What is your career narrative?
From ERP on paper in Northern Ontario to enterprise cloud transformation, tracing 40 years in technology as a single through-line. Published on LinkedIn, April 2016.
When you conduct a concerted job search, you tend to tell your story many times. If you're going to grow, you need to look back at where you've come from. You must understand your journey in terms of what you've learned, how it shaped you, how you leveraged it for success.
How does your journey foretell your future value in a new organization? Perhaps in a nuanced role or even in a dramatically different career?
For what it's worth, here is my narrative, my own career journey, so to speak:
I began as a Moore Business Forms salesperson in Northern Ontario. You may be too young to know what a business form is, but essentially I sold ERP on Paper: to a railway, a telco, a gold miner, many hospitals, small municipalities and plenty of distributors. Lots of variety at fairly high scale. I learned the fundamentals of business workflow.
Moving next to a small telco, I provided IT infrastructure and networks in a managed service framework to these same sorts of clients, adding more geography and more experience: in transportation and logistics, forest products, power generation, pipeline, electricity distribution, education, tele-health and most valuably, a major credit union. I feel I did one-of-everything. The diversity of experience was mind blowing and unique.
I carried this experience into Bell Canada to focus on driving complex deals in the Banking sector where I learned enterprise IT infrastructure. I became Bell's "King of Managed Services", selling multi-year infrastructure transformation projects. These were ground breaking deals driven by the clients' strategies for e-business that leveraged the Internet and high bandwidth IP communications. We redefined business telecom.
EMC's consulting organization taught me about leveraging information for business value. My sales efforts put people on the ground to do organizational change, policy and process development, EIM, workflow, search and UI design. On separate tracks, we brought social media guidance, mobility transformation and leading edge Journey-to-the-Cloud guidance to Banks and Telcos. Gartner's Nexus of Forces, I believe well-before the phrase was coined.
Savvis / CenturyLink provided a brilliant experience in everything online at scale. We hosted the largest SaaS, FinTech and Ecommerce properties worldwide in Tier 3 data centres, all linked by a Tier 1 ISP and global network. Savvis was an engineering-driven business with ITIL structured processes, a darling in SaaS, Large Retail and Capital Markets. Their entire enterprise ran primarily on the integrated SaaS solutions of their clients. Cloud First strategy in action.
I returned to Bell to serve one Bank whose aggressive transformation efforts to Cloud and the Digital Enterprise drove the agenda. My account leadership was in Information Security, Cloud, Mobility, Analytics and IT Resourcing. We achieved unmatched trust, extending all our major agreements out by ten years, something unprecedented in the industry.
Now with OpenText, the promise of the Digital Enterprise has arrived. I know what I can bring along from my journey and I'm anxious to see what I will learn and accomplish with this great innovator in business transformation around Digital.
To those seeking a job or career change, I invite you to revisit your journey, compose your narrative, bring your career to life and carry it forward.
As a mentor of mine once said to me, "The future is yours. Live it!"