Spotlight
COE
professor doubles as CEO
By Laurie
Mellas-Ramirez
Capturing
and leveraging intellectual capital using information management
systems may sound like a scholastic exploit, but the man behind
the effort is more than an academic.
Mark Salisbury,
an associate professor of multimedia/instructional technologies
in the College of Education and coordinator of the
Organizational
Learning and Instructional Technologies (OLIT) Program, leveraged
his skills to found a local business.
Salisbury
practices what he teaches as CEO of Vitel, a knowledge management
company developing web-based technologies that allow members
of an organization to share data such as expert knowledge, training
materials and internal documents.
Salisbury
takes the same systematic approach to life as he does work.
I
liken it to a practicing heart surgeon, he said. I
do heart surgery in the morning and then I teach in the afternoon.
That helps me to be the teacher I want to be. I think that system
is of value to the students, too.
Managing
and sharing the different kinds of information organizations
have at hand is key to their success, he says. It makes
more sense to look at all the knowledge an organization possesses,
not just documents. Sharing best practices, for example.
Vitel employs
16, several whom are UNM graduates. The company has several
major contracts, including some with Los Alamos National Laboratory
(LANL) and Sandia National Laboratories.
The company
recently completed a three-year, $1 million plus Department
of Energy (DOE) and LANL training project. Vitel developed a
common product realization process that could be shared and
adopted by DOEs some 4,000 employees.
LANL also
directly approached Vitel about two years ago to develop a management
information system for its Directed Research and Development
Program. The system will manage information from the pre-proposal
process to the reporting results stage. This is substantial
because the program manages more than 250 projects a year at
a cost of about $100 million, he said.
Before
coming to UNM in 1996, Salisbury worked at The Boeing Company
for 11 years helping to make the companys computers more
intelligent. He worked on the Triple Seven project, the worlds
first airplane to be completely computer designed.
As a professor,
he puts his background to work in the classroom teaching and
developing courses in management knowledge systems and instructional
system design. In 1997, Salisbury initiated discussions with
Boeing to identify ways OLIT could collaborate on programs and
projects.
Graduate
students blend OLIT courses with those offered through Anderson
schools and communication.
Just
coming up with a computer system isnt going to solve problems.
The system has to help facilitate solving those problems and
the computer is merely the tool, Salisbury said. We
train people to go out and help organizations work more effectively.
Developing information management systems is a new and emerging
profession.