End of the job search

The job hunt is over. I'll start my new position on Monday! It was as quick a search as could be expected, given the state of the economy. More details to follow, after I've had a chance to settle in.

I'll be managing the visual UI of the company's applications, so I'm out of the voice user interface business now. That presents a dilemma for me, since the name of the blog is "Interactive Voice Response." I'll need to re-brand the blog. Anyway, it's a good problem to have.

Is "networking" just a different name for something else

I've been thinking a lot about this "networking" thing--the person-to-person kind. I think I've been doing a lot of it lately, although I'm not really clear on the definition. As far as I can tell, if you are working with people, doing your job successfully and people see it, and helping people when they need help, then you're networking. I think "networking" is just a fancy term for "doing the right thing" with respect to your business and personal relationships. Maybe there's more, but I'm missing it.

Service research: crossing the Valley of Death

I was talking to an acquaintance recently about the research he was doing on service delivery. The company he was doing the work for had invested heavily in research on services. Part of his job was to apply the research to the way new services were developed within his company's own business units. This turned out to be very difficult, more so than he had expected.

"All the business units want are just some software tool, not the process behind the tool. Not a new approach to service." His team would deliver a software tool, then were placed in the position of having to support it -- not the place you want to be if you're trying to do leading edge research in a new field.

The scenario is familiar to scientists who perform basic research on products. The new service research was falling into the Valley of Death, the space between great ideas generated by research and the development and commercialization of the idea. A lot of what is written about the Valley of Death focuses on lack of funding to commercialize ideas, but there's more to it than that. There's a great deal of skill needed to take a genuinely new idea or prototype and guide it through an organization to a point where it is ready to be commercialized and marketed. That skill is rare.

Service researchers, being new to the commercialization game, are learning what the product R&D folks have experienced already: that great ideas for new services don't sell themselves. Someone needs to guide the prototype service through the Valley of Death. This idea is so new that you won't find much written about the commercialization of new service research.

That's where I'd like to be, generating new ideas for services out of a research framework for delivering service, and then helping to commercialize the idea. But no one out there is hiring those sorts of people, since there's no recognition that a role like that should exist.

Studying for the PMP exam

In addition to my job hunt, I'm studying for the Project Management Professional (PMP) exam, a certification that is given by the Project Management Institute (PMI). It's a lot of material, but I've finished my Project Management class and I've been doing projects based on PMBOK for a few years, so I should be ready to go by the end of next month.

Bitten by the layoff bug

The orders to my company had been slowing for quite a while, so now I'm a laid-off knowledge worker. So, this blog will - in addition to discussing corporate culture and design - deal with my new job hunt.

Any leads for an experienced researcher and designer with an almost-MBA? Here's a summary of my background on LinkedIn.