Duane Degler

Duane Degler is an experienced analyst and designer at strategic, tactical and implementation levels. He quickly develops an understanding of business and process issues, and helps organizations articulate both challenges and solutions in ways that fit their unique needs. Duane's overall focus is on performance improvement that may involve business analysis, user-centered design, knowledge/content strategy, and semantic technologies. He has over 20 years of experience working with government agencies and commercial firms in the US and internationally.

Duane founded IPGems as a home for integrating concepts from various professional disciplines. IPGems offers a wide range of online publications, as well as consulting activities that include:

Assessment of strategic opportunities for change in organizations
Business and user-centered analysis, including human performance, business processes, information quality/management, and system requirement
Design of applications, web sites, and content management systems
Ontology and taxonomy planning, design, and integration
Educational workshops and mentoring in user-centered design, requirements gathering, and planning for semantic technologies and Web 2.0

Duane has an MSc in Organizational Communication, with a focus on the human change impacts arising from new technologies, and a BSc in Communications, with a focus on interactive media production. He is actively involved in a range of professional organizations, including the ACM, SIGCHI, and UPA. He participates in a number of international projects:

The UPA Body of Knowledge, working toward developing an online reference source for usability and associated disciplines
The Semantic Web User Interaction workshop series, co-organizing a series of international workshops, a W3C mailing list, and educational conference talks, focused on stimulating the role of user interaction design for the development of the semantic web.
Participating as a speaker and workshop leader in conferences for the Usability Professionals’ Association, the International Semantic Web Conference, the Computer Human Interaction Conference (sponsored by the ACM SIGCHI), the George Mason/DAU eLearning Symposium, Extreme Markup, and the XML Conference.