Embracing Imperfection in Human-Centered Design

Mara Inglezakis Owens Mara Inglezakis Owens brings a human-centered focus to her work as an enterprise architect at a major US airline. Drawing on her background in the humanities and her pragmatic approach to business, she has developed a practice that embodies both "digital anthropology" and product thinking. The result is a knowledge architecture that works for its users and consistently demonstrates its value to key stakeholders. We talked about: her role as an enterprise architect at a major US airline how her background as a humanities scholar, and especially as a rhetoric teacher, prepared her for her current work as a trusted business advisor some important mentoring she received early in her career how "digital anthropology" and product thinking fit into her enterprise architecture practice how she demonstrates the financial value of her work to executives and other stakeholders her thoughtful approach to the digitalization process and systems design the importance of documentation in knowledge engineering work how to sort out and document stakeholders' self-reports versus their actual behavior the scope of her knowledge modeling work, not just physical objects in the world, but also processes and procedures two important lessons she's learned over her career: don't be afraid to justify financial investment in your work, and "don't be so attached to an ideal outcome that you miss the best possible" Mara's bio Mara Inglezakis Owens is an enterprise architect who specializes in digitalization and knowledge management. She has deep experience in end-to-end supply chain as well as in planning, product, and program management. Mara’s background is in epistemology (history and philosophy of science, information science, and literature), which gives a unique, humanistic flavor to her practice. When she is not working, Mara enjoys aviation, creative writing, gardening, and raising her children. She lives in Minneapolis. Connect with Mara online LinkedIn email: mara dot inglezakis dot owens at gmail dot com Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/d8JUkq8bMIc Podcast intro transcript This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 34. When think about architecting knowledge systems for a giant business like a global airline, you might picture huge databases and complex spaghetti diagrams of enterprise architectures. These do in fact exist, but the thing that actually makes these systems work is an understanding of the needs of the people who use, manage, and finance them. That's the important, human-focused work that Mara Inglezakis Owens does as an enterprise architect at a major US airline. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode 34 of the Knowledge Graph Insights Podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Mara, I'm going to get this right, Inglezakis Owens. She's an enterprise architect at a major US airline. So, welcome, Mara. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Mara: Hi, everybody. My name's Mara. And these days I am achieving my childhood dream of working in aviation, not as a pilot, but that'll happen, but as an enterprise architect. I've been doing EA, also data and information architecture, across the whole scope of supply chain for about 10 years, everything from commodity sourcing to SaaS, software as a service, to now logistics. And a lot of my days, I spend interviewing subject matter experts, convincing business leaders they should do stuff, and on my best days, I get to crawl around on my hands and knees in an airplane hangar. Larry: Oh, fun. That is ... Yeah. I didn't know ... I knew that there's that great picture of you sitting in the jet engine, but I didn't realize this was the fulfillment of a childhood dream. That's awesome. But everything you've just said ties in so well to the tagline on your LinkedIn pro...