Portfolio / Resume / Who I Am

Tim Shores

I make organizations
and systems work more effectively

Leverett, Massachusetts, United States

Tim Shores portrait

About

I make organizations and systems work more effectively.

Here's how: most useful knowledge is stuck — in people's heads, social systems, team silos, processes nobody interrogates, or data waiting to be shaped into a decision. I find it and work with people to restructure how the organization stores and represents it, making that knowledge useful. The goal is always to support people in making and measuring better decisions.

At Cisco, that meant leading content strategy and information architecture for security products, treating technical content as a problem of business systems and team alignment, not a pile of deliverables. I served on a cross-organizational tiger team transforming Cisco's technical communications into an AI-native content system, collaborating on content modeling and context engineering that structured institutional knowledge for accurate, efficient delivery by generative AI products. This built on earlier work documenting Cisco's LLM-powered assistant and prototyping AI generation of identity-based technical content.

Before Cisco, I built databases of European Parliament voting patterns for multistakeholder forest policy campaigns, designed donor data systems for a rapidly growing Haiti-focused nonprofit, constructed the knowledge base that cut support call volume by 20% at a software company, and wound down an unprofitable service line at an IT business.

In civil society, I lead data and operations on the board of The 'MPOWER Project, and serve on a planning board, an energy committee, and two school committees in Western Massachusetts. Nonprofit capacity, municipal budgeting, policy analysis, performance evaluation, and community needs assessments all drill down to trapped knowledge, and the value is making it legible to the people responsible for decisions and communicating to the public. How do I do it? I walk around and talk to people. Sometimes I get lucky enough to help a group rope a grant, and my walking and talking becomes facilitated group work with mixed-methods research, followed by a dense but charming report and rounds of public interest communications.

I've deliberately pursued a wide range of work. Organizations get stuck in knowledge tarpits — knowledge trapped in silos, legacies of practice, in-group dynamics that hush some voices, complexity outrunning management structures, decisions starved of information that already exists somewhere in the building. The whiteboard-and-dialogue work of getting unstuck transfers across domains. The trick is getting the group to trust the process enough to try something new.

Core Focus

Practice Areas

  • Community-based participatory research
  • Community building
  • Knowledge architecture
  • Technical content strategy
  • Data storytelling
  • Policy and civic research
  • Cybersecurity documentation
  • Facilitation

Working Skills

  • Content Strategy
  • Context Engineering
  • Cybersecurity
  • Data Science
  • Communications
  • Technical Writing
  • Research
  • Facilitation
  • Storytelling
  • Community Development

Selected Work

Cybersecurity

Cisco Secure Access Content Strategy

Content strategy lead for Cisco Secure Access, architecting end-to-end content strategy and launching documentation for SASE Management in close collaboration with product, engineering, UX, and CX teams.

Member of Cisco's AI-Native Content Strategy tiger team, focused on content modeling and context engineering for graphRAG-structured knowledge, AI reasoning, and dynamic persona-driven content experiences.

Content StrategyInformation ArchitectureAI-Native ContentContent Modeling
Communication Strategy

Duo Customer Communications Program

Served as customer communications lead for Cisco Security Documentation, translating release and vulnerability changes into clear action-oriented updates.

Improved communication process consistency while coordinating impact studies with Product and Data Science teams.

Release NotesComms PlanningRisk CommunicationMentorship
Policy Analytics

Forest Defenders Alliance Research and Monitoring

Managed campaign web and research for the Forest Defenders Alliance and analyzed parliamentary voting patterns and committee memberships.

Produced campaign monitoring datasets that supported outreach strategy and policy advocacy across the EU context.

Data CollectionPolicy ResearchDatabase DesignCampaign Strategy
Nonprofit Systems

Hope for Haiti Data and Donor Experience

Owned revenue data management, grant pipeline operations, and donor support systems.

Strengthened fundraising operations and decision support for mission-critical programs.

Grant PipelineDonor SystemsRevenue DataOperations
Automation and CRM

VentureWell Platform Operations

Supported Salesforce planning and implementation for grant, community, and program operations.

Improved cross-team workflows and user support with scalable platform operations.

SalesforceProcess BuilderFlowIntegration

Credentials

Certifications

  • AI Foundations for Business Professionals, Saïd Business School (Feb 2026)
  • Project Management Professional Certificate (v2), Google (Oct 2025)
  • Systems Thinking, Cornell University (Feb 2024)
  • Communicating for Impact, IDEO (Jul 2022)
  • Dialogue Facilitation Across Divides, Paula Green (Oct 2021)
  • Basic Mediation Training, CRG (Jan 2020)

Education

  • University of Michigan BGS, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology September 1998 - June 2004
  • University of Massachusetts Amherst Graduate Certificate, Data Analytics and Computational Social Science (DACSS) November 2022 - December 2024

Community

I currently serve in local civic and education leadership roles, where policy, budgets, and community needs are translated into decisions people can use.

  • Planning board member in Western Massachusetts
  • Energy committee member in Western Massachusetts
  • Two school committees in Western Massachusetts
  • Board member, The 'MPOWER Project, NYC