The views expressed here are mine.
1-Minute (or less) Summary
- I’m an Oracle Consulting User Assistance Developer trying to help you become better with Oracle technology. But, the views expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.
- You can email me at bill.sawyer@oracle.com.
The Whole Story
I am an Oracle User Assistance Developer. Specifically I am a Consulting User Assistance Developer in the Oracle Database Development team. This is a nice way of saying that I have been doing Oracle Database-related user assistance content for a long-time, and I am pretty good at it. Good enough to be recognized by Oracle management.
But, what the heck is a User Assistance Developer? In days of old, which in the tech world is often as little as a year ago, there were technical writers, sometimes called doc writers, who wrote manuals. There were instructional designer, sometimes called curriculum developers, who wrote training classes. Technical trainers delivered those training classes, and often wrote their own class materials or labs.
Someone figured out these types of people had fuzzy borders between their work, and content from one could be shared. After all, why write content multiple times? Why risk writing conflicting things? So, at Oracle, and lots of other companies, these jobs merged. The merged function was born and named User Assistance at Oracle.
So, how did I get all this experience, and get good at this? Well, I have both deep experience and degrees in Computer Science and Training and Performance Improvement. I’ve spent time in documentation, training, and instructional design at Oracle, and I have built small and large user assistance teams at several technology companies. If you want my background, check my LinkedIn page.
Why do this?
- There are lots of people interested in learning Oracle’s products, and they do not know where to start.
- There are lots of people using Oracle’s products, and they do not realize that there are great resources that could help them be better with those Oracle products.
- There are Oracle resources that might not show up at the top of a Google search, and you might never know they exist.
- There are other things that I wish to say about user assistance, in general, that you might find useful.
I expect to keep to a weekly posting schedule, if not more often. If you haven’t heard anything from me in a while, email me at bill.sawyer@oracle.com.
