Moving UX into a Position of Corporate Influence: What has been your experience where you work?

I'm leading an "interactive session" at the upcoming CHI conference 
entitled, "Moving UX into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose 
Advice Really Works?"  Here is the abstract:

"Professionals working to move user experience (UX) into a position 
of corporate influence are impeded by conflicting recommendations, 
including those regarding the roles of documenting and evangelizing 
UX work, ownership of UX, organizational positioning, calculating 
return on investment, and conducting "ethnographic" research.  In 
this interactive session, a group of senior UX management personnel 
who have moved UX into positions of rapidly increasing influence in 
their varied places of work debate their different perspectives and 
approaches to help resolve the conflicting recommendations and 
generate some new and improved guidance."

During recent weeks, I've posted articles in my blog about the roles 
of documenting and evangelizing UX work, ownership of UX, 
organizational positioning, calculating return on investment, and 
conducting "ethnographic" research:

   15 Feb 07: Documenting and evangelizing user experience work
http://riander.blogspot.com/2007/02/documenting-and-evangelizing-user.html

   24 Jan 07: Ownership of the user-customer experience
http://riander.blogspot.com/2007/01/ownership-of-user-customer-experience.html

   01 Feb 07: Does it matter where User Experience is positioned in 
your corporate structure?
http://riander.blogspot.com/2007/02/does-it-matter-where-user-experience-is.html

  13 Mar 07 Calculating return on investment
http://riander.blogspot.com/2007/03/calculating-return-on-investment.html

  5 Apr 07 Conducting "ethnographic" research
http://riander.blogspot.com/2007/04/conducting-ethnographic-research.html

What has been your experience where you work?  Please share your 
stories by authoring comments in response to the above 5 blog 
entries, or share them here, or send them to me via email.

Richard Anderson
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Richard I. Anderson
http://www.riander.com/
http://riander.blogspot.com/

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