My next phase

Today was my first day after I left OpenText. I had a great 11 years with the company that afforded me fabulous opportunities to learn about content management, the enterprise content management (ECM) field and how it relates to business process and enterprise architecture. In recent years our view of content greatly expanded to the digital media perspective.

On the collaboration side, I had many opportunities to blog - sometimes in this blog, and more often in OpenText Online Communities and internally within OpenText. I also heavily promoted microblogging in the context of work. After a slow start, it was gratifying to see growing numbers of active participants.

Personally I am one of those who tend to 'drink from a firehose' of information, even when it threatens to give me a headache. As a believer in the importance of metrics, it was interesting in my studies to find I was subscribed to 40% more internal discussions than the next most active staff member. I was also one of the most active and relevant staff on external social media as shown by internal tracking studies for marketing effectiveness. So my activities had business benefit. But they also had personal benefit. Much has been written about the merger of personal and business life, and this is one clear example.

As I announced my departure from OpenText, I was contacted privately and publicly through many different channels, which was very gratifying. New opportunities are opening up, in part because of those online social activities. I'm hoping for a wide range of new experiences in the coming months, helping me to broaden my knowledge and to do some things I could not do before.

The orientation of this blog will change, and hopefully my post frequency will pick up again.

On to the next phase.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to contact me directly you can find me on Linkedin, Twitter (@MartinSS) or email me at MartinSS at Rogers dotcom.