Thomas Vander Wal

Summary

Thomas is a consultant, adviser, and strategist for to those who build, manage, or considering social software and general systems for organization's intranet, web properties, and applications. He has been building, designing, and managing social, business, and consumer sites and applications since 1996. His focus is use of systems with deep experience in tech, design, and business. He has deep experience with assessment, development and designing for optimal interactions, innovating, iterating, managing, and planning planning for what is needed today and the not to distant future. Thomas is also a popular public speaker, mentor, advisor, and workshop leader across a broad array of subjects including: Emergent information structures (folksonomy), social web (Web 2.0), collaborative and community digital work platform, innovation, project management, product management, digital development & design, mobile development & design, user experience, information management, information use and reuse, and knowledge management. His in-house consulting has customer's rave about immediate returns from his frameworks that improve approaches to their development and design processes. His nearly 30 years of professional experience in information systems, internet, mobile, and web design and development has proven innovative means to create efficient interactions between all parties in the information and media flows for people wanting, needing, and using that information and media. All of experience this is built upon graduate degree in social sciences and education in organizational communications and interactions, as well as academic work in economics and finance with mentoring from top economists and finance experts. Thomas connects the business goals to the people that desire the products, content, and media using models that put focus on the most efficient means for all parties involved. He believes well structured information is the starting point for information use.