New Member Profile: Khaled Aly

Direction: Can you briefly describe your business background?

Khaled: Over twenty years of professional and academic background in the field of Information & Communications Technology: five years in network commissioning and site operations, ten years obtaining a Ph.D. in broadband switching and conducting applied research in network architecture and modeling (published 21 research papers during that period), and most recently, six years with a global enterprise network services provider assuming several regional/global network and service management roles.

Direction: Tell us about your work - responsibilities, challenges.

Khaled: Before moving into technical writing, I managed the setup, operational processes and re-organization of several network/service management teams and activities. My latest responsibility was acting as liaison with different activity owners and performers to define and document processes and procedures. I worked on documenting SOX control standard procedures and got a fair exposure to the ITIL set of recommendations. I currently freelance in technical writing and documentation, working to establish an independent practice, while completing a professional diploma in Information Design with a focus on structured authoring. I am also working on some project proposals involving e-business process modeling.

Direction: Tell us about your audience.

Khaled: My audience ranged from operations staff to subject matter experts and technical/senior management. In my information design and development business concept, I would like to work for technical and business information "consumers." Extracting and structuring relevant public knowledge for customized modular presentation as a "professional user" commodity is both interesting and challenging.

Direction: What do you like most about your job?

Khaled: My favorite activities revolve around research, modeling, and documentation. I like doing process work for information and communications services. I decided to go independent to gain flexibility in defining my preferred pursuits.

Direction: What advice can you give to someone who wants to get into P&P documentation?

Khaled: In a fast-paced service provider environment:

• Be concise and strive to describe more with fewer words and effective illustrations that online operations staff can intuitively remember.
• Emphasize such information usability measures as: accessibility, visibility, structure, and cognition.
• Define a process with both "change" and "customer transparency" in mind.
• Derive modular procedures that minimize/eliminate the impact of process or policy change on daily operations.

Direction: What’s the biggest P&P challenge that you face in your current environment?

Khaled: Significant challenges, in my opinion, include:

• Working with constantly evolving technology, services, and business models.
• Taking advantage of current modeling and authoring technologies to support effective P&P specification and maintenance.

Direction: Tell us a bit of personal information about you - e.g., hobbies, where you live, your family, or other information to help us get to know you.

Khaled: I currently live in Cairo, Egypt; divorced; did much travelling in the past. I am interested in several sports (how many can one maintain!), modern jazz, geographical & theological history and technology progress news. I also find that extrapolating evolution and convergence of the way we would potentially conduct our lives is a motivating background mental activity!

You can contact Khaled at ka.aly@luxsci.net.