Open Text Content Day Toronto 2012

Yesterday was this years 'Content Day' Open Text mini-conference in Toronto - and it was as good or better than last years !

We had an excellent set of keynotes, with OT's new CEO Mark Barrenechea opening things up, adding his own personality and vision to the corporate vision.  The key messaging was that your content needs to be doing something for you to be adding value - summed up as 'content in motion'. If its just sat in repositories, then it's just costing you money to hold it, while not adding value to your processes.

I thought Mark did a good job of putting across his message, plus he left us hanging with teases that there would be some key releases coming very soon ! I actually had a personal meeting with Mark, which went over it's allotted time largely because he appears passionate about his subject matter. He is certainly very knowledgeable, and even though he is only 90 days into his new role, he definitely knows where he wants to take things - and no, before you ask, I can't give you any more details - I would just say there is plenty of potential for them to execute a winning vision, so just keep an eye on their website !

Bio's for Mark and the other keynote speakers are available here:
http://www.opentext.com/2/global/events-contentdays-toronto-keynotes.htm

Next up was Eugene Roman, CTO. Another good session, obviously enough with more focus on the technology across the various solutions spaces.  There was a brief sales pitch for Tempo, the secure on premises answer to cloud solutions for sharing content with both employees and other stakeholders (e.g. contractors or consultants) - Eugene managed to pass across his enthusiasm without turning into a sales presentation.

                                           Eugene Roman, CTO Open Text on stage

To be honest I did not stay for the third keynote; no offense to Lubor Ptacek who is a great speaker, but his focus was on how Open Text work together with Microsoft, and personally I thought I would gain more be chatting to the Open Text staff manning the booth's and signing up for my Tempo demo and downloading the Tempo Android app to my Acer Iconia Tablet.

The afternoon breakout sessions were more detailed presentations, but not necessarily on Open Text product - I was very impressed by Corinne Scmid's (@itzcorinne) session on Gamification - a subject I am highly skeptical about ! However she has an excellent way of presenting the benefits, not just on external sites for interfacing with customers, but also in the internal, enterprise context:

Please excuse the fairly awful photo - but Corinne's slide was showing the "Leader Board" for the internal Open Text system they use for gamification - they are awarded badges for such things as having completed the training on understanding Export rules !

In summary

An excellent "mini-conference" for those who can't attend the main event each year (now renamed as Open Text EnterpriseWorld - this year its Orlando in November). Knowledgeable staff on hand to discuss your questions, good keynotes and breakout sessions.

Obviously the highlight for me personally was my chat with the new CEO. An impressive man, with a vision for where he wants to take Open Text by closely integrating the acquisitions such as Global 360, Nstein etc, in order to get that added value from content that is in useful motion, rather than sat idling in an archive.

Good day, great vision, exciting times ahead for Open Text customers :-)

Penultimate day at the OU

Yep, its finally here, time to leave ! I think this will be saddest I have ever been to leave a job, the OU is a marvellous institution, with some brilliant people, and in terms of ECM, Enteprise Architecture, eBusiness etc it is on the cusp of some serious change, which will make it an even more interesting place to work.

For those of you who are not British, or even if you are but you don't know any of the history of the distance learning University that has according to a recent study, one of the top, most recognisable brands in the UK check out the following pages at the OU web site:

• About the OU - about the mission, ethos and history of the organisation
• Studying at the OU - gateway to all the courses you can take in a huge range of subjects
• Research at the OU - many think of University just in terms of teaching, but it has world class research groups too
  
• OpenLearn - want to try out some courses for free ? OpenLearn has hundreds of OU course units which you can sign up for, all free. Forget MIT Open CourseWare, this is how it should be done... :-)

Of course its not all a bed of roses, the Open University suffers like the rest of the UK H.E. sector from a Government which appears to be making up policy on the fly ! When it was originally set up as the "University of the airwaves" in the early 1970's, it was heavily funded and subsidised. Although still in reciept of heavy central gov. grants, the system these days is very complex, and as we have seen recently, can change at the whim of Whitehall functionaries. Part of the issue has always been internal though, the tension between the academic side of things, the view of a university as a seat of learning, and the business side of things where we operate on a scale other UK universities can not contemplate, with hundreds of thousands of students, warehouses, call centres, data centres and a publishing operation more akin to Elsevier or Reed-McGraw. Personally, I side with the 'business people' but when it comes down to it, it is a University !

I got my BSc (Honours) in Computing from the OU before I came to work here. It took me seven years of working in my own time, weekends and evenings, and if it was not for the OU I would not be in the line of work I am now, I probably would not have had the eductional or work experience points required to get into Canada etc. Whilst working here, I continued to work in my own time to gain an MBA.

So, bottom line, its a great institution, I fervently hope it can embrace change and become a little more agile, but for the break it has given me and probably hundreds of thousands of others, I surely hope it goes onto be the world leading distance learning institution for a long time to come.