April 2007 | Volume VI, Issue 4

DataPath's Featured Employee: Alex Kimball

Name: Alex Kimball

Title: Marketing Writer/Technical Writer

Years at DataPath: 8 Months

Role at DataPath:

Updating Users Guides, Training Manuals, Product Group Secretary, writing marketing pieces, maintaining mailing lists for Updates, Alerts, and Newsletters

What do you envision as the most important function of your department?

From the marketing perspective, I’d have to say that the most important function is to make sure that our clients and perspective clients know what we’re doing as a company and the direction we’re taking. As far as the technical writing, I’d say that keeping training manuals in a state such that they’re useful to our clients is the most important function.

How do you see your department developing / improving in 5 years?

I see the writing in Marketing to come into its own as we get more writers to add their talents to the DataPath Voice. In Quality Assurance, I see more technical writers joining the team, perhaps having a dedicated writer per-solution, to ensure that updates to the product can be included in the manuals with less delay.

What is the best thing about your job?

I get to see what is going on in multiple departments at DataPath and get a holistic view of what DataPath is doing to improve its solutions and move the benefits market forward.

What is the most challenging thing about your job?

When large scale changes are made to the dpiSuite solutions simultaneously, it can seem daunting at times to incorporate all of the new changes to into all of the different manuals.

Fill in the blank to this bumper sticker …

“I’d rather be...” Sipping Maker’s Mark in a dimly lit room while listening to Tom Waits’ “Alice”

What is your work background?

I started off in the food services industry while in college to pay for books and whatnot, had a brief stint in warehouse work for a big-box retailer but messed up my wrist carrying a scan gun for 45 hours a week, so returned to food services. Right out of college, I interned at DataPath for a little over a month before being hired on full time

What are your 3 ‘desert island’ albums?

“Tender Prey” by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
“Trout Mask Replica” by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band
“Bucky Fellini” by the Dead Milkmen

Where were you born?

Little Rock, AR

Family Information

22, Single.

Hobbies

Listening to “opaque melodies that would bug most people” as Don Van Vliet so eloquently put it.
Playing 2D fighters (particularly the KOF series)
“Gunpla” (go ahead, wiki it). Not very good at it, but I’ve still blown a couple hundred dollars on it over the years.

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© DataPath, Inc. 2007