Technical and Business Content Developer

Rebecca is a writer, content developer, and trainer with over 15 years experience producing documentation and training materials for complex enterprise software applications such as telecom billing systems, messaging presence servers, and customer relationship management software. As a trainer, she has worked with account managers, professional services, channel partners, new hires, and customers to deliver industry-specific courses. As a graphic designer, she has created product brochures, presentations, and video storyboards to showcase products and projects. In addition to her work in the software industry, Rebecca consults to write business articles and white papers on a variety of OR/MS topics such as the use of expert systems for supply-chain optimization.

Since joining Expert Support, Rebecca has worked on a wide variety of projects, including:

• Hewlett-Packard—Collaboration with analysts in HPÕs Strategic Planning and Modeling Group (SPaM) to draft and submit business articles describing successful project work in the area of supply chain management and optimization. SPaM's mission is to apply OR/MS techniques to take the guesswork out of current planning processes, analyze cost/benefit trade-offs of various types of decisions, and deliver profit robustness over a broad range of uncertainty in a volatile and unpredictable market. Works with authors to create internal white papers and concept papers describing the theory behind new planning tools, to gain widespread acceptance of those tools. Topics include applying financial risk-management techniques to procurement and capacity planning, design for supply chain management (DFSCM), inventory-driven cost (IDC) reduction, supply-chain network design, and applying statistical analysis techniques to historical forecast/actual data in order to measure forecast accuracy. This requires content creation, coordination among multiple authors, and ensuring compliance with author guidelines from trade journals and academic publications.
• Clarify, Inc.—Documentation for the mobile component of Clarify's Front Office sales workflow management and customer care solution. Included Administrator, Client, and Installation documentation.
• Excite/@Home Networks—Created document templates for use by internal development groups in accordance with development process. Identified and documented the development process. Produced API documentation for @Home's cable business partners, who need to develop interfaces between @Home and their own internal customer provisioning and billing networks.
• Verio—Online help for PCs with interface to Sony musical cataloging and equipment controls.
• CyberSource—Documentation of CyberSource's customer interface for e-commerce.
• Certus (formerly nthOrbit)—Created 1.0 first-release product documentation for Certus Software's flagship Sarbanes-Oxley compliance management system. This included a system administrator guide and, at various times, XML interface specification guides as well.
• LiquidEngines—Created 1.0 product documentation.
• VocalPoint—Produced API Guide for CSS-based voice-to-HTML interaction system that allows end users to navigate the Internet using telephone voice menus.
• Openwave—Wrote architecture and server administrator guide for Presence Server, a messaging middleware application.
• NativeMinds—Developed online help and tutorial for their scriptable Web agent that guides users around a customer web site using a chat window.
• Liquid Systems—Created 1.0 product documentation, including a system administrator guide, and online help for end-user and system adminstrator interfaces.

Prior to relocating to the West Coast in 1998, she supported custom software and network billing projects at Kenan Systems Corporation from 1990-1997 in Cambridge, MA. Rebecca worked her way into increasingly more strategic positions based on her analytic and organizational skills.

At Kenan Corporate Headquarters, she served first as a Technical Writer, and later as the Documentation Team Leader, to create documentation for the Arbor/BP network billing and customer care system. The documentation kept pace with the billing software as it evolved from a series of custom implementations to become a standalone, standardized software product that is now considered among the most flexible and robust network billing solutions in the world. The docs team automated document production through the use of cross platform templates, print on demand technology, and standardization of material to expedite the production and management of multiple projects and software releases.

As a Technical Trainer, Rebecca created the initial Arbor/BP training program. She developed a suite of five courses from scratch, defined the delivery logistics, and delivered these courses both at client sites and corporate training sites with minimal technical support. She recruited other subject matter experts from within the company to create and deliver courses on their specialty areas. As part of the initial course development, Rebecca devised various training lab and installation procedures to allow training to run reliably on beta-release software versions. She took the courseware to next level by devising methods to deliver training to wider audiences including internal, client, and partner consultants. She identified and initiated long-term training development goals, including certification, train-the-trainer programs, and ongoing employee training programs.

Prior to moving to Cambridge, she worked at Kenan Systems in Washington, D.C., designing, creating, and producing user documentation, slide shows, and brochures for various decision support applications built by Kenan Systems for the U.S. Postal Service.

These operations modeling applications were used by the USPS Technology Resource Department to assist in planning a nationwide mailstream automation which took place in the 1980s. The models allowed USPS to compare detailed operational scenarios regarding mail processing at the general mail facilities, and test sensitivities and assumptions for proposed new mail sortation and OCR equipment that had not yet been built.

Rebecca's formal education includes a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Oberlin College. During college, she spent a year abroad on the One Year Program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Internships at nonprofit and commercial art enterprises. These internships allowed her to develop a better critical eye for viewing fine art, while convincing her that she needed to be in a more remunerative field herself.

Current activities outside of work include Middle Eastern dance, fire performance, martial arts, Burningman activities, and yoga.