MEMBER SPOTLIGHT | DECEMBER 2001

Diana Snowden: DUE DILIGENCE PAYS OFF FOR NEW MEMBER

By Kim Broers

She was in the right place at the right time. She kept her nose to the grindstone. She got luc--

Bother, as Pooh said. The fact is, the career path which Diana Snowden has traveled over the past 25 years defies easy explanation. One might as well say that she walked in one door and then proceeded to walk through others, either because they were open or because she nudged them open. The one thing that seems certain during decades of professional development is that, whatever else she did, she demonstrated a keen work ethic.

Diana, blue-eyed and mild in manner, graduated in 1977 from William Jewell College armed with a degree in English, with the expectation of finding a teaching job. Despite the excellent education provided by her alma mater, she searched in vain for a position, and ended up taking a proofreading/word processing job at Farmland Industries. Her hope that it was a foot in the door of corporate communications did not materialize. (Full disclosure: I am a proud alumna of William Jewell, a gem of a private school located atop a hill in Liberty, Mo., and recently cited for its excellence by Time magazine.)

Diana held the proofreading position for 12 years, earning a reputation as a proficient editor. "Other departments began sending me manuals to proof; I was reading up to 250 pages a day," she recalled. "It was a perfect job at the time, as I was having my children then."

With little fanfare, it seems, she moved into information technology (IT) and systems documentation, learning programming so she could write training manuals on how to use specific software. "I've always been fascinated with computers," she explained. "There were so many things I had to teach myself."

The next career door swung open when Diana was asked to define her dream job and told her supervisor that she'd like to be a marketing analyst. Her wish dovetailed with Farmland's plans for her department, and she began living the dream, donning a number of marketing hats in the process. She was working on her master's degree at the time and graduated from Keller Management Institute in 1997 with an MPM (Master of Project Management).

"I had a great supervisor," Diana emphasized. "She was phenomenal. When I found out she was leaving, I cried." That supervisor, who clearly deserves to be named, was Jennifer Havens, a presenter at AWC's Dot Com conference last February.

The career plot gets a bit trickier at this point. As Diana describes it, Farmland "jay-veed" with accounting firm Ernst & Young, a joint venture whose conclusion saw Diana heading IT corporate communications for Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, now a multinational with some 60,000 employees. Today, her boss is in New York and her team is in Chicago, and Diana ... well, Diana works out of her home, an enviable arrangement that sprang from the gall bladder surgery she required in the waning days of the year 2000. In January of this year, she received the laptop that provides her access to all her desktop functions.

Such a set-up allows her to more closely supervise her 15-year-old daughter, a competitive gymnastic dance student. Diana goes in to the office once or twice a week and travels to Chicago once a month. In fact, she flew to Chicago September 11, arriving to find the city largely evacuated and everyone gone home. She managed to snag a seat on a bus and returned to Kansas City within 12 hours.

Diana always has her eye out for interesting seminars and workshops, which is why she was on hand for the Dot Com Conference presented in February. She joined AWC shortly after that, finding that she missed interaction with people.

Married during her senior year of college, Diana raised three children and is now a single mother. Her husband died in 1998. Her two sons are at William Jewell, one a senior and the other a freshman. Both are competitive soccer players, as is her daughter. Diana has recently discovered the pleasures of regular fitness workouts and also enjoys music and movies. She's an amateur photographer and when time allows, does a bit of writing for fun. "People don't stretch to find the right word anymore," she offers, along with a recommendation that everyone keep a dictionary near at hand.

What do we call Diana? Nothing one can easily find in a dictionary. Her current title is Marketing Communications Knowledge Manager, which translates as a sort of Internet librarian. She oversees a "knowledge management repository," managing content for her firm's Intranet and Internet sites.

Not surprisingly, Diana's language is peppered with corporate talk, the sort of jargon for which dictionaries offer indifferent aid. ABAP, HTML, outsourcing, systems documentation, shazam! Okay, perhaps not shazam... but Diana's mastery of IT dialect has certainly done wonders for her professional path. Can you say, Open sesame... ?