Starting out on a new path

I’ve been working on this in the background for a while, but today I can finally talk about it here: starting October 1st, I am starting on a new leg of my career journey. No I’m not leaving Siemens PLM Software; quite the contrary in fact. I am really excited about my new role, but I must admit I am sad to leave the partner and platform team. I started the partner and platform marketing team more than 5 years ago when we were just spinning out of EDS. It was a team of one, and there was a lot to do. A few years pass and it’s a 7 person team with major alliances in place with the major software technology players around the world. Along the way I learned more about the way that companies work than I ever thought possible. I learned what makes partnerships really work. And I learned how to lead a team without micro-managing (something that the first team I was responsible for no doubt wishes I would have learned earlier!)
But all good things must come to and end, and even though I still love that area of the business, five years is a long time in any one job – everything can get a bit stale. So what’s up next for me? Two words: online marketing. We have been experimenting with various forms on online marketing / e-marketing since we first got our first website in the mid-nineties. But now we have decided to set-up an entire organization designed to develop the best practice in that area.  My team will be focused first an foremost on our web properties, our email marketing engines, our marketing automation capabilities and emerging areas like social media.  We will be  looking after no only the strategy for each of these pieces, but also the platforms that are required to be best in class.  We want to move from the web as way to avoid the costs associated with printing information about ourselves to the web as an interactive live part of the way we talk with prospects and customers.
There will be a lot of challenges in the days, weeks and months ahead, and I hope that it doesn’t turn into too much of a busman’s holiday!  For now I will just enjoy the honeymoon phase and figure out all the things I don’t know before firing things up and getting them moving – fast!