Tech by LLM
Laura L Martin
Knowledge Management
and Repository Tools Experience.
My experience with software and documentation spans a variety of market sectors, including fintech (financial technology), the medical industry, and the energy sector.
Below are a few examples of my experience as a manager of documentation projects, particularly with using ECM software.
The Beginning
My first forays into documentation creation and management began in the late 1980s in New York City - first with my own small company (Martin Enterprises), and then with my first job as a technical writer at Merrill Lynch. My project management experience, and experience with ECM (enterprise content management) systems, began in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with Bankers Trust, Merrill Lynch, and several fintech startups.
Rising Experience with Content Management Systems
In the late 1990s to early 2000s, I began to gain experience in more structured document and content management solutions. Some projects utilized traditional methods of simple databases and/or a defined hierarchy in shared drives. Other projects rode the wave of rapidly-evolving ECM software products, which functionalized - and in some cases automated - taxonomy development and definition, and metadata tagging. It was also in the late 1990s that I began developing internet websites for advertising small businesses and individuals, as well as corporate intranet websites as content repositories.
Product Manager of a Document Management System
In 2005, I was tapped to be the Product Manager for a massive document management system used by over 10,000 employees at Merrill Lynch in New York City. The in-house product, known as Knowledge Exchange, was built on Livelink, an OpenText product. The system held hundreds of thousands of documents and other pieces of content, with multi-level permissioning, and complex permissioning-inheritance capabilities. My role was much broader than just product management. It involved end-to-end management of the service offering, from overseeing the development and deliverables of product customizations requested by users, to user support, to user training and more. For information on accomplishments in this role, see Slashing the Support Ticket Queue.
Project Management, Managing Migrations
In 2006, I was hired as a Vice President at Merrill Lynch, to work in the Advanced Content Engineering group, which hosted an internal ECM service offering built on Documentum. I oversaw various projects, including the migration of content created by a financial analyst group from DocuShare to Documentum. I also oversaw the development of system customizations requested by that group. Additionally, I began to design and develop SharePoint sites for content storage and management for the group's internal information.
Project Management for Existing Content,
Knowledge Manager for Development of New Repository
In 2011, I was hired by an engineering firm to write processes and procedures, and help to organize and manage documentation (tens of thousands of documents) for a client in the energy sector. The client was Southern Company, which owns power plants (coal, gas, hydro and solar) across most of the Southeastern United States (100+ plants). I served on the Southern Company project for 9 years, working on processes and procedures for all the power plants. I also spent a year in a lead project management role at this engineering firm, developing and building a data warehouse in SharePoint for the firm’s CSU group, which was in charge of power plant commissioning and plant startup projects. For information on accomplishments in this role, see Speed Up Searching Inside.
Welcome to the Wiki
In the 2020s, I began to gain experience in wiki-based content management. Products like MediaWiki and Confluence were becoming the tools of choice for many companies for housing their internal documentation. With these tools, my roles expanded to involve not only content migration and content management, but also the ability to design the repositories' structure and navigation to build multiple pathways to access content.
In 2020, I managed a documentation project for CloudFrame, a software firm specializing in mainframe software modernization. I worked to migrate content from Microsoft Word into a wiki built with the MediaWiki product. The version we were using did not include the GUI editor plug-in, so the formatting for each page in the wiki was hand-coded by me, using MediaWiki syntax and HTML.
I designed the navigation, the layout of all pages, and the interlinking between pages. I redesigned some images which illustrated the workings of the product. I developed a taxonomy, and applied metadata and category tagging. I met regularly with developers and the Chief Architect to gather more information for the wiki, which was used internally by company employees, as well as clients in proof-of-concept trials.
Knowledge Management for Intranet Wiki Websites
In 2021, I was hired as a consultant to manage a documentation project for LPL Financial, migrating content from Word to Confluence. In 2022, I was brought onboard as an Assistant Vice President, Knowledge Manager in Technology, and I began to develop a far broader scope of responsibility.
In the Knowledge Manager role, both as a consultant and employee, I began to develop an overall strategy for growing a robust KM culture at LPL. I began implementing the core philosophies and methodologies I had developed over my career. This involved best practices and paradigms for storage, access, navigation, taxonomy and metadata tagging, which I updated and modified to leverage the unique characteristics of wiki architecture.