I'm back

Well, it has been a busy 6 months since I wrote my last blog. In the meantime I have visited two conferences and worked out some interesting stuff about the topic of using semantic technologies in documentation. I will post my ideas in the coming weeks.

What did I work on? I was hired by Be Informed to create an overall knowledge infrastructure - in models. You can see a part of it on their website: http://www.beinformed.nl/. Untill the end of the year I will be working on this.

In January 2009 I will start as a Senior Information Advisor at USG People The Netherlands. After 12 years of working as a consultant in the ICT world, this is a welcome change. The core business of USG People is employment services and I will be working in their internal ICT department and advising the management of the operating companies on their ICT plans and projects.

USG People is a specialized provider of employment services in Europe, focusing on the market segments general and specialist temporary employment, professional secondment and projects, HR services and customer care. We provide this range of services through our independent operating companies. Our companies are active in thirteen European countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland. USG People shares are listed on the stock exchange NYSE Euronext Amsterdam. (Source: http://www.usgpeople.com/)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using the Golden Circle Model in your resume and LinkedIn profile

Image
The last three years I worked as a (senior) business consultant and information architect at software company Be Informed in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. We worked on an amazing product, a ground breaking model-driven business process platform. And my job was to explain the possibilities of this platform to various audiences. The Be Free program, which I launched in September 2013 was a marketing campaign that targeted on making a wider group of people familiar with the product. The campaign was a great success and I had the feeling that I was really helping people in proving their ideas to their customers and managers. But the interaction was on-line and from a distance, never close enough to really understand their business goals and issues.  The sudden end of my contract with Be Informed, forced me to rethink my professional goals and ambitions. What do I really want? Do I want to be a product marketer, focused on 'pushing' a product? Or do I want to be a business cons
Read more

Improve Product and Brand engagement through smart documentation - A White Paper about the challenge of creating user-centric documentation

Image
For most product manufacturers, delivering adequate documentation is a constant challenge. The increasing complexity of products and the stricter regulations for product documentation often lead to extensive documentation sets with 500+ pages manuals on-line or in print. The question is: how effective is all this documentation? Smart, user-centric documentation Users can be overwhelmed by long, jargon-loaded user manuals, and frustrated by a lack of clear answers. When customers don’t find a solution, blame inevitably falls on the product and the company. Bad documentation - incomplete, unclear, out of date - creates a negative engagement with products and brands. Figure 1. Smarter documentation asks users what they need to know Smart documentation leads users to success and satisfaction. These are the users who share their positive experience with family and friends, and convince them to become customers in turn. Using semantic technology, we can create the smart document
Read more

Laying the foundation for an effective article

Image
In this series of articles you can follow my process in writing a new article on Robotics. In the  first episode  I explained my approach towards writing, the  second article  focussed on setting the goal, choosing an audience and finding the right approach. Now that we have a clear vision on goal, audience and approach, it is time to start setting up the structure. Writing requires a structured approach Writing is all about structuring your thoughts. And although this is a process that most of us do in a more implicit way, it sometimes helps - and is actually best practice - to write down your structure on a very high level. The goal of my article is to change the opinion of the reader towards accepting Robotics as a something that brings value to a business and motivates employees, rather than being limited to reducing FTE. So the structure of my article should be build up around the motives used to build up this case. As I want my article to be short and sharp, I don't
Read more