Blogs

Bo Warburton is CEO of Supai Systems; which provides consulting, professional services sales, and general management of Open Text Content Server (formerly Livelink). The vision when he began with his parter was to build a professional, partnership-based Livelink practice in order to help address the ECM skills shortage. “We are not a body shop, but rather a professional services firm built on the partnership model. We are an Open Text partner in good standing.”

Bo also makes for an extremely funny email correspondent. Enjoy.

Duhon:  What do you do and how did you get there?

Warburton: I run a small(ish) OpenText partner, Supai Systems, providing services and add-on products for what we used to call Livelink. It's me and 17 engineers in India. I was an OpenText consultant from 1997 and started Supai after a couple of idiots at OpenText got me fired from there in 2005. (They are both gone now, so it's all lovey-dovey.) I spent some time in the dot-com haze, learned classic structured analysis/structure design methodology under the whiz-kids at American Management Systems, and was in the Navy mostly in Japan before that: Your typical IT career path.

Duhon: How did you get from Chinese Folklore at Harvard to running an ECM company?”

Warburton: Well, you know, folktales are unstructured content and folklore is the traditional process of cultural knowledge management, right? That's my narrative and I'm sticking to it. Okay. The truth. After taking said college degree, I had no marketable skills so I joined the Navy. After about five years, the Russians lost the Cold War and I still had no marketable skills so I went back to Harvard for a master's in public policy. After that, I STILL had no marketable skills, but as you know that does not deter the big systems integrators, so American Management Systems hired me as a business analyst. They were too stodgy for me, however; I soon left for the startup mentioned below under the heading "worst day of my life." Eventually (and this part is 100% true) I saw a demo of Livelink by OpenText. I loved it so much that I put in for a job and that was that.

Duhon: What was your best day at work? Worst?

Warburton: The best was yesterday. We went live with the world's first major upgrade to OpenText Content Server 2010 (* statement cannot be verified empirically) and received a few checks in the mail.

Worst day. You really want to know? I was the only chump dumb enough to be in professional services on the East Coast for a worthless startup called Connect (long since defunct) in 1996. They made what we would now call a Web application server, which was great, except for one thing. It wouldn't install. The client would say, "OneServer has perfect security. It won't run." On this worst day itself, some new empty suit of a PS manager came to the client's office and threw me under the boss. His personal feedback to me was "The problem with you is that when something goes wrong, you make it worse." By the way, I'm not saying that this was or was not true. I'm just saying that day was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. (Ever notice how it's easier to write about the negative experiences than the positive ones? Why is that anyway?)

Duhon: What are you proudest of?

Warburton: I assume you mean what I am proudest of at work; growing Supai Systems, for sure. I knew that getting into sales and running my own company would be tough, but let me tell you, I had no idea. (If you mean what am I proudest of in life, it would be staying married for 22 years. But that's more a matter of gratitude, not pride. By the way, didn't you know humility is a virtue? Benjamin Franklin said it's the toughest one, and he would know.)

Duhon:  What is your No. 1. goal today—and what is your greatest content-related challenge?

Warburton: Top goal for today, for this very day, is to outline the sales plan for WorkflowPlus, a packaged solution for document automation. What I mean by "solution" is simply where you buy services, software, methodology, and post-production support all at once. It has nothing to do with synergy, paradigm shifts, sea-change transformation, strategic alignment, or value-add frameworks for achieving transparent ROI.

My greatest content-related challenge is getting the records managers of the world to leave me alone. No, you don't need to control everything, grandpa! Haven't you ever heard of the Internet? "Collaborate, don't obfuscate!"

Duhon: You’ve just become a Certified Information Professional (CIP); what’s your view of this new certification from AIIM?

Warburton: Not too shabby. The questions on the exam were hard enough that I couldn't ace it cold and they all seemed relevant. The testing center was seriously formal and solemn. It was almost like a real certification.

Duhon: Why do you consider yourself an information professional?

Warburton: Because I have no other marketable skills. Just kidding. It's really because I have the Certified Information Professional accreditation, and acronyms never lie. Still kidding. The truth is, when I get beyond the technical features-and-functions with clients, we get to a level where we are talking about the life of information inside the organization. We talk about the information of documents, about documents, and inside of documents. It was always there, but it was invisible before. When I can get paid to have that conversation, I am an information professional.

Just for fun:

Duhon: What are your three favorite websites?

Warburton: I use the Web a lot differently than I did a few years ago. I only ever go to Google Apps, My Yahoo, iGoogle, Amazon, the OpenText knowledge base, our invoicing system, and LinkedIn. But those can't possibly count. They aren't even real websites. Well maybe they are. So here are my three favorites: OpenText Knowledge Center, Amazon, and American Thinker.

Duhon: What are the three greatest books ever written—and what’s on your nightstand today?

Warburton: I assume I cannot say "The Holy Bible" because of the separation of church and AIIM. So I choose: Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle; Democracy in America, Toqueville; and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkein. On my nightstand is How Civilizations Die by David Goldman.

Duhon: What are the three greatest movies of all time—and what’s the last one you’ve seen?

Warburton: Princess Bride, Star Wars, and The Burmese Harp. (But what about Gladiator, Brave Heart, and Saving Private Ryan? Pfft. Chick flicks.) I just saw "Monumental" by Kirk Cameron.

Duhon: What was your first concert—and what are the three greatest songs on your iPod?

Warburton: Journey at the Cow Palace south of San Francisco. "If I Can Dream" by Elvis Presley; "Courageous" by Casting Crowns; and "Washed by the Water" by Needtobreathe.