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 profile. You're like, "I'm a people-loving architect, and data leader." And one of the things I love about that, we talked a fair amount at the knowledge graph conference about your background in the humanities-
Mara:
We did.
Larry:
... and your transition into your current role. I would love to hear ... And what you just said, like, the end of what you were just saying about so much of your job is about interacting with people, and convincing business leaders to fund you, and stuff.
Can you talk a little bit about that? Like, what drew you into the humanities in the first place, your transition out of it, and here we are today.
Mara:
100%. Before I talk about being in the humanities, I love to read, I was an epistemologist, and a 19th Century scholar. But before that, when I was a little girl, I was writing my own websites in HTML, XML, and some of the technologies that eventually got to be used in the semantic web, which is how I entered the knowledge graph space way later as an adult. So, that got put on hold.
Mara:
I love to read. So, I became a humanities scholar, and I was for about five years, the lowest of the low adjuncts at an R1. My teaching experience, not my scholarship, although, I did a lot of thinking about how people interact with written media, and how they enter internal argumentation with those media, and come to know the world differently. That's what most of my work was about. It was interdisciplinary with literature, history, philosophy of science, which is why I say epistemology.
Mara:
But my best teacher for coming to where I am today was being a teacher. So, lowest of the low, first year, although, I spent most of the time teaching applied rhetoric, I was teaching freshman comp. So, this is a super diverse group of students who are showing up for a required class. To be successful, I needed to do two things. One, I had to listen carefully to what these students cared about to actually get them to get something out of the between $5000 and $8000 they were paying for this course. And then I had to generalize what I wanted them to learn about enough to make it accessible to them. Okay? So, my goal throughout my teaching career, similar to my goal now, is to inculcate effective communication through fit for purpose argumentation.
Mara:
So, while a lot of my colleagues were being like, "Here's an essay. Write something about it. Make it sound smart," what I did, because I needed my students to hook in, to be engaged, because the vast ... I maybe, I don't know, taught, like, four English majors over my career ... No HSPS [humanities, social, and political science] people. I told my students, "Okay, guys. Get into groups. So, you're set up to do some argumentation amongst yourselves, pick a little part of this essay," this was the first year, "And something you react strongly to. What about the sentences are doing this? Grammar, syntax, semantics. What's the whole universe of your group reactions? How are they related, or not related?"
Mara:
This evolved into a directed research curriculum in my applied rhetoric courses. So, I said, "Okay. Okay, guys. Go find something out in the world that needs to change. We need a pedestrian bridge over the street. We need better accessibility for people with disabilities in our gym. We need better gym hours. Figure out how it's working, frame up a case for someone who can make a change, do your argumentation, go present it." Some of my students actually argued well enough that they got a stoplight installed on a really busy street corner. So, it worked.
Mara:
So, fast-forward, lots of life drama that brought me out of the humanities into what is a much better place for me, in corporate. I'm in a trusted advisor role, not so dissimilar to being a teacher. As a trusted advisor, I have to be attuned to what the business says that they want. So, if they're saying ... And then what they demonstrate that they want through their behaviors, and through their artifacts, often times, their processes and information system. And then I have to think about why and how those things align, or don't align.
Mara:
Because I'm full-time employed, and this is in this role, and all of my corporate roles, but I'm, effectively, providing a boutique service. It's not enough for me to come up with something that sounds smart, or cool. I have to come up with a solution that accommodates process data, technology, and, most importantly, people, and that actually fulfills a business need. And I used to think about the connection from my academic career to my corporate career as like, "Oh, I became a good EA, because I taught my students to do this," but with about a decade of reflection, I'm realizing that teaching was really mutual.
Mara:
Like, I asked my students to show me what they were thinking. I evaluated what they were doing. I was very critical, but I was generous. And I was with them as their efforts bore fruit, or didn't. But how I demonstrated, elicited, and critiqued them evolved with constant, and often very, very vulnerable feedback. Like, I do with my clients now, I constantly asked, "How am I doing? Am I giving you what you need? Do you need something else?'
Mara:
For a student, it's really hard to say that to someone who's got the power of a grade over you. It's not as perhaps scary when we're all adults in corporate, but I still think many adults ... I was always the stupidest person in the room as a scholar. So, I don't have this problem, but a lot of us are worried about appearing, "I'm not smart enough. I am not creative enough." So, I still have to flex that good, compassionate, people-loving, listening muscle all the time in corporate just like my wonderful undergrads at Indiana University taught me how to do.
Larry:
That's so awesome. I've thought a lot about rhetoric. In fact, I don't know if we talked about this in New York, but my first career was in college textbook publishing,
