Tech by LLM
Laura L Martin
Knowledge Management & More.
My knowledge management experience spans a variety of market sectors, including fintech (financial technology), the medical industry, and the energy sector. Below is a narrative summary of my work in knowledge/content management, product management, and more. For details, see my resume links page.
The Beginning (late 1980s)
My first forays into documentation creation and management began in the late 1980s in New York City - through consulting agencies - as well as my own small company (Martin Enterprises) - servicing clients in a variety of industries. In 1989, I was placed in my first job as a technical writer at Merrill Lynch.
Intro to ECM (1990s)
My project management experience, and experience with ECM (enterprise content management) systems, began in the late 1990s and early 2000s, at Bankers Trust, Merrill Lynch, and several fintech startups. Most of this work was performed as a consultant/contractor, through my own small consulting firm (LMA) or through other consulting agencies.
In those early days, my work consisted primarily of building user manuals in MS Word, which were distributed in print form. The audience for these manuals typically involved internal users or users at partner companies, and described how to use custom software solutions.
During this time, I also began to gain experience in more structured document and content management solutions. Some projects on which I worked utilized traditional methods of simple databases or merely well-defined hierarchies in a shared drive. Other projects rode the wave of rapidly-evolving ECM software products (DocuShare, Documentum, Livelink and others), which functionalized taxonomy development and definition, metadata tagging, and utilized layered permissioning schemata.
Intranet Websites (late 1990s/early 2000s and beyond)
While continuing to deliver content management projects using ECM systems, I also began to learn HTML, and started developing internet websites for small businesses and individuals, as well as corporate intranet sites which served as informational/educational vehicles and content repositories.
Product Management (mid 2000s)
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 (KX), was built with customizations on Livelink, an OpenText product. The system held hundreds of thousands of files, with multi-level/multi-faceted permissioning structures.
My role involved end-to-end management of the KX product/service offering, from overseeing the development and deliverables of product customizations requested by users, to user support, user training and more. My solution to the burgeoning trouble ticket queue I inherited when I began the position is described in this blog post: Slashing the Support Ticket Queue.
Content Management & Repository Migrations (mid 2000s and beyond)
In 2006, I was hired as a Vice President at Merrill Lynch, to work in the Advanced Content Engineering (ACE) group, which hosted an internal ECM service offering built on Documentum. I oversaw various projects, including the migration of content created by an internal financial analyst group from DocuShare to Documentum, and the development of system customizations requested by the analyst group. Additionally, I took it upon myself to design and develop SharePoint sites for content storage and management of the ACE group's team documentation.
Project Management, Documentation, and Content Management (2010s)
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 procedural documentation 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.
Wiki-Based Knowledge/Content Management (2020)
In 2020, 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.
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 with Cloud Solutions (2021 to present)
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.
As I had done at Merrill Lynch in 2005, I built a large internal knowledge site for LPL, but this time, in Confluence. The site houses hundreds of pages of information on knowledge management best practices and recommended paradigms for storage, access, navigation, taxonomy and metadata tagging, as well as how to apply those best practices and paradigms by using a blend of wiki architecture for collaboration and traditional web/cloud drive architecture for organization.