[Profile] Bob Glushko Educates Future Knowledge Workers About Document Engineering

When most people set retirement as a goal, they cite reasons such as having more time to play golf or commandeer the TV remote control. When Bob Glushko talks about retirement, it’s about teaching only one semester so his schedule has enough flexibility to do other work—in law school clinics, in public interest law, on the board of OASIS, and in the Robert J. Glushko and Pamela Samuelson Foundation, which sponsors the annual David E. Rumelhart Prize, essentially the equivalent of a Nobel prize for cognitive sciences. Oh, and maybe have a little time left over for scuba diving and astronomy.
One could call Glushko a workaholic, but more appropriate would be to call him a man of many passions. He had already retired from industry, having made significant contributions toward technologies and standards for electronic publishing and business-to-business electronic transactions. But through a round-about route, taking a course at the University of California, Berkeley led to teaching a course there, and Glushko began a second career at the School of Information as an Adjunct Professor and Director of the Center for Document Engineering.
As the discipline of document engineering has its roots in the 1980s, when electronic publishing of documentation required re-engineering of the publishing process. What started out as the phenomenon of hypertext, and evolved into what we now know as single-sourcing and XML structured content publishing strategies, has been Glushko’s domain since his days creating electronic books and enabling firms to automate their business processes by exchanging electronic documents. The metamorphosis of structured content, from changing manuals and forms from print to electronic formats to today’s sophisticated document schema patterns, has evolved in response to articulated business needs, and the ability of visionaries such as Glushko to respond to them. Many of these documents are no longer paper documents, but electronic data messages, yet our mental models continue to think of “documents,” not “data clusters.” Structuring of the information using document engineering principles ensures human, as well as computing, functionality.
What could this look like in a business context? Documents can be engineered to “talk” to each other so that regular transactions can be completed without manual processing - for example, to allow documents to follow transactional rules that would let a basic purchase order to be submitted from one company to another, and a return acknowledgment to be sent.
Glushko makes the idea of document engineering seem easy. After all, his students were able to build a Syllabus Viewer data model that allows Document Engineering students to have multiple views of the syllabi. All factors considered, it’s probably not quite so easy, and rather it is Glushko who gets an A for his teaching efforts.
Don’t miss Glushko’s keynote presentation, Document Engineering in User Experience Design, at the Documentation and Training West 2008 conference, May 6-9 in Vancouver, BC.
If you want to know more about this exciting new discipline, consider reading Document Engineering (now in paperback). Glushko and co-author Tim McGrath document the methods, skills, approaches, and standards that play a role in engineering documents and they provide real world examples of how document engineering principles can be put to use to solve common business challenges and make humans far more efficient.