Today is my first day as an Avega Group employee

Today is my first day as an Avega Group employee. To those who are interested, I will briefly introduce you to Avega Group and explain why I decided to make this career move.

What is Avega Group? 
Just as it says on the corporate website (Swedish website), Avega Group is "a consultancy company with specialized subsidiaries within IT and business development." Nothing very surprising about that. The mission is "to match our customers needs with our employees expertise and focus, creating mutual success". I love that 'employees' are mentioned in the mission statement. How often do you see that? It tells you a lot about the company, it's not just one of the regular buzzwords you put in a mission statement. If it's there, you've put it there for a reason.

What will I do there? 
I will work as Digital Strategist and Business Analyst within my fields of expertise; Enterprise Collaboration, ECM and strategy, design and implementation of digital services. Besides doing assignments for customers, I will develop Avega Group's Enterprise Collaboration offering. Our ambition is to recruit and build a team of the best consultants within in this field in the Öresund region.

Why Avega Group?
It's pretty simple; I'm joining Avega Group for much the same reason why so many organizations have chosen to become customers to Avega Group.
  • The employees are passionate, experienced and skilled specialists within different fields 
  • There are many interesting touch points between what I do in the field of Enterprise Collaboration and what my colleagues do who are experts on Agile and Lean, Strategic Analysis, Change Management, Strategic Architecture, Requirements Management, Web Development, Portal Platforms, ITSM, and much more). 
  • Avega Group has a strong (although not very visible) brand and a very good reputation among customers for being professional, skilled and independent.  
  • Continuous, structured and employee-driven knowledge sharing is in the DNA of the company, ensuring that we share our knowledge both internally with other colleagues and externally with customers and other stakeholders. 
  • Being vendor-independent means that Avega Group employees are credible and trustworthy as a strategic and tactical advisors, standing behind our customers. 
Why this career direction? 
A year ago, me and a colleague Henrik Gustafsson from Acando joined Tieto, but it wasn't (and didn't turn out) as we had expected. But that is another story that I won't share here...anyway, these are the main reasons why I've chosen this career direction:

1. I'm a consultant
I love being a consultant. I love getting to do challenging and important assignments for various organizations in various industries. It allows me to gain valuable insights, and to transfer those from one organization to the other. I believe I have found an excellent environment for being and growing as a consultant (and person).

2. I'm a doer and thinker in one person 
Some people see me as a thinker. Some people see me as a doer. Those who really know me, however, those who have worked with me, know that I am both a thinker and a doer, and that being able to do both things is a necessity for me. The main source of inspiration for my blogging and speaking is the work I do "in the trenches". This work provides me with insights about real problems, challenges and opportunities in daily operations that I can help finding solutions to. To me, there is nothing more gratifying than being involved in defining, designing and implementing elegant digital services that make a real difference to both people and organizations – especially those which are the results of mine (and other people’s) thinking.

3. I want to help organizations improve knowledge work – in person
It is my firm conviction that the new frontier of productivity improvement lies in improving knowledge work in general and collaboration in particular. Since knowledge work is becoming increasingly interdependent and the environment is becoming more and more dynamic, collaboration is a key capability for organizations today and will be so even more in the future. My professional passion is to help organizations empower their people to develop and adopt better practices and improve at collaborating with each other with the help from elegantly design digital services.

4. I value my independence - and so do my customers 
There are reasons why I never review or write products on my blog (I get tons of emails (!) from software vendors asking me to review or write about their products): I value my independence, never being accused of running somebody else's errands or following hidden agenda. I believe organizations that hire me value my independence as well. They can trust that I am not there to convince them to buy a certain product or solutions. I am there to help them get things done, with making smart use of modern information technology as a key ingredients. What decision-maker doesn't want to have an experienced and knowledgeable person at her side that she can trust will always provide honest advice and guidance?

Oscar Berg