This is my very first blog post

Thank you for stopping by my website and hopefully you took a moment to view my portfolio
*cough*.

Let’s get right down to business here and discuss what you will find on this blog…

My blog is going to be centered around my industry and what I excel at which is multimedia, innovation and web development. If you work in any of those fields, these posts will be very useful to you. My overall vision is to provide my audience with reviews, resources, best practices and lots of tutorials.

Let me tell you a little bit about my career journey…

As you may have guessed from the domain name, my name is Jason Hogan and I am a man of many skills. I started my career journey as a network technician working with Windows and Linux servers as well as providing desktop support. I worked for Comcast Cable as a Senior Technical Advisor during their epic growth period in early 2000 before moving onto Telus and then IBM in a similar role. After mastering this role, I became bored and needed change which led to going back to school.

In 2003 I attended NAIT as a student in the Digital Interactive Multimedia Design program. I had a very solid background in graphic design before attending and while I was there I specialized in web development as well as video but also heavily involved in Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash. After completing the course I opened my own multimedia company and found myself with a lot of work from different local night clubs. I created websites and promotional pieces for companies such as Nite Tours (now operating in Vegas), Diamonds, Stellar Entertainment, as well as a variety of professional performers and realtors.

I spent a brief period at 555 Group (the company behind West Edmonton Mall and American Dream Mall) on their web team doing a lot of store photography before finally moving on to Alberta Blue Cross. Alberta Blue Cross hired me as a Flash developer to create some e-Learning materials for some of their products and services. I was rehired as a Web Developer and then Senior Web Developer before taking the role of Senior UI Specialist & Web Developer. I was working with both frontend and backend technologies such as Oracle PL SQL which lead to the my creation of a series of web applications. I would meet with different business units to analyze their current processes and then build small applications that could create more efficiencies in their work. Many applications I created (which can be found in my portfolio) for Alberta Blue Cross received IABC awards and created dramatic shifts in a variety of business processes.

These successes led to major changes in my role after being asked by our CEO to help pioneer an innovation department and later building a corporate recognition tool. During that time I helped to create many best practices surrounding innovation as well as reward and recognition. This was accomplished through a great deal of research as well as my experiences shifting the culture of 1500+ employees to become more innovative in their role. I worked with tools such as Planbox to assist on that journey and developing different processes for varying levels of innovation. As we matured in our innovation journey, we developed measures that were more meaningful than our initial measure of employee engagement to provide the organization with a more tangible ROI.

Being a multimedia developer with a great deal of familiarity in corporate communications, I found it very easy to create a great deal of employee engagement. I created my own communication plans, newsletters, poster and interesting methods of marketing the innovation program. In 2018 I was invited to attend an Innovation Conference by Planbox in Montreal, Canada. During the conference I learned through our round table discussions that some of the strategies used to engage our employees were extremely effective based on our metrics. I shared those strategies (as I will on this blog) and I was asked the following year to speak on their panel of guests.