Mr. Conrad specializes in the seamy underbelly of dysfunctionality that develops where business process and technology collide. Focusing in the high-end document management (SGML and XML) industry, he has worked with companies like SmithKline Beecham, Microsoft, Elsevier Scientific, Boeing, the Department of Energy, and the World Trade Center to structure and better leverage their knowledge assets. Along the way, he has provided services in such areas as:
Recently, he spent over two years working with Cisco Systems to implement publishing and metadata standardization infrastructures to support Cisco Connection Online.
His work has pulled him into two complementary directions, both dealing with the migration towards highly-granular, semantically-rich documentation and other knowledge artifacts. The first deals with the mechanics of modularizing and structuring documents and applying meaningful semantics. This has driven some fairly esoteric work in the areas of semantic modeling, knowledge representation, metadata management, and ontology development.
The second deals with the difficulty that organizations have both making investment decisions and reaching consensus on the value of and meanings embedded within their information and knowledge holdings. This has driven the development of a variety of strategic planning and social decision-making methodologies. Together, these two paths have led Mr. Conrad into the realm of organizational therapy, as these initiatives typically involve big budgets, big personalities, big opinions, and big conflict.