Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I’ve just made a big change, joining Forrester Research as a Principal Analyst, and this new adventure is sure to be exciting. It’s an honor to join this stellar organization and work with so many talented folks. I’ll be serving security and risk professionals and will focus primarily on identity and access management, so this move feels like a natural outgrowth of work I’ve been involved in for more than ten years now.

My tenure at PayPal was a great learning experience; I’ll never forget my time there, nor the good friends I made. I also managed to learn a few things while “catching up on life” in the few weeks between gigs. Here are some questions folks have been asking me, with answers:

Q: Are you moving back to the east coast?

A: Nope, I’m still based in the Pacific Northwest, but I will likely be out Boston-way somewhat more often. As for other appearances, you’ll definitely be able to find me at Forrester’s IT Forum 2011 in May, and I’ll be figuring out the situation with other events shortly.

Q: Will you continue to blog here?

A: Yes, though the mix of topics will likely change, as I’ll be contributing industry-related posts to the Forrester blog. I’ll post pointers to those here, and my hope is to step up my writing activity on other topics of interest at Pushing String. And I hope you’ll continue to follow my doings at @xmlgrrl (where the #forrester tag will likely make lots of appearances).

Q: What about User-Managed Access and other innovation-oriented work?

A: The plan is for me to continue in my role as “chief UMAnitarian” and to participate in certain other tech leadership activities as time allows. In the last couple of months we’ve gotten a big influx of active UMA contributors, and we’ve had a burst of progress in the last few weeks on defining how to loosely couple “user-centric” policy enforcement points and policy decision points. So I think we’re well on our way to meeting the goals and timing stated in our charter.

Q: So what did you do on your winter vacation?

A: One of my goals was to “learn one big thing”, so I started learning how to play guitar, under the tutelage of my dear old friend Rich. My original use cases were around communicating better with my Mud Junket bandmates who are actual guitarists, but Rich doesn’t fool around: I have to learn good technique and not take any shortcuts. Luckily, the fret-hand callus crop has finally started to come in.

I also read a great book called The Talent Code, which describes what goes on neurologically in people who seem like once-in-a-lifetime geniuses, and discusses how any skill (like guitar-playing!) can be honed more rapidly through “deep practice” that stimulates myelin growth.

With all this plus a healthy dose of R&R, it feels like I’m learning how to learn all over again.