OpenText is the topic on everyone’s mind today, and I’m happy to sit down with our consultant Martin Svensson, who has a long past with OpenText, to get an understanding of what working with OpenText at Epical can look like.

It’s so great to be talking to you today, Martin! 

💡 To get us started, could you tell me a bit about how you got started with OpenText?

I started working at Epical in 2018, but my history with OpenText goes back further than that, all the way to 2012.

The OpenText community is quite small, which means I’m still working with many of my colleagues from the start of my career in one way or another which I really enjoy, there’s a great community around OpenText.

In the beginning I primarily worked with the IDM side of OpenText, but in recent years identity governance has become a specialty of mine.

💡 14 years with OpenText is quite an achievement, would you say a lot has changed since 2012?

Yes, quite a lot. Governance has become a bigger part of it, with more focus on the self-service side compared to when I started, when it was more about user provisioning.

Now the focus is more on forms, interfaces, and development, which I really enjoy, since that’s where my main interest is.

It’s also interesting to see how OpenText and IDM handle identities and large volumes of data quickly in the background. You don’t really notice it from the outside, it just works.

With the forms and interfaces, you can also build quite a lot yourself.

💡What kind of problems are we helping our clients at Epical with when it comes to OpenText?

When we work with our clients on OpenText, it’s mainly about helping them take control of access rights and simplify how things are handled.

A big part is governance, making sure they can audit access rights, users, and which applications they have access to.

The other part is closely tied to identity management, meaning the whole lifecycle of user accounts, from when someone joins, changes roles, or leaves.

We also help them adapt their processes so their organization can handle things like account management and access requests more easily, and so that IT can manage it more efficiently.

💡 Do you see something in how we work at Epical that stands out beyond the technical part?

Yes, definitely.

After we have established the actual products at our client, our focus shifts to supporting them along the way and helping them take more and more ownership, especially when it comes to the governance part.

There it’s usually less about technical capabilities, but about having insight into your own processes and systems, making sure you know how you want to handle access rights, set up user roles and so on in your own organization.

We have an ongoing collaboration with our clients, where we support them with questions, if they need additional support, or if things aren’t working the way they want. It also gives them a space to bounce ideas and discuss further development.

💡 It’s quite a big system to set up, but if you don’t know how to use it, you lose a lot of the value, you really need to be able to own it afterwards, right?

Exactly. It can easily slow down or stagnate if you don’t keep working on it, and that might work for a while. But today, things are moving quickly, especially on the IT side, so you really need to keep developing it, and that’s something we support our clients with.

💡 If someone is curious to start working with OpenText, what advice would you have for them?

It’s a very exciting journey to get on!

It’s good to keep in mind that OpenText is not something you’ll have a complete understanding of within six months, instead, it’s about learning smaller portions of OpenText at a time.

It’s great to start with a specific part and once you get a hang of how all the cogs in the machine work, you can widen your view and perspectives and take on more, otherwise you risk overwhelming yourself. It is a huge product so my advice would be to take it bit by bit and keep adding parts once you have gotten the hang of what you started with.

Starting small and consistently learning more while working together with colleagues who are a bit more senior will give you a great and much easier start.

💡 What is it like working with OpenText at Epical?

We’re a good-sized group that works with OpenText at Epical; we all work on different client projects and stay quite busy. We make sure to take time to spar and bounce around ideas in our project teams to ensure we get to the best solutions and can learn at the same time.

Working together in teams is a great way both for our juniors to learn from more senior colleagues, but also for our senior colleagues to help support our more junior colleagues.

Whenever you get to describe what you’re doing and why to someone else, it creates an extra dimension in your own competence.

💡 What kind of projects do you typically work on here at Epical, and what drives you in those projects?

No matter the client, there’s always been something about the projects I’ve worked on that both excite me and brings a sense of edge and attentiveness. It can be anything from an integration where 6,000 critical accounts are affected by our work, to working with an organization that’s very eager to get started.

I take my projects very seriously and try to stay alert and anticipate what could go wrong, so we can stay on top of things from the start.

There’s something about the impact the project will have on the client that makes it exciting and appealing.

That sounds great, Martin. Thank you for taking the time!