Moderator Spotlight - Jocelyn Dart

[moshenaveh]

I'm very happy to announce our new SCN Moderator Spotlight,jocelyn.dart , which is our way on SCN to thank significant moderator who put a lot of effort into the community. Jocelyn is known to be very active and helpful SCN moderator for the SAP Business Workflow, Business Process Management and Composition spaces. I also got to know Jocelyn as she was one of the early adapters of the Blog It Forward challenge. I'm sure you will enjoy the interview below as Jocelyn has many years of experience in SAP and SCN.

                                                           

Please share with the community a little about yourself:

I’ve worked for SAP Australia since late 1994 – so nearly 19 years now (scary!).  I started on the help desk (what we would now call AGS) and then moved into instruction (what we would now call SAP Education) and finally settled in Consulting Services.   Before SAP I worked at several companies who were using SAP – including Esso Australia who were one of the first customers in Australia to buy SAP solutions – those were R/2 days!  These days I mostly do what is loosely called “architecting” – helping with design/strategy/direction, sometimes it’s all slides, sometimes its proof of concepts, or building “gold standard” examples for others to follow. 

When did you join the SCN community?

I joined SCN back in the early SAP Developer Network days – much earlier than the date that actually shows in my Reputation page! I really got into it in those early days and remember one year I was in the top 100 of SAP employees in the community (measured on participation points).  Even my boss noticed! I stepped away from it for a while mostly due to time pressures, but started to get back into it as it was morphing from Developer to Community space.  

Before that I was on the SAP-WUG forum (Sue Keohan’s baby) so I was already convinced that working with forums was a way to make a real difference to customers.

Why do you moderate?

SCN makes living with SAP solutions easier, more enjoyable, and more engaging for everyone.  As a moderator, it’s my job to encourage behaviors that enhance our community, such as being patient with newbies, and suggesting to entrenched forum answer-ers that maybe it’s time to step up and write some blogs.  With a large community like SAP Business Workflow, it’s more about picking up the unanswered question, calming down the occasional frustrated response, and keeping an eye out for those who could take on a greater role, but the forum largely runs itself.  With a small community, like Business Process Management and Composition, there’s much more time spent creating content, and for me as an SAP employee, that means looking at high questions areas on the forum and encouraging the right people from within SAP to answer them or to add helpful content that makes it easier for people to work with our solutions.

If you could offer one bit of advice to new members or new moderators what would it be and why?

For new members, by all means look around at anything and everything, but before you post, please read the blog on the difference between a discussion, blog post, document and Wiki … it would save us moderators so much time!  For Moderators – the Moderator space is fantastic! Lots of great advice and ready help whenever you have one of those I’m-not-sure-how-to-handle-this moments.

How has the SCN community helped you?

I actually use it as a source of advice… although I do double check who wrote the article and adjust my level of confidence in the solution to suit… but it’s a reliable source of good ideas on how to tackle design and implementation challenges.  But more and more these days I also see it as a way to get into a different headspace – a more human and more humane headspace re how technology does and should impact our lives. It’s also occasionally somewhere to vent frustrations constructively – by creating warning-tale blogs that avoid mistakes being repeated at multiple sites.

How are you finding the new SCN?

Really enjoying it – fascinated at how the conversation is changing from just technical blogs and marketing pitches to much more thoughtful discussions on issues that affect us all, like Ageism and Empathy, and how SAP internally is using SCN more often to engage directly with real customers who use our solutions but might not get to a TechEd  or SAPPHIRE or user group conference.

Is there another moderator or community member that you've found incredibly helpful? 

susan.keohan – workflow goddess and moderator extraordinaire and friend!

mariana.mihaylova– who has done extraordinary work in changing the whole face of BPM and Process Orchestration from a small dying side area to a major player, and is simply amazing at encouraging internal SAP support for SCN.

What is the best lesson your parents taught you?

When I think about what my parents taught me 2 maxims come to mind:

• Circumstances alter cases, i.e. respect the differences and the fine distinctions... things make look similar, but it’s the uniqueness that makes it interesting and joyful.
• If you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem. Being part of the solution is what being in SCN is all about for me.

And one I wish they had taught me.. regret is more painful than fear.  I think I’m much more courageous than I used to be.

If you were given by your work a full day every week to do whatever you feel like, what would it be?

I actually work a 4 day week so I feel like I have that now! I spend it mostly with my Mum – she won’t be here forever and I want to cherish my time with her – and I spend it getting my head out of computers, looking up and enjoying life.  Resetting perspective in a way that helps me be more balanced and more grounded the rest of the week.

What was the most fun project you ever participated in and why?

The fun projects have been the ones where you get to really know your colleagues better – I remember one intense, high profile project where we had an over-sized baby’s dummy that we used to sneak round and put on the work-space of whoever we felt was losing it and was having a bit of a “dummy spit”.  At our milestone dinner at the end of the project we awarded the dummy not to the person who had had the biggest dummy spit, but to the person we felt had been the cause of most of them.  There was a lot of camaraderie, and a sense of release, and it really felt like your colleagues were looking out for you and trying to help you deal with the pressure.

Moshe: Thanks a lot to jocelyn.dart for sharing these insights and interesting stories. Please feel free to ask her more questions using the comments section below.