a building expansion and parts of the IT department have been cube and office-less this week. One good friend also managed to find a way to move into a new house this week, I think he’s been sleeping at Panera Bread. As a side note, it’s too bad that good ideas always come to me too late because it would have been cool to have everyone that has been misplaced to take pictures of where they were working this week. I alone have worked from:

• My boss’s office - He’s on vacation this week.
• The World Prayer Center at New Life Church (Colorado Springs)
• The Lobby of New Life Church
• Panera Bread
• My house (This can be further sub-categorized into: the dining room table, the couch, a recliner and on the deck… I am a restless creature)

And that about catches you up to date (assuming you’re still reading). The good news about the move this week is that it has given me a chance to catch up on some much needed research, reading, brainstorming and planning for the new job (with a little coding thrown in).

Some more in relation to my new job: Obviously, this blog was created to be a place where I threw half-baked opinions about UX design against the wall. That was fun for a while, but then my ADD took me to some content about developer stuff related to all the goodies from last years’ DevConnections conference. That was also fun for a while.

All that being said, I think that this blog has never really had the unique personality that it needed to. What’s cool is that my new job has created some interesting synergies between that developer in me (still there Ken) and the guy that thinks that UX matters. Case(s) in point:

1) When I attended the Gartner EA Summit, I heard a great talk by Harry Pierson called Beyond SOA: Understanding the User’s Role in Architecture. Hey, that sounds like something I would enjoy… That was the first sign that I may not have strayed to far after all.
2) I found out after I got back and I was poking around that Simon Guest had given a talk at TechEd entitled Putting the User Back into SOA that I managed to grab the slides for. The second sign… (BTW, that link does not link to the slides themselves. I can’t seem to find them anymore, nor do I remember how I got them. For the next best thing, you can head over to this link where Simon links to an ARCast episode he did with Ron Jacobs on the same topic.)
3) A couple of weeks ago, Simon posted once again about UX. This time, he was announcing a Forum discussion he will be hosting in California on “…the intersection of Architecture and User Experience.” The third and final sign…

This was an exciting set of circumstances for me because I felt in my gut that those old passions were still important and had a place in my new role. This was just some great confirmation. The SOA aspect of this was especially interesting as some aspects of an Enterprise SOA have been rolled out at Compassion and we will continue to look for ways to use it to craft a larger Integration and BPM Platform. For more info on Compassion’s SOA Implementation, Dan Fox, our resident Solutions Architect, Microsoft MVP and all-around genius has been posting about it at length. Check it out here.

So what does all this mean then? It means that I will continue to blog (or start depending on your definition of ‘continue.’) about UX, but from a slightly different perspective. I will continue to talk about UI design and UX for the web, but I will also begin to incorporate some SOA, SaaS, BPM, Architecture and even Knowledge Management ’stuff.’ If you actually read this far, my hope is that you would either a) stick around and continue reading what I write; or b) start today. I’m no expert on any of these subjects, but I love to read, write and discourse on nearly everything.

So here’s to a new phase in the journey. Stick around… let’s hope I find reason to turn my entry in your FeedBurner client bold a bit more often.

UX, BPM, SOA, SaaS, Architecture, Gartner, LIS

So I’m not going to say much about the fact that I haven’t written anything since January. Suffice it to say that enough has been going on to keep me from taking time to post thoughts from the swirling maelstrom in my head. For the two readers that have managed to hang on, let’s hope I can get more consistent again. (Unless I write crap, of course. No one wants that)

With that out of the way, I wanted to write a bit about a new experience. After a six year reprieve, I have returned to academia to pursue my Masters Degree. Two weeks ago, I started the Library and Information Science program at the University of Denver and will pursue the Knowledge Management concentration.

Three weeks ago, I had my orientation for the program. Since this is a Library Science degree, a good deal of the content in the orientation was library-specific (jobs, internships, other foci of the program). I must admit that as a software developer and IT person, I wanted to distance myself from this kind of talk because I wasn’t there to learn how to be a librarian (condescending and conceited, I know). But at one point in the conversation, the director of the program said this:

As Librarians, our job is to connect people with information

And I thought this:

Wait a minute, that sounds like my job as an IT person…

Or not. I realized at that moment that Librarians have a better handle on what Information Technology is all about than most IT people do. Think about it: Librarians do connect people with information. The format, presentation, color and flavor are simply a means to an end. Librarians will argue at length about how the architecture, structure and layout of a particular library is pitiful, passable or peculiar, but only in the context of how it hinders or enables the goal of a connecting people with information.

In theory, we should be about the same thing in IT. But as a software developer, I know that that is often not the case. IT has unfortunately morphed into a group of professionals connecting people with technology, not information. I say this because we spend the majority of our time talking in technology terms, rather than information terms. We rave about frameworks and widgets and architectures and IDEs and all the clever things that we can make an application do, and in the shuffle, we neglect the people and their need for the information that our applications are in existence to work with. It’s high time that we get back to our information roots.

And thus, I remembered why I wanted to pursue this degree in the first place. And I felt good about saying “I’m in graduate school to become a librarian.” Chances are, I will never work in a library, nor leave technology. But the Information Technology world (and the web in particular) needs more librarians. And that as why I am there.

LIS, KM, Library Science, DU, University of Denver, Knowledge Management, User Experience, UX