Mary Ellen returned to academia after a long period working in applied research - and data-related roles, including founding and leading the team that implements Apple-branded surveys to support marketing of Apple products worldwide, and heading research at Flurry, where she mined insights from app analytics data collected from more than a billion smartphones and tablets each month, and dissecting data coming from a variety of third-party data sources for Apple’s iAd group. She also founded and led organisations that provided research and analytics consulting (Market Truths), data-driven content marketing (Story in the Data), and data training services (Analytics for Us). Mary Ellen particularly enjoys connecting theory and practice and bridging the gap between decision makers and people who are deep in the weeds of an organisation’s data. She is a technology enthusiast, being an early adopter of Web surveys (starting in 1995), online education (starting teaching online in 2000), and conducting research in virtual worlds.
IT workers are often seen as sharing a set of values that unite the IT profession and set us apart from other kinds of workers. But how similar are we in reality? Based on a survey of 500 IT professionals we identify four very different groups amongst New Zealand IT professionals: Fun-lovers, independents, innovators, and institutionalists. We outline the differences between these groups and their values, then explain why this matters for understanding our own approach to work, assigning tasks to others, setting up effective teams, and managing staff.